Felix the Cat: An Existential Influence on Philosophy and the Science of Mysticism
Felix the Cat is an existential hero. He best embodies the bridge between modernity and Post Modern in the last century. Felix inspired a generation of leading French and German philosophers shortly after WWII. His magic bag of tricks played a large role in this inspiration. Felix the Cat was the model for Camus’s protagonist Meursault in his most widely read work The Stranger. Felix went on to inspire Sartre, Beckett and Martin Heidegger. He served as the personifying primary answer to the question. Heidegger poses this question in his seminal work Being and Time, ‘What is Being?’
Heidegger answered his own question with, ‘why Felix the Cat, of course; and his Magic Bag of Tricks, silly”.
Few people know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle originates from his experiments with Felix. He repeatedly tried to put Felix in a box with a capsule of cyanide gas. Felix was able to elude death my virtue of his Magic Bag but nonetheless was still able to serve as the model for modern quantum physics. Without Felix, there could not have been a moonshot nor Musk’s Tesla automobile.
Dashiell Hammet’s famous existential hero/detective Sam Spade is said to be loosely based on Felix. Humphry Bogart spent weeks absorbing all of Felix’s cartoons. He did this in preparation for his cinematic portrayal of the existential sleuth. The sleuth is forced to choose duty over love. He eventually overcomes his own choices by using his bag of magic tricks.
Much of Samuel Beckett’s work is set inside of Felix’s bag and the playwrite was often overheard muttering under his breath “where’s my bag? Where’s my bag? I can write nothing with out my bag of magic tricks”.
In February 2025, the University of Heidelberg will be hosting its annual Felix the Cat academic conference. Felix scholars from around the world will present their papers on the cat and his impact on 20th-century thinking. The conference is entitled Felix’s Bag: Magic or Science?
As an internationally renown Magic Bag expert myself, I was invited to attend but unfortunately have a prior commitment to take a cat nap on the day. Inside my Magic Bag, of course. The conference is free and open to the public who are encouraged to attend with their own magic bags-of-tricks
igorgoldkind
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