Peanuts and Philosophy

Charlie suffers from not being able to be what he feels a need to be—a good baseball manager—and this affliction is uniquely his own. But if he feels he’s alone and “not like himself,” that also means he hasn’t fully lost the underlying “he”—the one who’s really in there, feeling this.

This is how Heidegger turns Descartes’ “thinking thing” (the “I” of “I think, therefore I am”) into the existential Dasein, or “Being-there”; if I’m raising the question of what it means to be, then there must be a type of being for whom its own way of be-ing is an issue. No matter how deeply I sink into despair, there’s still an inner place where it’s happening, so all is not lost.

Life usually has ups and downs, so we get at least some satisfaction. But for Charlie, the downs are so interminable that hope makes no sense;

“We didn’t do anything you told us! In fact, we didn’t even miss you!”

the existentialist, it’s crucial to linger in the tension long and often enough to let go of our coping mechanisms and accept reality the way it is. As Lucy puts it to Charlie in 1957, “What this world needs is more troubled minds! A TROUBLED MIND IN A TROUBLED WORLD!!!” This strip, incidentally, uses the same popping-point tactic in the final panel: “A TROUBLED WORLD IN A TROUBLED UNIVERSE . . . A . . .” Charlie: “Good grief!” Yes, to misquote Gordon Gekko, “Grief is good.”

True, he does still hold out hope that a larger audience would make the game “important,” but this is evidence that he’s reaching the cusp of the absurd—he’s acknowledging that his hopes are misplaced, yet refusing to let go of them.

There are no other worlds for you to live in . . . Right? You were born to live in this world . . . Right? WELL, LIVE IN IT, THEN!”

in another hillside epiphany: “As far as you know, this is the only world there is . . . Right?

Existentialism suggests its own standard for how to live: authenticity. Being authentic means recognizing that I can take responsibility for who I am, actively accepting that responsibility, and committing every aspect of myself in an ongoing way to my undertakings or “projects.” This isn’t the same as striving to be the “master of my fate”; authenticity isn’t about whether my projects succeed, or even about what they are. It’s about how thoroughly I employ my whole self toward them.

We can learn here from Peppermint Patty, who turns overzealous while taking a True or False exam: “Everything is true! Nothing is false! The whole world is true! We’re all true!” She’s right that the world is “true” in that it’s being itself and “doing its thing”; Heidegger says the world is always “world-ing.