Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 25, August 2003
Ways of Thinking:
A Response to Andersen and Baggini
Nathan Andersen 'Is Film the Alien Other
to Philosophy?: Philosophy *as* Film in Mulhall's _On
Film_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7
no. 23, August 2003 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n23anderson Julian Baggini 'Alien Ways of Thinking:
Mulhall's _On Film_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7
no. 24, August 2003 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n24baggini I'm grateful to Nathan
Andersen and Julian Baggini for their careful,
thought-provoking, and generous reviews of my book. As a
result of their refusal to be irritated or otherwise
disconcerted by the unorthodox ways in which I try to
inhabit the border between film and philosophy, they both
manage to raise a number of interesting and important
questions about how one might -- as I claim we can -- think
of at least some films as philosophy in action, and hence of
film as philosophising rather than as raw material or
ornamentation for a philosopher's work. So in my response to
them, I will focus on this question, and try to say a little
more about the ways in which I intended my book to justify
that claim. I will begin with
Baggini's review, since he is plainly rather more anxious
about my claim than Andersen -- and indeed, I will want to
elaborate on some of the suggestions Andersen makes in
explaining what he takes to be the central implications of
my claim. Without meaning to deny Baggini's highly nuanced
and self-questioning ways of framing his worry, I think it
not unfair to see the following thought as lying at the
heart of the matter for him: 'the problem I have
encountered [with _On Film_] is that for philosophy
to be anything more than an exchange of opinions, it must
involve the giving of good reasons for accepting or
rejecting the position under discussion. These reasons may
well be other than formal arguments, but they must be
reasons of some kind. Such reasons, however, appear to be
lacking from the _ Alien_ quartet.' And a little
later: 'I see it as central to
the philosophical enterprise that we offer reasons as much
as is possible and that reason-giving ends only when it has
to, not before. In contrast, along with much film and
literature, the _Alien_ films offer us symbolic
representations of the world, but don't provide us with
reasons for thinking that these representations are
accurate.' The idea that philosophy
is peculiarly, or distinctively, subject to the claims of
reason is surely undeniable; at any rate, I don't want to
deny it. But then, everything hangs on what one is prepared
to count as a way in which reason makes its claims on us,
and what one is willing to acknowledge as a way in which one
might answer to these claims. Baggini is careful to
distinguish the giving of reasons from the provision of
formal arguments, with premises regimented in technical
formulae so as perspicuously to display the conclusions they
support; the latter is only one genus of the relevant
species. But must our acknowledgement of reason's claims on
us take the specific form of giving reasons in support of
our opinions or our 'symbolic representations' (which I take
to mean something like our 'view') of the world? There are other
possibilities. Andersen gestures towards two: what, in his
opening remarks, he calls 'reflective film criticism', and
what he calls in his concluding paragraphs 'providing
pathways for thinking'. The first involves changing one's
mind about what is happening in a given film 'not because
[the critics] propose that there are hidden elements
in the film that cannot be understood apart from some
theoretical apparatus -- but because they lay out and make
plain what is already on the surface, showing that close
attention to the explicit dimensions of the film reveals it
to hang together much better than initial audiences and
critics supposed'. Suppose we think of this as a mode of
description that helps us to make sense of our experience of
a film, and hence of the film itself. Then we will see a
close link between reflective film criticism and providing
pathways for thinking, which Andersen explains as the
provision of 'an open space in which thinking takes place,
enabling new modes of organizing and making sense of
experience and knowledge. In order for there to be a pathway
for thought, there has to be a motivation for the movement
of thought. Questions . . . provide this motivation'. I want
to say a little more about these ideas of making sense and
of questioning, understood as alternative ways of meeting
the claims of reason. First, making sense. One
state in which reflective beings might find themselves is
that of disagreement; two people hold opposing views on a
given topic. Here, philosophy can usefully intervene by
providing and assessing the reasons one might have for
either view. But such disagreements presuppose a shared
space of thought, one given by the givenness of the topic --
a shared sense of its shape and significance. Sometimes,
however, we want to, or need to, or simply do, re-imagine
that space, by finding a new way of thinking about the topic
-- one that reorients both participants to the dispute by
altering their sense of what stances are available to them
with respect to its topic. And at other times, we find that
we lack any sense of a shared space for thinking; we find
ourselves utterly disoriented by our situation, unable to
find our feet with others, and with ourselves, with respect
to what we confront. Then we need to find our orientation by
imagining how we might take a stand here, and hence by
finding a way to recognize certain topics and opinions about
them as defining a space of thinking that we might
inhabit. Could we justify such new
ways of thinking about a topic by the giving of reasons?
Well, if what we mean by the giving of reasons presupposes a
given space of reasoning or thinking within which competing
positions locate themselves, then obviously not. But that
does not entail that such re-envisionings of the space of
reasons are beyond the claim of reason; it means that they
are answerable to it in different ways. For example, when
Socrates faces judicial execution, and his friends urge him
to flee from his captors, he tells them that it would be
wrong to do so because disobeying the Athenian polis would
be like disobeying his parents. He thereby reorients their
thinking about Athens by comparing the polis to a family.
But the degree of conviction this imaginative connection
elicits is dependent upon the extent to which it can be
followed out in detail, the way in which it makes sense of
various aspects of political life, the further connections
it allows us to draw in a range of related cases, and our
willingness to rethink our own status and our own experience
of life (in the family and in the polis, but not only there)
in the terms it suggests. Socrates's imagination is thus not
a faculty that is essentially other to that of rationality,
or essentially unconstrained by it; it is accountable in a
variety of ways, but none would straightforwardly fit the
model of 'giving reasons for and against an
opinion'. To return this line of
thinking to the matter of my book: I would wish my readings
of specific films to be understood as accountable, as
answerable to the claims of reason, in just the ways
described above. Those readings aim to make sense of the
films they respond to, to show how various elements within
them have a significance that depends on the way they hang
together with other elements to make a coherent whole, and
thus allow us to make sense of our experience of them. The
way in which a given film coheres internally has definite
(if not logically determined) implications for the ways in
which it can be seen to hang together with other films in a
given series (whether within the Alien universe, or within a
given director's body of work); hence a reading of one film
gains credibility insofar as it engenders a coherent reading
of other films to which it is linked, and of the links
between it and them. And my reading of the _Alien_ films as
a series offers two other dimensions in which such
accountability is at issue, and hence measurable: the
relations between the various stages of Ripley's
understanding of herself and her universe, and the relations
between each director's understanding of Ripley's universe
and that of his successors and predecessors. We might think
of these as Ripley's ongoing dialogue with herself, and as
an unfolding conversation between her directors; we might
also think of each film in the series as embodying a
dialogue between Ripley and her director. Since in each
case, the plausibility of each individual's reading of
Ripley and her universe can be measured in terms of its
internal coherence, its willingness to follow through the
consequences of its particular way of making sense of
things, and its willingness to respond critically to
opposing readings, the dialectical evolution of these
interwoven conversations seems no less answerable to reason
than are Socrates' discussions with the young men of
Athens. Perhaps it is also worth
saying at this point that the accountability of Ripley's and
her directors' readings of the Alien universe is to be
assessed not just within that universe (as readings of the
fictional world of the films), but also within our universe
-- our experience of the human condition. Ripley's
understandings of human embodiment, sexuality and integrity
are engendered by and directed towards the world of her
experience; but that world is a recognizably human world. It
contains alien species and extrapolations of human
technological achievements, but it is not a fantasy of human
reality, if by that we mean a fictional world that represses
or rewrites the fundamental elements of our finitude. If
Ripley's readings of her life can seem variously empowering,
self-punishing and childlike to and for her, they cannot
avoid showing us how our own accommodations with such
understandings of human existence can manifest our own
empowerment, masochism and immaturity. Does this sense of
film as a projected moving image of human reality require a
Bazinian, realistic theory about cinema, or a metaphysical
ontology (as Andersen seems on occasion to imply)? My sense
is rather that my use of the ordinary word 'real' in these
contexts needs as much and as little justification as my use
of any other ordinary word in this text, or indeed in any
text. I am accountable for every word I use, as is any
speaker; but I am not bound to give such an accounting in
any specific discourse of film theory or
philosophy. What about philosophy as
questioning? If I understand Anderson rightly here, a number
of philosophical themes come together under this heading.
One has to do with a familiar model of philosophy as an
essentially parasitic discipline; lacking any subject-matter
or body of knowledge of its own, it comes into its own by
asking questions about the subject-matter of other
disciplines that cannot be answered with the resources
characteristic of that discipline. So a philosopher of
science might ask why we should accept inductive reasoning
-- based as it is on the assumption that the future will
resemble the past -- when it is patently possible that any
past pattern in our results or our experience might cease to
hold at the very next moment. We cannot avoid this problem
by saying that inductive reasoning has worked well so far,
since that begs the very question at issue; but any specific
scientific results will also presuppose the validity of
inductive reasoning, and thus be similarly incapable of
providing an answer. What is standardly known
as philosophy of film applies this kind of parasitic model
to the realm of cinema. It asks questions about what the
relation might be between the screened moving image and
reality, between an actor and her character, between an
actor and a star, between acting in cinema and acting in
other media, between a film and its sequels, between the
viewer of a film and what the film represents, and so on.
Insofar as the films I discuss in my book turn out to be
preoccupied with just these kinds of question, and to be
critically evaluating various answers to them (by, for
example, following through the consequences of accepting a
given answer for understanding the power of the medium,
confronting them with alternative answers and assessing
their relative merits), then they have as much claim to be
philosophical exercises as do the articles and books that
appear in journals and series devoted explicitly to
philosophical treatments of cinema. After all, a person's
way of working can intentionally have a philosophical
dimension without his being professionally identifiable as a
philosopher. Einstein's questions about physics are at least
as much philosophical as scientific; so why must we reject
the possibility of a film director's endeavours as being
similarly both philosophical and cinematic? Whether the
films I discuss are in fact preoccupied in the ways I take
them to be is, however, another question; answering it is a
matter of judging for oneself, case by case, whether my
readings of them succeed in making sense of them in those
terms. Another aspect of the idea
of philosophy as questioning has a more explicitly
Heideggerian inflection. For Heidegger defines the
distinctively human mode of existence as that in which the
essential nature of things (including ourselves) is an issue
for us; in other words, we treat the essence or Being of
anything and everything as a question -- as something for
which an answer is not given once and for all but rather to
be sought, through the systematisation of our natural
interest in questioning (through such modes of inquiry as
physics, history and ethics), and the periodic questioning
of the assumptions that such systematic practices of
questioning necessarily take for granted. Philosophy appears
here as the radicalisation of that human questioning. As
Stanley Cavell once put it: 'I understand
[philosophy] as a willingness not to think about
something other than what ordinary human beings think about,
but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things
that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or
anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in
fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape . . . Such
thoughts are instances of that characteristic human
willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot
answer with satisfaction . . . Philosophers after my heart
will wish to convey the thought that while there may be no
satisfying answers to such questions *in certain forms*,
there, so to speak, directions to answers, *ways to think*,
that are worth the time of your life to discover.'
[1] I'd like to conclude by
drawing three morals from this conception of philosophy's
essence. First, there is no essential break between the
natural, inherent reflectiveness of human life-forms and the
inveterate reflectiveness of philosophy; what distinguishes
the philosopher is the persistence and the single-mindedness
with which he employs the capacity for self-questioning that
informs every aspect of our ordinary existence. Second, the
advent of philosophising can occur within any and every mode
of human existence, insofar as those engaged in a particular
form of human practical activity find themselves driven to
question the nature of their own enterprise and the
resources with which it is pursued, and to incorporate both
the process and the product of this self-questioning into
the practical activity from which it emerged. And if this is
possible for the physicist and the literary critic, why not
for the film-maker? Third, if philosophy requires a certain
self-questioning or self-accounting from every other human
enterprise, then it must in all consistency require it of
itself. This means that any truly thorough-going conception
of philosophy must put its own internal resources and
self-understanding in question, and thus acknowledge that
any such self-conception is open to question by others, as
theirs is open to question by it. Philosophy therefore
cannot avoid the responsibility of accounting for its own
understanding of itself, recognizing that it will have
competitors, and accepting that the critical dialogue
between their proponents will never end as long as
philosophy remains true to its own questioning
nature. Hence, although I need to
believe that my own conception of what counts as a
legitimate way of philosophising can acquit itself before
the bar of reason, I have no investment in the idea that my
way of thinking about ways of thinking is the only plausible
way of so doing. Accordingly, the questions so pertinently
raised and elaborated by Andersen and Baggini must, as a
matter of intellectual necessity, remain open to further
exploration. New College Oxford University,
England Footnote 1. Stanley Cavell, 'The
Thought of Movies', in _Themes Out Of School_ (North Point
Press: San Francisco, 1984), p 9. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Stephen Mulhall, 'Ways of
Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 25, August 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n25mulhall>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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