The Stygian Wholesto

Winnie the Pooh continues to teach us all. Recently, I watched an old Pooh episode with my niece which proved to be a closer, and more precise exercise in the dialectic than we have chewed in pompous circles at the universities, chock-full of senseless bravado. In the penultimate spot of the 1977 cartoon, Pooh finds Piglet struggling in the blustery winds of the Hundred Acre Woods; the dialog is as follows:

Pooh: “Where are you going, Piglet?”

Piglet: “That’s what I keep asking myself, where?”

Pooh: “What do you think you will answer yourself?”

Piglet: “Oh, oh, oh, I’m unraveling."

Pooh could not ask a better question. He is beyond an existential role. He asserts upon Piglet with our central question which many stray from—not what you will do, but how you will answer. Pooh should be part of the Stygian. Existentialism has grossly become a cliché in our time, often supplanted by angst filled pseudo-intellects or half-ass TV screen writers as a buzzword for boredom and suburbia idleness. Pooh reinstates dominant traditions in philosophy which foreground the influence of our greatest minds of two hundred years. Pooh, in his simpleton approach, understand human subjectivity, denies determinations, clusters empirical and idealistic emotional projections upon his careful aimed criticism of phenomenological perspectives. Heidegger and Sartre both moved away from an emphasis on knowledge; Pooh affirmed the fostered personal inflection into not answering, but thinking of the question. The question is more than the answer, the question is intersubjective—it’s inebriated, it resists logical discourse and should draw a detailed portrait of consciousness without a clear method. For Pooh, imagination is something intrinsic and is always opposed to utter alienation. The existential is not alienated, but orientated. It is careful in the episode that right after Pooh lets Piglet spiral to the skies on his unraveling sweater that silence follows—our most profound aesthetic. Piglet’s proclamation is an anti-manifesto in itself—“we shall not discuss.” The Stygian sees this, of course, as similar to “‘What is the wind doing?’ Nothing again Nothing”—if we can get away with another Eliot line. Against philosophical judgment, we can funnily find ourselves (albeit satirically) at a sort of realism which defies ratioclination, or even better, attendant reflections towards our historical milieu. Pooh stands the test of time. Pooh’s spatializing and recentralizing of fundamental insecurities, juxtaposed with his temporal and ceaseless experience of ontological necessity is something we can all benefit from touching again. The hope lies within is that kids still love watching Pooh.