Dangerous Subjects

For Nietzsche, the idea that we are Cartesian subjects, or the creators of our own thoughts—or, likewise, the creators of our own drawings—is "simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed"...

Being a big fan of both Nietzsche and Freud, I found myself drawing them recently when I suddenly became paralyzed with what seemed to be the awesome responsibility of giving them a cartoon worthy of their stature. Having not been making cartoons for very long, I don't know if this is a problem generally felt in the cartooning world, but this was certainly new to me. I have experienced anxiety in teaching Nietzsche and Freud, and in quoting Nietzsche and Freud (especially in my new book), but I have never before had any problem including Nietzsche and Freud in jokes of any kind.

Nietzsche would have made a great guardian angel, or so I like to imagine...

Something about Nietzsche and Freud together, about putting them in this specific juxtaposition, left me feeling overwhelmed. As such I tried creating not one cartoon out of my drawing, but two. You can judge the results for yourself, but this anxiety over this drawing of two of the Fathers of Angst is likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

If anyone would have deconstructed their own portraits, it would have been these two...

Perhaps it's even a manifestation of my concern that I'm starting to enjoy drawing philosophers more than I enjoy quoting them in papers...

Drawing Philosophy

Adventure Time is already philosophical, so why not make it official?

I have lately rediscovered my love of drawing, and since I am supposed to be spending my time working on philosophy, I thought why not fuse the two activities by drawing philosophers.  

Admittedly, I'm not good with hands, but there is something about Nietzsche that makes a paw seem appropriate...

As you might imagine, Nietzsche has been my main preoccupation (his mustache is just too damn hard to resist, but I have been trying to branch out.

It's either Kant or Sylvester Stallone doing a period piece...

If you like these, you might like my deviantART page, where you can see some more of my work and even buy some of it.  

Kierkegaard and Kant both have surprisingly pouty lips...

I have noticed myself noticing more since I started drawing again, and in particular noticing how one can see the world as to-be-drawn.  When I look around now I can feel my hand preparing to draw what I'm looking at, leading me to further notice things about what I'm looking at—such as curves, intersections, shadows—that I had not noticed before.

I tried my hand at David...

To try Michelangelo's Nietzsche...

I have similarly begun to notice things about the philosophers themselves that I had not noticed before—such as how pouty were the lips of Kant and Kierkegaard, or the evolution of Nietzsche's magnificent 'stache.  Perhaps drawing philosophers is indeed a way to get to know the philosophers in a way that their works alone could not provide...