There
are two major works of philosophy in the 20th century: Heidegger’s
Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations, published in 1953. The first is the magnum opus of
existentialism – a culmination of phenomenology (the study of experience and
consciousness) and ontology (the study of being). The latter launched the field
of language philosophy.
Of
course, outside of these two massive fields, there were other philosophical
trends. Postmodernism, represented by Foucault, and deconstructivism,
represented by Derrida, both were important philosophical breakthroughs – but arguably
both arose only because of Wittgenstein’s pivot to focus on language. (Other
philosophers and movements certainly made breakthroughs in the 20th
century, in areas such as political philosophy with the important work of John Rawls.)
Heidegger’s
existentialism is difficult – harder to access than either his 19th
century forerunners, such as Nietzsche, or his successors, such as Jean-Paul
Sartre. Being and Time is an incredibly challenging work to read, but its
general ideas, vastly oversimplified, are as follows:
We are
Dasein – “being-in-the-world”. Dasein is an apparently unique experience to
human beings: our existence presents problems of identity, as does our constant
engagement with the world (including other people) around us. Our being is not
distinct from our world in which we live – in which we are thrown into without
any choice or initial understanding. How we make sense of our self, and how we
make sense of our world, are therefore fundamentally linked. That is why we are
“being-in-the-world”.
When we
are living “authentically” we are confronting Dasein – but most of the time, it
seems, we aren’t really engaged in such existential awareness. A nice example:
I am walking down the street, and I notice a friend walking towards me. My mind
goes to my experiences with this friend, memories, feelings, context. My mind
is now “far away” from what is actually happening to me, walking down the
street. I’m focused on someone further away, and on a time that maybe has
passed or is yet to come. Our experience of the world, therefore, is
infrequently focused on the here and now in such a way that supersedes other,
more “distant” thoughts and concerns. If it were otherwise, and what was
proximate to us demanded our attention here an now, think of the result: Seeing
my friend approaching would not be as important, due to their lack of immediacy,
as the socks on my feet, which are, after all, much closer to my experience in
that moment!
But we don’t
think about our socks in that scenario. And that is actually very
interesting, and important – there is insight in that observation of how we experience
the world, and what it means to be a human in this world.
Like
other existentialists, Heidegger’s focus on being also is interested in death,
and how our “beings-towards-death” is the source of meaning in our lives. My existence
is not just defined by being thrown into this world, but also from the inescapable
fact that I can’t stay forever – that I will die, and cease to exist.
* * *
When I
read Being and Time in a philosophy course dedicated to the tome my senior
year, I had a question, which I asked a few different times: “But what about
children?”
As an
adult I think Heidegger’s description of our lived experience is fairly spot-on,
as shown in the sock story above. We walk through life with our minds on other
things, rarely focused on our existence in the moment, in that place and time.
Our experience of life is defined by our death. Being “thrown into” a world
which we have to make sense of – that is very true, but also very much a focus
of developmental psychology. I think Heidegger is right, that an in media
res understanding is how we all must take the world around us. Yet a child’s
understanding, and sense-making, of the world is fundamentally different from
an adult’s. They experience life fundamentally differently, and, therefore,
there must be an element of becoming, or developing into, Dasein.
I was,
at the time, taking classes on child development and psychology, pursuant to my
studies in education and in preparation for my career in teaching. Throughout
college I took at least one philosophy course per term: Existentialism, Ancient
Greek, Leibniz and Hume, Philosophy of Religion, Wittgenstein, Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason, Theoretical Ethics, Logic, and Heidegger’s Being and Time. But
the papers I was reading in psychology and child development were equally as
fascinating. And, as Piaget had begun to realize, by the same time Heidegger
was writing in the 1920s, children’s brains are not like ours. They do not make
meaning the same way. Arguably, then, they are not Dasein – that Dasein is something
we become with age. The meaning in a child’s life is not based on their
appreciation of mortality. Children – quite often – do focus more on their
socks than their approaching friend.
Philosophy,
as far as I can tell, has typically avoided the ontology or metaphysics of
childhood. Certainly, the big names, from Socrates to Descartes, Hegel to
Rorty, didn’t seem to spend much time considering how children understand and
make sense of the world. There are great exceptions – epistemology, studying
how we know and make sense of the world – sometimes considered in the context
of education, as seen in Plato and Rousseau.
Generally,
though, the existentialists seemed unmoved by childhood – that state that,
along with adolescence, encompasses roughly a quarter of the average life-span.
Perhaps the psychologists, with their various theories of understanding, under
the title ‘cognitive development’ – such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, Erikson,
and the behaviorists – had taken care of all that.
This is
a shame, because the lived experience of most people is of a sea change in our
ability and means by which we make sense of our world. Our awareness of this
process, deeply tied to awareness of our self and identity, and comprehension
of what it means to exist, begins to really take hold in the years transitioning
from childhood to adolescence. While we have a sense of our selves, and our
world, prior to this time – one which has undergone numerous critical
developments since our infancy – this age’s deepening sense of identity and
vastly broadened horizons is, in some sense, the first tentative steps into
Dasein.
And
that experience, that is so fundamental to our lives and our existential
experience, is why Adventure Time is one of the most important documents of recent
popular culture.
* * *
In
2019, The New York Times made a list of the 20 best television dramas since The
Sopranos. On that list: Lost, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Americans… and
Adventure Time. From an excerpt of their reasoning:
“The
story of Finn, a foundling in the magical and once-devastated Land of Ooo,
“Adventure Time” evolved from a whimsical action-adventure into a sprawling
story of abandoned children, surrogate families and self-discovery. It grew up
as its protagonist did, teaching its viewers that while the battle of good
against evil can be thrilling, it’s rarely simple. It had the vast,
well-imagined cast of a saga like “Game of Thrones,” along with a stunning
visual language and a through sense of empathy.
“If you
still need convincing, let me direct you to the Season 4 episode “I Remember
You,” which begins to reveal the back story of the series’ original mad
villain, the Ice King. Once a mild-mannered human named Simon, he saved a young
girl (now Marceline, the goth-punk vampire) by embracing a magic that took his
sanity and memory. As Marceline pieces together the story and he grasps at the
fragments of his past — a story with familiar echoes to anyone who’s seen a
loved one fall to dementia — the episode’s 11 minutes build to an emotional
climax, a villainous character reframed and given depth on the spot.
Surreal,
wise and often heartbreaking, “Adventure Time” may look like kids’ stuff. (It
is, in fact, outstanding kids’ stuff.) But under its confectionery surface lies
the material of great drama. It’s a wonderland of broken, misfit toys learning
to fix one another.”
All of
that is true, but it buries the lead – “it grew up as its protagonist did”. And
this is really interesting, because I know of only one other drama that charts
that process of development as its focus: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. But,
unlike the 2.5-hour 2014 film, Adventure time slows down, focusing on episodes
of Finn’s development from the age of twelve to seventeen, those same key years
of becoming Dasein.
Dramas
rarely have ‘filler’ episodes – in which nothing happens that develops either
plot or character. But Adventure Time is comfortable, and very clever, with
this. Lived experience does not follow a narrative dramatic story arc – so neither
does Adventure Time. Finn’s experiences are sometimes incredibly meaningful,
and sometimes entirely pointless, and sometimes seemingly pointless, but
meaningful later on. The show does this again and again – showing you
things which they don’t explain, or hint at, or leave in the background until
later. The importance of characters waxes and wanes, in often unpredictable
ways. Think back to your own life: Five years ago, would you have predicted you’d
be where you are now? That the people in your life would be the people who are
important to you now? Were the major turning-points, in hindsight, identified
by you at the time? Even in the final season there are seemingly pointless
episodes, because of course there are! That’s how the course of life runs.
As Finn
develops, his understanding mirrors ours, and how he makes sense of his world
develops, too. As a tween he runs around and sees things as simple adventures –
good and bad, scary and comforting – some things being too confusing for him to
make sense of, so he doesn’t try (while we, the audience, start to learn to
sock those elements away for later). As he ages, he starts to learn the history
of his world, the history of the people around him, and his own place and story
– just as we do. All the two-dimensional characters get fleshed out, and his
horizons expand. His maturity drives the framing, narrative, and context – in this
case what the animated world presents to us, as the viewer. Episodes from the later seasons would be totally out of place earlier on, because Finn, developmentally, wouldn't have experienced the world like that yet. The example given by the Times shows this: As Marcy and Ice King figure out their painful, complicated, past, Finn and Jake look on in bewilderment. The last lines have Jake ask: "What is going on in there?" To which Finn honestly replies: "I have no idea." But he will - when he is older.
* * *
Most shows geared to young people are age-specific. Daniel Tiger, Arthur, Transformers, Sesame Street, Yogi Bear, and so forth. Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer were designed for a certain audience, just as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Lizzy McGuire were. So often, the characters are ageless – or only progress a few years in time between start to finish, most commonly in shows geared to adolescents.
A show
that aged appropriately with its characters, was, by itself, a major
breakthrough. Further, Adventure Time covered new, interesting, developmental
ground. For one of the first times ever, in popular culture, if not the first, it charted how we become aware
of our existence as Dasein, and how that awareness evolves, doing so in a way that mirrors
lived experience. It managed this insight with humor, drama, creativity, all while tossing in some
truly intriguing philosophical concepts. As such, as the culture of our time is passed
on, Adventure Time should be treated as a major artifact – a critically
important document of how we as a culture in the early 21st century made sense of our being.
