The inspiration for a class on philosophy and film came to me after watching (not for the first time) Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and thinking, I could teach a course on this movie! A central theme of Chinatown is that great creative works are twinned at birth with evil, and this idea is not only ready-suited for philosophical investigation, it is also illustrated by the film itself: Polanski was later convicted of a crime not wholly different from that depicted in the movie. This porousness between the two sides of the proscenium arch is among several themes that recur in the films we watch (e.g., Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Iñárritu’s Birdman), and it suggested that I could leverage some heavy philosophical lifting in a seminar grounded in watching and talking about movies. I could also use the class to introduce students to movies that belong to a basic curriculum of film literacy.
A drama depicts an action, as we learn from Aristotle, so movies provide natural fodder for ethical inquiry. I was reading Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity when I wrote the syllabus, and the philosophy and film sides of the course easily fell together. It’s important for the way I run the class that I’m not interested in motivating conversations about metaethics or the strengths and weaknesses of voluntarist theories of moral value; this is a class in normative ethics. We read carefully selected sections from Korsgaard and related material (e.g., Harry Frankfurt on second-order volition and Charles Taylor on strong evaluation) to build a model of ethical action that emphasizes will, an agent’s self-conception and capacity for reflection, and integrity. This model is incomplete and open to objection; in particular, it would be nice to have a persuasive argument for the Kantian imperative that the agent legislates as a citizen of the Kingdom of Ends. (Korsgaard’s argument for this claim is not unproblematic.) But our work in the class focuses exclusively on applying this model as a basis for interpreting, analyzing, and criticizing the actions of the characters in the films we watch. It is a course on how to think ethically, rather than how to think about ethics, and it is well suited for students at a comprehensive regional university, who tend to a “practical” orientation that stands in need of tutoring.
The work of the course falls into three parts. In the first, I introduce students to an apparatus of film theory and aesthetics. Talk about lighting and editing isn’t the usual business for a philosophy class, but it supplies students with a vocabulary to talk about movies that goes beyond “I liked it!,” and it enriches the conversation once we start mining the films for examples to illustrate the philosophy. Moreover, our simplified film theory emphasizes that an audience constructs the aesthetic object it views, and this meshes with constructivist claims we make later in the semester, especially the Nietzschean idea that we ourselves are artworks that we construct through our practical choices.
The next part of the syllabus develops the main ideas of the class, which I’ve described above. We use three films to illustrate these ideas: Citizen Kane on what it means to live a human life (in an extended sense of Locke’s notion of the identity through time of an organism), themes from Frankfurt and Taylor through the diminished practical reasoning of the characters in Pleasantville, and the moral choices presented to Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) as illustrating Taylor’s account of strong evaluation and Korsgaard’s theory of the role of practical identity in moral deliberation. Casablanca is an especially compelling example. Inter alia, Rick faces a choice between his practical identities as a lover of Ilsa and an anti-fascist, and these conflict: does he send Ilsa away with Viktor Lazlo – which is consistent with his being an anti-fascist, since she is Viktor’s partner in his work, but conflicts with his being a lover of Ilsa – or does he keep Ilsa with him, which is consistent with his being a lover of Ilsa, but conflicts with his anti-fascism? He measures his desires not according to which he wants more, but according to their worth; since the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, he puts Ilsa on the plane with Lazlo.
The final films and readings on our syllabus explore the adequacy of this account in a world in which God is absent or dead (The Seventh Seal, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Chinatown). This ends the course in a dark mood, and the next time I offer the class I may add as a redemptive postscript Jean Renoir’s humanistic Grand Illusion. I also plan to include Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, for its examination of identity through the prisms of race and ideology.
This semester, COVID has forced the course online, which is less conducive to the conversations that are central to the course’s work. Still, using the films to illustrate the ethical theory we develop seems to help with students’ comprehension of the material, and I achieve my twin aims of getting students to think more deeply both about the art they consume and about the structure of moral deliberation.
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Marc A. Joseph
Marc A. Joseph is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Missouri and Professor Emeritus at Mills College. He is the author of Donald Davidson (McGill-Queen's University Press) and the editor of a revised translation and critical edition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Broadview Press). He has a BA in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also studied mathematics and classics, and a PhD from Columbia University. Professor Joseph’s current research focuses on problems in post-Kantian metaphysics about the nature and structure of objectivity, especially as these matters arise in connection with the works of Kant, Sellars, and Davidson.
