The Little Prince

"Yes. This is a bit of a surprise, but it’s The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Have you read it? There’s the story itself, and then there is the story of the author. He incorporates his real-world experience of being an aviator and crashing in the desert. The protagonist in The Little Prince is an aviator who has crashed in the desert, and he is visited by this avatar, this little prince from another world. It’s essentially a children’s book, but it’s written in a very clever way. There’s a lot to love about the way in which the writer captures a sense of endearing curiosity through the little prince’s eyes, and the telling of the little prince’s stories about all the worlds that he has visited. He has visited several different planets, and on each of those planets he met different characters. There are important lessons about love and loss, and the beauty of life in each of the stories he shares. It’s really beautifully done and a very emotional read. One line stands out to me: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye . It’s beautiful. I think in modern life, we underplay the role of the heart and soul, and the importance of purpose and connectivity with others. That really does speak to our theme, about being kind to ourselves and kind to others, as we navigate our way through the complications of daily life."

"I’m going to start with a book that I only read last month. It’s Le Petit Prince . I know people who love this book, I know people—non-philosophers typically—who say, ‘this book is my Bible. This book is so deep.’ I was struggling with what to read to my son next, so I thought, ‘Let’s read him Le Petit Prince .’ Also, he is learning French so I thought that’d be nice, we can read it in French. And I was really delighted with it. The book is interesting because it uses pictures, not just to illustrate philosophy, but as an actual part of its philosophy. For instance, here, at the beginning, it starts with the protagonist, the author. The author, by the way, did the illustrations himself and is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was an airplane pilot. And he says, ‘Look, I made this first drawing, and this is the first drawing I ever did as a child. Now, what does it look like?’ Now, if you haven’t read The Little Prince , then you’re going to see what most adults see and they say it looks like a hat. ‘No,’ says Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘it’s not a hat. It is actually’ —and this is the second drawing—‘a boa constrictor that is swallowing an elephant.’ He says grownups just don’t get this. But then he meets this strange little creature, a little prince who comes from a faraway planet. And he shows him the drawing and asks, ‘What is it?’ And the little prince says, ‘Of course, it’s a boa constrictor eating an elephant. This is obvious.’ The whole story is like that. It’s sort of whimsical. There are so many themes, but one of the themes of the book is the idea of being an authentic person. The Little Prince travels from one planet to another and he meets different people. He meets a businessman who is only interested in counting, and he meets a king who is only interested in people obeying him. But the king makes very reasonable laws and he will change his laws so that you will do whatever he says. If you say, ‘I’m going away’ he says, ‘Okay, I command you to go away.’ It’s a story about authenticity, and the drawings bring draw you in to help the story along. They’re not just illustrations, they really are an integral part of the story, part of the philosophical interest of the story. Yes, I think the best way to do philosophy through pictures is the combination of words and pictures. They complement each other. I’m actually quite happy with the more radical idea that philosophy can be done through pictures alone, like, for example, in Picasso’s Guernica , or the memento mori paintings we discussed earlier. But supplementing your philosophical ideas with pictures, and those pictures playing a role in the argument, is something that Le Petit Prince does very well. That’s right. Thought experiments are typically very barebones. Particularly if you read thought experiments from the 1950s and 60s, you have Jones and Smith as the protagonists. My colleague Eleonore Stump calls these ‘philosophical crash dolls,’ like the dummies that you put in a car. They have no feelings. Similarly, the fat man that you push off the bridge. People worry about the fat phobia—which is a thing—but I’m also thinking, just as a human being standing there unsuspectingly on that bridge…. Yes, if you’re with John Norton. He thinks that’s what thought experiments are, just arguments prettily dressed up. Then, obviously, you don’t need that amount of detail. But I think there is a sense in which the detail of a picture adds something to the philosophical quality that can’t be reduced to argument. I think that, in general, philosophical thought experiments are more than just arguments, they are like mental models. When I’m doing a thought experiment, I’m not just trying to think of generic stick figures, I’m trying to think, ‘if this was an actual situation, what would these people be like?’ I think it does add something to the philosophical idea. I was prejudiced against The Little Prince . I thought it was sentimentalist, from what I could gather. The people I knew who liked it were sentimental people. I thought, ‘I will not enjoy this book.’ And actually the ending—I don’t want to spoil it—but it’s terribly schmaltz, it totally descends into hyper-sentimentalism. But I think overall it’s a wonderful book. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I don’t think I would have read it, if I hadn’t treated it as a bedtime story for a seven-year-old . However, having read it, I do feel there are lots of interesting philosophical points in there, particularly about being an authentic person. You have all sorts of plans when you’re a little child, and you want to grow up, and those plans get thwarted. There’s an almost Sartrean idea there, of somebody who plays a role – this idea of the waiter, he’s just being too waiter-y, that was Sartre’s problem. Similarly, in The Little Prince , the prince visits all these people on their planets, and they just play their role. You have this guy who closes and opens the gas lights. It’s a wonderful image. And because the planet is so small, he has to do this all the time, he has no rest, because there’s sunrise and sunset every minute. He’s just there, opening and closing the gaslights all the time. He does this because this is his job. This is just what he does. The Little Prince talks to him and says, ‘Why didn’t you do this or that? Why didn’t you skip a turn?’ So, I do think that even for adults there are all these insights about being an authentic person in The Little Prince . The imagery complements it so wonderfully, too, by showing all these people that you meet in a story. It’s pretty great. I’m happy I read it."

"I am a person who believes in chasing your dreams, ignoring preconceived ideas and narrow-mindedness. If you focus on your goals then nothing is impossible. The Little Prince is in many ways my bible. If you watch animals or birds behaving as they were created to be, you see that verbal communication might be important but that there are so many other ways that they communicate. Modern man has in many ways lost the ability to be silent, to just listen and watch what surrounds him. So, yes, The Little Prince has influenced me in every aspect of my life, from my own emotions and how I feel inwardly, to how I like to view our planet. It is the simplicity and innocence of that little prince and his love for a flower that makes the book so special to me. That is also how I feel when watching my hippos, or, for that matter, any wild animal that has not been domesticated or commercialised by man. I live in Southern Africa where the people on the land, be they black or white, believe in ‘sustainable utilisation’, meaning that they see animals not as individual sentient beings, but as different species to be used for the benefit of the land, and in most cases to bring financial gain to the owners of that land. Yet, once animals are looked upon commercially, you can often open a Pandora’s box that is very hard to close. Elephants don’t have to be culled to cut down on numbers. They can be moved to areas like Mozambique that wish to bring back the elephants that originally inhabited areas of that country. They can be given contraception – there are ways of controlling elephant numbers without the gun. Every one of us who loves animals, who feels the animal and does not wish to control it, is up against a thousand others who do not feel that way, and that is probably the biggest challenge of working with wild animals in any part of the world. Tourism is a double-edged sword if mismanaged, but with the right outlook it could be the saviour of Africa and any third world country. Tourism, more than any other industry within Zimbabwe, is what brought the country wealth and employment and helped it become the great African country it used to be. Due to the political situation since 2000, the tourists have all gone. It is picking up a little bit, but for our National Parks to continue to nurture the true inhabitants of those lands, we need the tourist market to return. Donors are not as keen to help out in African countries that have internal political pressures. They would rather go to more stable areas. Yet it is often the struggling African country that needs the most assistance, but it is left to sink into oblivion. People forget that there are those of us still here who believe in a better future and want to see the people and the animals prosper again. We need our tourists back, we need donors to support the initiatives of pro-active, forward-thinking conservationists. When taking people to the hippos, I ask them to try to experience the real animal, not to listen to the myths and the legends and the hunters’ tales of horror and fear, and ego-related bullshit, and just look at the animal for what the animal is."