Picture Books and Philosophy

Many adults view picture books as simply a great way to get their kids to sleep. And they sure are good at that! I remember many pleasant hours getting lost in a picture books that I was reading to my son as he calmed down after a day packed full of adventure.

But good as they are at fulfilling that purpose, picture books are so much more. Just ask any adult to name their favorite picture book and you’ll see that they have great affection for at least one or two picture books that they likely remember from their own childhood.

As a result of my own work conducting philosophy discussions among elementary school children, I’ve discovered that, surprising as it may be, many picture books are actually repositories of philosophical wisdom. So not only are they a great vehicle for getting kids to talk to each other about philosophical issues like whether you can be brave and scared at the same time, they are also a very non-threatening way to get adults thinking and talking philosophically.

And that’s not easy to do. Many adults seem to have had traumatic experiences in their first college philosophy class, so that they view philosophy – and philosophers! – with suspicion and mistrust. I think that’s really tragic, for philosophy deals with concerns that everyone has and wants to find a way to think about. Some of these issues are pretty practical, like the question of how much of your income you should be giving to charity. Others are pretty abstract, like the question of whether life itself has a meaning. But both the practical and abstract questions that philosophy discusses originated in people’s very specific real-life concerns.

I wrote A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children’s Literature in order to help people who were put off by philosophy’s reputation as an arcane discipline see that they are very much philosophers in their own lives. I chose sixteen well-known children’s picture books that raise question across the gamut of philosophical fields, from metaphysics and the philosophy of language to ethics and aesthetics.

Let me give you a sense of how a picture book can broach some of the heady issues that philosophers raise. One day, Arnold Lobel’s charming amphibian Toad brings a plate of delicious cookies to his best friend Frog. The cookies smell so good that the two of them tuck in. Problem is, they can’t stop and a stomachache looms on the horizon. How can they resist those delicious treats? What they need, Frog tells the puzzled Toad, is some will power, a notion that Toad can’t really grasp. Nonetheless, Frog adopts a number of clever stratagems – like putting the cookies way up high on a cupboard, out of their reach – to keep them from eating too many more. Yet each time, Toad figures out a way to subvert Frog’s attempted exercise of will power. After Frog in desperation feeds the cookies to the birds, Toad is upset. Relax, Frog suggests. You don’t have any more cookies but you have lots of will power. Disgruntled, Toad heads home to bake a cake.

Cute story. But it’s more than that. It raises a complex philosophical issue: Is Frog right when he says that he and Toad have lots of will power at the end of the story? It’s true that they are no longer eating any more cookies, but that’s because they don’t have any. Can you have will power if the temptation has been removed? Doesn’t will power require the presence of the very thing that tempts you? But if that’s true, Frog’s wrong about his having it at the end of the story? Is there a way to reconcile Frog’s claim at the end of the story that he’s got will power with the fact that he doesn’t have to struggle to resist the pull of the cookies, for there aren’t any there to tempt him?

You’ll have to read my chapter on “Cookies” in A Sneetch Is a Sneetch to find out. And that’s only one example of the many philosophical conundrums I have found peeking out from between the words of many of our beloved children’s books. And this raises the question of whether there is a more direct connection between picture books and philosophy than I have so far said. But that will have to be a story for another blog.