POKEMON COLORINGMy Teacher Spoke to Me about Hobbes, I Thought of Pokémon
During a philosophy assignment, a student wrote this unexpected sentence: "As we know, the Leviathan is a legendary evil Pokémon." Behind what might seem like a simple mistake—confusing Hobbes' Leviathan with Gyarados, a well-known aquatic Pokémon—lies a revealing short circuit. The student didn't randomly confuse two words: they superimposed two cultural worlds, that of political theory and that of the Pokémon universe, one demanding, the other playful but just as codified.
This anecdote, both comical and endearing, is nevertheless full of meaning. It questions our relationship to memory, knowledge, and imagination. It raises a fundamental question: how do we learn in a world saturated with cultural references, where entertainment figures permanently coexist with those of academic knowledge? Could this confusion be seen not as a fault, but as a sign of silent dialogue between two forms of understanding the world?
Error as a Symptom of a Saturated Imagination
Lexical and Mental Slippage
Confusing "Leviathan" and "Gyarados" is not a typo: it's a confusion of a symbolic order. The Leviathan, for Hobbes, embodies the absolute State, a powerful, rational entity imposing order against the chaos of a state of nature. Gyarados, on the other hand, is a Pokémon from the evolution of the weak Magikarp, becoming a formidable and often uncontrollable creature. One is conceptual, the other visual; one belongs to the field of political ideas, the other to the playful imagination.
For a young mind, fed on popular culture as much as—if not more than—classical philosophy, the image of Gyarados can easily cover that more abstract image of Leviathan. The brain seeks to fill conceptual gaps with familiar forms. This phenomenon of "parasitic association" is well known in cognitive psychology: faced with a known but poorly understood word, the mind summons an image that is phonetically or visually similar. The confusion then becomes a form of clumsy yet sincere interpretation.
Pokémon as Modern Mythological Figures
What makes this confusion possible is the cultural weight of Pokémon. For an entire generation, these creatures are not mere elements of entertainment: they form a personal bestiary, structuring the imagination from childhood.
Gyarados carries stories, values (strength, transformation, anger), and an almost mythical aura. Its colossal stature, furious gaze, and often dramatic appearance in games or anime intuitively link it to the symbolism of the biblical Leviathan.
Thus, the confusion between Gyarados and Leviathan betrays the strength of an alternative imagination, in which Pokémon take the place once occupied by mythological, biblical, or literary figures. These new heroes, these new monsters, form today's symbolic landmarks of childhood and adolescence.
A Memory Woven of Images
The Role of Associative Memory
This slippage between Leviathan and Gyarados highlights a fundamental mechanism of learning: association.
The human memory does not function like a fixed dictionary but as a network of links, resonances, images, and stories. Paul Ricœur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, insists on this narrative dimension of memory: we do not remember in a raw manner, but through interpretative frameworks. The student who retained the teacher's joke—"Leviathan is not Gyarados!"—encoded it into a memory where the Pokémon takes precedence over the concept.
Popular culture often works this way: it offers strong figures, immediately recognizable, that impose themselves at the expense of more complex concepts.
This is not a weakness of the student, but a common cognitive function: where the concept demands an effort of understanding, the image familiarizes and reassures. The error arises when the image replaces, rather than complements, the concept.
At the Intersection of Institutional Knowledge and Affective Imagination
The school transmits institutionalized knowledge, but addresses students whose reference base is partly shaped elsewhere—in games, cartoons, social networks. This tension between academic lexicon and personal universe sometimes produces side effects: semantic slippages, mental translation errors.
The Pokédex, in this sense, is more than a fictional encyclopedia: it constitutes an affective, emotional, intimate database. Each Pokémon is associated with memories, emotions, adventures experienced in the game or in the imagination.
In contrast, the philosophical lexicon imposes a distance, an abstraction, a rigor that is acquired only in the long run of study. The confusion between Leviathan and Gyarados illustrates this clash between two regimes of knowledge: one fusionary, alive, rooted in fiction; the other analytical, rational, demanding a position of withdrawal. It's not just a matter of knowledge, but of internal language.
Philosophy of Error
Error as a Pedagogical Opportunity
The episode of the Leviathan turned Gyarados could simply have been punished. But the teacher, while giving a severe grade, chose to slip a mocking, kind word on the paper. This gesture is far from anecdotal. It is part of a pedagogical approach that sees in the error, not a fault, but an opportunity.
Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky have widely shown that errors are necessary milestones of cognitive development. They signal a process in progress, an unfinished but authentic elaboration.
The error here is not a sign of laziness or disinterest.
On the contrary, it is the product of poorly channeled, but sincere attention. The student retained what spoke to them—the joke, the familiar name—and tried to integrate it into a response. Making mistakes then become a gateway to reinforcement, clarification, differentiation. Provided the institution knows how to welcome these imperfect attempts with flexibility and humanity.
Thinking Confusion as a Path to Clarity
The teacher's role, in this context, is no longer just to transmit, but to translate. Translate the concept into the student's language, then guide the student in the inverse translation: bring out the idea behind the familiar figure.
The Gyarados error can then become a springboard to explain what a concept is, why it differs from an image, and how our thought often slips from one register to another without us realizing it.
This confusion becomes a point of support: it reveals the winding paths by which thought is formed. It gives the teacher a Socratic role: questioning, reformulating, bringing out meaning through dialectic. Because at bottom, doesn't philosophy begin there, in the trouble, the astonishment, the surprise of not having understood what one thought was obvious?
From Leviathan to Gyarados, there is only a slippage, a spark of errant memory that, far from being trivial, says a lot about our contemporary relationship to knowledge. In a world saturated with stories, images, names, figures from popular culture come to mingle with academic concepts, sometimes even masking them. This confusion, occurring in a philosophy assignment, is not just an accident: it is a cultural symptom, a way of learning marked by experience, emotion, play.
Instead of mocking it, it is more fruitful to question it. For thinking is also learning to distinguish, to sort, to recognize what belongs to the image and what pertains to the idea. And if this confusion between a Pokémon and a philosophical concept precisely opened the way to this distinction? If the student, through their mistake, had unknowingly engaged the very process of philosophical thought—the one that begins where meaning wavers?