Lord of War

Lord of War (2005) is a film in which a Ukrainian-born American arms dealer, Yuri Orlov, and his brother, Vitaly, who works with Yuri when not in voluntary rehab for drug abuse, make money by selling military arms to dictators including Andre Baptiste of Liberia. Whereas Yuri is able to maintain a mental wall keeping him from coming to terms with his contribution to innocent people getting killed by the autocrats who are his customers, Vitality is finally unable to resist facing his own complicity, and that of his brother. This itself illustrates that moral concerns may have some influence on some people but not others. Yuri’s position, which can be summed up as, what they do with the guns that we sell them is none of our business, contrasts with Vitaly as he realizes that as soon as the Somalian warlord takes the guns off the trucks, villages down the hill will be killed. Vitaly even sees a woman and her young child being hacked to death down below. Yuri tries to manage his brother so the sale can be completed and the two brothers can get out of Somalia, but Vitaly has finally had enough and has come to the conclusion that he and Yuri have been morally culpable by selling guns to even sadistic dictators like Andre Baptiste. Even as Yuri ignores his own conscience, Vitaly finally cannot ignore the dictates of his own, and he takes action. Does he ignore his happiness, and thus his self-interest, in being willing to die to save the villagers by blowing up (admittedly only) one of the two trucks, or has he reasoned through his conscience and found that it coincides with his happiness? In other words, are the moral dictates of a person’s conscience necessarily in line with a person’s happiness, and thus one’s self-interest? This is a question that the filmmaker could have explored in the film.

Joseph Butler (1692-1752), a European, Anglican bishop, theologian, and philosopher, “explicitly upheld the claims of conscience against all rivals, especially interest”, otherwise known as self-interest, which Butler claims is interested in the happiness of the self.[1] To be sure, because “’the greatest satisfactions to ourselves depend upon our having benevolence in a due degree’”, “’even from self-love we should endeavor to get over all inordinate regard to and consideration of ourselves,’ and cultivate other-regarding desires.”[2] Even with this extension, Butler took it for granted that “the dictates of conscience and self-love coincide,” even though, when he considered “which is the real arbiter of virtue, he [always came] down on the side of conscience.”[3] In the “cool hour” passage in one of his sermons, he asserts, “’Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such; yet that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it’”.[4]  This does not mean that the ground of rightness is conduciveness to happiness, [and thus self-interest, and the passage] does not even mean that the motive of self-love is a good motive—the good motive is ‘affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such’—it simply means that as a motive to action, self-love is more influential than the dictates of conscience.”[5] Yet rational self-interest, which is based or premised on self-love, is coincident to matters of conscience, he insists, so why should it matter which is more influential? 

Firstly, Butler includes the happiness of heaven in self-interest, and so just looking at our embodied life here, even rational self-interest can give different results than conscience. "Butler believed, on theological grounds . . ., that virtuous behavior brings the greatest happiness in the end."[6] Secondly, Butler states that other-regarding benevolent motives (and acts) do not necessarily impact the moral agent’s mental state, and thus happiness. A person can indeed follow one’s own conscience to act benevolently such that the other person’s mental state will change without one’s own necessarily changing (i.e., being happier). So in terms of ethics alone, excluding theology, even Butler would admit that self-interest and the normative dictates of conscience can conflict. From this standpoint, Vitaly's ethic in the film can be analyzed. 

Vitaly was lost and unhappy both in being a cook in his parents’ restaurant and working for his brother Yuri. In fact, his desire to escape—to feel happy—had been so great that he resorted to cocaine and repeatedly went to a clinic without success. It is only in coming to terms with the immorality of what he and his brother were doing in selling arms to dictators around the world that Vitaly found meaning sufficient to act with purpose. In witnessing a man in the nearby village use a machete to kill a woman and her young child, Vitaly does not decide to destroy the weapons to keep the warlord from killing all of the people in the small village in order to have purpose; rather, he is overwhelmed emotionally by the severity of the harm to the two innocent people and out of this sentiment he reasoned that by destroying the guns in the trucks, he could prevent the deaths of all of the villagers. That Vitaly found purpose—essentially, found himself—is not his motive even though as he lays dying after being shot by Baptiste’s son for blowing up one of the trucks, Vitaly finally is at peace and then he dies. It is like in Jainism, where spiritual freedom from the material realm is only realized as a person lies dying without even relying on one’s heart.

Therefore, even though acting justly by honoring rather than bracketing the dictates of conscience may, and Butler would say, does coincide with the self-interest that stems from self-love, being motivated does not depend on the extra push from being happy as a result even though happiness may result. In other words, the film can be interpreted as contradicting Butler’s theory by showing that Butler depends too much on self-love and its interests (i.e., to be personally happy as a result) in motivating a person to follow one’s conscience. Other-regard, or benevolence, can be oriented to improving the mental states, and thus self-interests, of other people without being motivated by one’s own happiness being positively affected too. This is so even if the moral agent is happier as a result.

To be sure, Vitaly clearly is very troubled internally by Yuri’s instance that Vitaly not disrupt or impede the sale going through. Yuri is doubtlessly motivated by self-interest, but in terms of money and being able to leave alive. That he has no moral scruples does not mean that he is oblivious to how bad his customers are as people. Vitaly, I submit, cannot live with himself unless he blows up the sale, literally, so in this respect he can be said to be motivated not only because he does not want the innocents below to be shot after he leaves, but also because he wants to improve his mental state from being in such pain. However, his ethical/mental crisis is triggered by his having witnessed the horrendous double-murder with the murderer calmly walking away with impunity. Being so emotionally shocked —in Hume’s terms, judging morally by having a strong sentiment of disapprobation—is the basis of Vitaly’s motivation to follow his conscience even though that means betraying his own brother.

The operative motive is not Vitaly’s rational self-interest in being happy or at peace, as Butler would claim, especially as Vitaly undoubtedly knows that he would probably be killed. What people are capable of doing to other people can be so horrific that a moral agent may emotionally disapprove so much and be so motivated to forestall further harm that one’s own self-interest qua happiness is of no concern. Even if relieving one’s own internal angst is motivated by a non-rational, instinctual urge, and one may indeed be at peace afterward, the angst and peace can be effects of something else that is triggering the distinctly normative, or ethical, process that ends with a decision and an action. It is Vitaly’s strong emotional reaction in seeing a woman and young child hacked to death out in the open that is decisive in motivating him to try to blow up both trucks so nobody else in the tents below would be killed. It can perhaps even be said that he is willing to sacrifice himself, and thus his happiness, to save the lives of others. It is an odd, unfortunate, commentary on human nature itself that even if Yuri had also witnessed the violence, he would still be intent on completing the sale. Yuri’s ethical compass is extremely compromised—he even reasons that because eventually lies become the norm in a marriage, it is only logical to start one off by lying. His wife Ava leaves him, and his parents disown him, and Vitaly is dead. So much for self-love and even rational self-interest. Butler gave them too much credit. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t.

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1. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), 329-44, p. 332.
2. Stephan Darwall, “Introduction,” in Joseph Butler, Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue. Ed., Stephen Darwall (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 7.
3. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), p. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 337.
5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 340

Obsession

Brian De Palma’s film, Obsession (1976), harkens back to Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo (1958) primarily in that resemblances between a character-contrived myth, or story, and the closely related (though different in key respects) social reality in the film (i.e., what’s really going on in the film’s story-world) trigger perplexed reactions for the character being duped by other characters in the film. I thought she died, but there she is . . . or maybe that’s another woman who looks like her—so much so that I believe I can will the woman to be her. The human mind may be such that it convinces itself of even a supernatural explanation rather than admits to have been fooled by someone else’s cleverness. At the very least, doubt as to what is really going on can be stultifying. The human mind is all too willing obviate its uncertainty by either resorting to a supernatural explanation or making something so by force of will, as if believing something to be the case is sufficient to make it so.

The European philosopher, David Hume, wrote a text on the natural history of religion in which he suggests that we mere mortals have an innate tendency to add familiar ornaments onto divine simplicity; we innately anthropomorphize the wholly other so it looks human. Then we believe that our artifices are ontological, or real, and even divine. De Palma’s Obsession explicitly draws on religious iconography and even dream-like mysticism in conveying Michael’s vision of Sandra as Elizabeth brought back from the grave. Viewers may resist the religious cross-over because it is easier to accept that a distraught man believes someone is his deceased wife than that our minds are just as prone to lapses when we enter the domain of religion. This is not to suggest that religious meaning is thus invalid, or even that symbol, myth and ritual cannot be useful in enabling religious experience; rather, Obsession can, if we allow it to do so, gently show us what our minds may be up to in making metaphysical and ontological leaps in matters of religious faith. At the very least, the human mind ensconced in the religious domain regularly confounds belief with fact, whether epistemologically or ontologically. Similarly, we conflate two distinct literary genres: faith narrative and historical non-fiction as if the respective purposes were the same even to the respective writers themselves. We are much better at distinguishing films that are fictional from those that are based on a true story. Even a fictional film can hold a mirror up to human nature as it exists in us. I submit that the human mind is not as goof-proof as we think. Both in Vertigo and Obsession, the minds of the protagonists are definitely put under stress by observation of resemblances that don’t make sense yet are extremely inviting.

In Vertigo, Scottie thinks he recognizes Madeleine even though the contrived story is that she jumped to her death at a convent. In Obsession, Michael thinks Sandra, whom he sees priming for a painter in an Italian church, is his former wife, Elizabeth, whom the contrived story has as having died in a car more than a decade earlier. Whereas Madeleine really is Madeleine, Sandra is not Elizabeth, but is actually Michael’s (and Elizabeth’s) daughter, who is in on the scam that is being perpetrated by one of the kidnappers and Robert, Michael’s very patient real-estate partner.  Sometimes investments like swindling jobs can take over a decade before the returns come in.

In Obsession, it is not just the resemblance—though curiously not adjusting for the difference in ages—of Sandra and Elizabeth by which De Palma conveys isomorphic (i.e., of the same shape or form) resonances throughout the film The images shown at step-wise distances as the open credits are shown are of a church on a hill in Italy. Michael and Elizabeth first met there, and this is where Michael sees Sandra during a business trip with his business partner over a decade after Elizabeth died. The visual resonance of the church is found in the large memorial structure that Michael has erected in a park for his dead wife and daughter. That even as a real-estate developer he refuses to carve up that part is a testament to how dear that monument is to him. The church and the memorial edifice are also isomorphic with the top of the wedding cake in Michael’s dream of his wedding to Sandra, who, uncomfortably, it turns out, is really his daughter, Amy. That incest may have occurred by the time the couple return to America is left up to the audience, though that Michael has his arm around Sandra in a taxi connotes a certain physical intimacy, especially given the changed sexual mores in the 1970s. The ethics aside, any discomfort felt by viewers can be said to have its source in the obvious lapse in Michael’s will of wish-fulfillment as being sufficient, to him, to render the young Sandra as a replacement or even incarnation of Elizabeth as if from the grave. Willing it so does not make it so. Michael’s dull gaze at Sandra when she is on a painting riser in a church full of religious iconography not only shows the suspension of his rational mind, but also the implication that religious devotion is also susceptible to such a lapse.

One way in which myth touches us emotionally and even spiritually is in the resonances between symbols in myth and things in the world in which we live. The human brain makes use of such likenesses in dreams, such as the one that Michael has of his wedding to Sophie. Whether intentionally or not, De Palma converges myth with the dream in portraying Sandra as translucent and even other-worldly as if she were a goddess. Sandra is vicariously Elizabeth, who has come back from the grave to give her inattentive husband another chance. Michael believes this to be so even in his waking state, and his temporally elongated gaze at Sandra at several points in the film resembles how a person might look at a religious statue, such as that of the Virgin Mary, in adoration. Sandra gains goddess-like standing in the myth, which Michael accords as real empirically.  Therefore, myth can also touch our world in that a person thought to be real (in our world) has mythic resonances. In Christianity, both Jesus and Mary are typically believed to have existed historically and also in a distinctly religious state (i.e., heaven) while maintaining human form via the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the bodily assumption of Mary.  

I submit that the salience of Christianity in the film allows the viewers to grasp that the myth in the story-world, which Michael believes is real in his waking daily life, resembles distinctly religious myth as it is believed in as real by religionists. Of course, one big difference is that viewers find out what is really the case in the film, and this bursts the story’s credence, whereas religious people are not debriefed as to whether the characters of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in the Gospel stories are merely nominally real in the stories or actually existed historically. The debriefing in the film can be understood as giving the audience a psychic payoff in lieu of the one that never comes in religion.

Perhaps such a payoff in religion is not really what we want; after all, at the end of the Da Vinci Code (2006), Robert asks Sophie whether it is worth deflating the faith of Christians by revealing that Jesus was married and had at least one child—thus implying perhaps that Jesus was a man rather than a god-man. The religious meaning in Sophie’s spiritual, inherited qualities is not deflated, but the faith of many Christians who have not been debriefed on the relation between the myth and history could be expected to take a hit to the extent that the basis of their faith is the divinity of Jesus Christ rather than, say, compassion itself to people one doesn’t like (or don’t like the person).

If the reality is different than the myth, does the distinctly religious meaning in the latter necessarily or inherently collapse? Not so for Mary Magdalene in the film, Mary Magdalene (2018), who tries in vain to convince Peter in the last scene that the kingdom of God is within, and thus starts with the transformation of one’s own heart from compassion toward others, rather than with Jesus coming on clouds in the future to defeat the evil Romans and free Israel. Michael’s debriefing by Robert in Obsession is like wish-fulfillment writ large for an audience that is not accustomed to finding the meaning of a religious myth in the myth itself, rather than in other domains, such as history, astronomy, and even moral science.

Obsession is embellished with ornate religious settings and even meaning, especially with Sandra appearing like a goddess of sorts in Michael’s dream—his dead wife being de facto a goddess. As in the domain of religion, there are stories and there is the world in which we live out our daily lives. Resonances between the two give us pause, as we are not really sure what is going on—and what is really real of the two, or what the resemblances mean. Michael’s bubble is burst, but he comes out just fine in realizing that his daughter was still alive and that they have found each other in something more tangible, perhaps even more real, than the world of myth that Robert had foisted on Michael in order to swindle of him of his money. To be sure, the world of myth can come in handy, for surely there is some sense of reality that goes with the claim that Robert, once killed in his climatic fight with Michael, is in hell.  

Bladerunner

In 1982, when Bladerunner was released, 2019 could only have been a blink of an eye in people’s thoughts. Even the year 2001, the year in which the movie 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) takes place, must have seemed far off. Of course, the actual year was not so futuristic as to have a computer take over a space station; controversy over AI eclipsing the grasp of human control would not hit the societal mainstream for twenty years.  So, Ridley Scott can hardly be blamed for positing flying cars, and, even more astonishing, imposing the notion of a replicant, a being of genetic biomechanics that fuses computer and human characteristics, on 2019. Even acknowledging the tremendous impacts on society of inventions since the dawn of the twentieth century, the pace of technological change is slower than we imagine. In 2019, on the cusp of a global pandemic, flying (and self-driving) cars were just in the prototype/testing phase, and AI existed rudimentarily, and certainly not corporeally in human form. Scott missed the mark, probably by decades, though he got the trajectory right. Indeed, the film’s central issue—that of the threat of run-away, or “rebellious,” AI to humans—was reflected in the press especially during the first half of 2023. I contend, however, that the philosophical merit of the film lies not in political theory, but, rather, in what it means to be human. The nature of human understanding, self-awareness, an ethical sense, and matters of theological reflection are all brought to the forefront in the question of whether the replicants can and should be taken as human beings. In other words, it is the fusion of AI, or computers more generally, and biology that lies at the core of the film.

In the film, Deckard is hired to kill replicants who have rebelled by traveling to Earth. His character arc can be grasped in terms of a gradual recognition that they essentially human, or at least enough like us that they can and should be regarded as subjects rather than objects. The film furnishes us with several criteria in which the replicants can be counted as human.

Self-awareness is the foremost criterion: taking oneself to be an entity that has subjectivity. At one point in the film, Pris, a female replicant, says, “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum. The screenwriter doubtlessly had Descartes in mind. I am aware that I am thinking, therefore I exist. Even if an evil deceiver has us believing incorrectly that the world of appearances exists, we know that our thinking does not depend on any external world. In the film, the replicants can indeed think; they have been programmed to do so by Tyrell, who is a genius. In fact, the leader of the rebel replicants on Earth, Batty, refers to Tyrell as the replicant’s creator (god) even though it could be argued that the genetic bioengineers who grow the biological organs of the replicants also warrant such divine status. In actuality, there is nothing divine about programming AI or growing biological organs presumably out of stem-cells. It is not as if Tyrell and his engineers create everything, whether ex nihilo or not (one of the Creation accounts in Genesis is not ex nihilo). In other words, the give rise to existence itself is qualitatively different than creating something in particular in the realm of already-existence.

So the replicants have the human attribute of being self-conscious of themselves as entities that can think. This is not to say that they are minds in vats filled with chemicals. Pris insists that she is also physical, by which she means biological or corporeal in nature. She has a body; a replicant has biomass and even human genes. One of the biometric engineers tells a replicant, “You have my genes in you.” Can we say then that Descartes’ mind/body duality pertains to replicants? The replicant’s mind is programmed whereas the bodies are grown organically. The film does not provide us with a definite account of how the replicant brain is “hard-wired”—whether it is a computer physically emmeshed in a biological body or that computer code has somehow been written into the organic neuro-networks. The latter alternative lies beyond our comprehension, at least as of 2023. Indeed, it may even seem paradoxical. In a Gospel narrative, the risen Jesus walks through a door yet he is hungry and eats a fish. It is clear that his corporeal body has been transformed yet is still corporeal. In Pris insisting to the bioengineer who grows eyes using his own genes for replicants that she is physical rather than merely a thinking thing, the implication is that the replicants are entirely biological (i.e., every organ is organic rather than machine). Yet in her death throws after being shot (not tased!), Pris’s body shakes violently as if it were being electrocuted. The implication here is that her brain was hit and is electronic circuits rather than made of flesh. If so, it is remarkable, again from the standpoint of the actual world in 2023, that a hard-wire computer can have self-awareness, and thus be taken as a subject (i.e., having subjectivity).

Furthermore, the replicants have emotions, which are in the subjectivity; that is, the replicants know that they themselves feel. The replicants, especially Batty being of the sixth generation, are intelligent. So too is Tyrell, who had programmed Batty; both are superb at the game of chess. The replicants know that they (i.e., their respective subjectivities) will one day come to an end. In being mortal, they are like us. Similarly, they fear death. Two replicants, one of whom is Batty, make it clear that they fear dying. Batty even tells Deckard, the bladerunner, that it is precisely that fear that makes someone a slave—a slave to one’s fear. So it is clear that AI extends in the story-world of the film beyond intelligence to include emotions. Additionally, Batty clearly mourns Pris, and even exacts vengeance on Deckard for having killed Pris and another replicant in Batty’s rebel group.

Even more astonishingly, the AI manifesting in Batty includes a moral sense. When Tyrell tells Batty, “You’re the prodigal son,” Batty retorts, “I’ve done questionable things.” Ironically, it is the human Tyrell who seems to be missing the moral sense, for he replies, “Also extraordinary things!” It is indeed extraordinary that a replicant would then bring in theology in saying quite sadly, “Nothing that the god of biomechanics would let you into heaven for.” Batty even conceptualizes heaven. At one point while fighting Deckard, Batty says, “Go to hell; go to heaven.” Batty’s sarcastic quip, “Aren’t you the good man” to Deckard for not fighting fair, can be assumed to have theological and not merely moral overtones. Batty even calls him a bastard spirit. Finally, clearly aware that he is soon going to die, Batty saves Deckard rather than kills him. Kindness to one’s enemy has explicit religious overtones in Christianity even if most Christians prefer to focus instead on a metaphysical belief-claim that is only indirectly linked to helping one’s enemies. Indeed, the history of Christianity presents examples of Christians having “true belief” yet belying the claim by persecuting rather than helping people they didn’t like. Here in Bladerunner, it is a replicant that ironically provides us with an illustrative example of Christian charity. Deckard can only look up perplexed at Batty’s change of heart. When Batty dies, he releases a white dove, which flies away, evocative perhaps of Batty’s soul leaving his body. At the very least, Batty has in his mind the idea of God. In his proof that God exists, Descartes posits that existence because the idea, itself having full perfection, could not come from a being of less perfection. So God must exist for there to be the idea of God in a human mind. Yet a finite mind can also have the idea of infinity without there even needing to be infinity.

At the very least, it is clear that Batty thinks a lot about morality and even religion. In contrast, Deckard does not. Even though Batty has done “questionable things,” it is telling that he is quite aware of this. Historically, Shaftsbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith all posited a moral sentiment in human nature; we are fundamentally sociable creatures who gain pleasure from shared experience that “fellow feeling,” or sympathy, and imagination can provide. When Batty saves Deckard from falling, the two share an intimate moment emotionally as Batty shares the marvels of what he has seen.  He is saying, in effect, that he had not been merely an instrument, or object, that humans sent out to protect the colonies in space; rather, his existence has chiefly been that of a subjectivity, and is thus worthy of being taken as an end in itself, rather than merely as a means to a human’s plans. Kant’s ethical claim that beings partaking in rational nature—being able to use reasoning—should be valued in themselves is taken up and embraced implicitly by the most advanced replicant. As he was being used as an instrument—an object—to protect the intergalactic colonies, Batty was marveling at the sights. He was not merely a machine. Perhaps by observing the humanity of the dying replicant, Deckard then comes to the realization that he loves Rachael, one of the female replicants, and that she can love and trust him. The two recognize each other as subjects—each as having a subjectivity rather than being taken as an object.

In short, the film essentially asks what it means to be human. Self-awareness, reasoning, emotions, a moral sense, and even contemplation of ideas transcending the limits of human conception and perception are qualities that pertain to at least the most advanced generation of replicants. It is ironic that it is a replicant, Batty, who brings up and critiques Deckard from moral and religious standpoints. Clearly, a replicant’s understanding goes beyond the machine-type of “manipulation of symbols according to rules.” Moreover, the cognition and understanding mesh with emotions and self-awareness, as well as the awareness of other subjects. Indeed, the aforementioned qualities of the replicants are sufficient to support the claim that they can love and be loved in return—the Bohemian ideal expressed in Moulin Rouge. 

In Bladerunner, both Deckard and Batty come around to being more human, and thus more humane. Both can be taken as subjects rather than objects; both have subjectivities. Perhaps it can even be said that Deckard’s humanity depends on that of the replicants, or at least to the recognition that they are sufficiently human to be taken as such rather than as walking computers. Certainly, it is the humaneness of Batty that Deckard literally comes to depend on to live another day. It certainly would not make sense to say that Deckard owes anything to the replicant were it merely a machine that manipulates symbols according to rules even assuming the existence of machine learning. Yet that Batty has a subjectivity and thus experience that goes beyond his essence—an existentialist assumption—means that Deckard can feel that he owes Batty a debt of gratitude. Certainly Deckard feels an ethical obligation toward Rachael because she not only loves him, but trusts him as well. She is thus capable of being hurt emotionally, should he betray her by reverting back to viewing the replicants as objects. Finally we have in Bladerunner what it means to be human, ironically in its fullest sense.  

The Bride and the Curfew

Our species is capable of horrific cruelty that defies any claim of having a conscience, and yet we can be willing to override our otherwise intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation for an ethical principle; that is to say, a person can choose to lay down one’s life for another person. Our biological nature—how we are hardwired—includes both vicious aggressiveness resembling that of chimps and yet the ability to “act on principle” in selfless love. In the Albanian film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), these two facets of human nature are on display, in direct contact as it were, such that the sheer breadth in human nature is made transparent. The two poles are personified by the Nazi military commander and Shpresa, the young Albanian woman living who assassinates a Nazi solder in her Nazi-occupied village.

From the very start of the film, it is clear that the Nazis place no value on human life per se. Hitler’s second priority in coming to power was to clear Eastern Europe of the Slavs to make room for Germans to spread out from Germany. It follows that the lives of the Albanian inhabitants have no value to the Nazi commander in the film. That Nazi soldiers are shooting down the street at whomever is using chalk to draw a partisan resistance symbol—a star—on buildings makes the point clear enough that human life means nothing. The stress daily on the villagers must be tremendous. The filmmaker’s use of lighting to build tension and sound to magnify the hard claps of shoes on cement provide the audience with the sense that life under such a totalitarian German occupation is indeed harsh. The literal translation of the film, “The Bride and the State Siege,” alludes to the severity of the onslaught.

The combination of a totalitarian regime and a wholesale disvaluing of human life by the oppressors is indeed a toxic cocktail. That the Nazi’s extermination of 20 million Slavs in Eastern Europe (not counting those killed on the battlefield) and the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust—not exactly Kantian facts of reason—came after the European Enlightenment (of reason) does not bode well for human civilization. Moreover, that the twentieth century included two world wars does not bode well for Hegel’s theory of a trajectory through history of an increasing spirit of freedom. Two world wars seem like more than a momentary regression, and the regimes of Hitler and Stalin should not be left out in making the claim that the sordid twentieth century was not just a regression. Perhaps it is not God that is dead, as Nietzsche has been interpreted as claiming, but, rather, Hegel’s optimistic theory, given the statis of human nature even given the gradual process of natural selection.  

The Enlightenment should not have been taken as a panacea. Reason, even cleverness, can be employed in evil designs. Hannah Arendt, who wrote from her experience as an observer of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claimed that the Nazi bureaucrat simply didn’t think; he was simply working out train routes and schedules so as to maximize a commodity that had to be transported. Yet Eichmann did think for himself when he violated Himmler’s order not to make the Jews in Hungary march to a death-camp in Poland, and this is what got him convicted by the Israeli judges. The thought that many of the Jews would very efficiently die of attrition en route appealed to the value that he put on business-like efficiency. Given the goal of exterminating Judaism in Europe, it was reasonable to violate an order so a more efficient option could be taken. So it is not the benching of reason that accounts for the mass murder; quite the opposite. Bureaucracy, it should be pointed out, is based on reason rendered as structure and procedure, and it is not contrary to reason to suspend a procedure in order to put in place a more efficient remedy.

Lest it be concluded that Nazi Germany was the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, the passions were also involved. Eichmann hated Jews, and his strong emotion was backed up by the Nazi social reality in which Jews were portrayed as sub-human, even akin to rodents. This message was clear in the Nazi propaganda films in which Jews are likened to the rats that spread the plague over Europe in the fourteenth century from China. Both Hume and Adam Smith posited the imagination as playing a role in the social realities we come up with to order the world. “Confronted with the vast and seemingly chaotic complexity of the world in which we live,” one scholar on Adams explains, “we feel an instinctive need to impose some sense of order on our perceptions, and it is our imagination that enables us to do so.”[1] The social reality evinced in a leader’s vision and propagated through speeches and film can satisfy what for Victor Frankl is our innate need for meaning. Although he showed at even the victims in the concentration camps had that need even as they were starving, it is no less true that the Germans, and indeed, any human being, seeks the order that a social reality can provide. The role of the imagination in the crafting of a social reality means that subjectivity is salient. Hence Eichmann was not a mere, unthinking bureaucrat; he was a warm-blooded human being whose subjective emotions were nestled in the Nazi social reality in which Jews were vermin. This likeness is made explicit in the film, Inglorious Basterds, when the SS officer explains how he approaches hunting Jews by thinking like a rat does.

In The Bride and the Curfew, the Nazi commander applies his hunting skills to snuffing out the resistance. Although he does not view Shpresa as a rodent, it is clear that he puts no value on the lives of any of the villagers, including hers. In complete contrast, Shpresa provides a light on the human condition. Her message is the following: My life isn’t mine anymore; it no longer belongs to me; it serves the ideal of freedom, which includes a free Albania. Even though she is living in constant danger, she embraces an ideal even to her own detriment. Whereas the Nazis are acting in line with their primitive instinctual urge of aggression, the young woman is willing to override her urge of self-preservation—an instinct that Hobbes claims in Leviathan is primary. Whereas the Nazis can draw on a collective social reality to base their subjectivity, Shpresa is virtually alone in making her decision to place freedom above even her own life.

She has but her own subjectivity on which to base her choice, hence, as Sartre points out, the gravity of her choice is weighty. She does not appeal to God or even to authority or tradition, although there is a hint of the later in her mention of free Albania. Conforming to the Nazis would obviously be more convenient, though she would not thereby make use of their social reality. She embraces the hard responsibility that lies in making a choice that goes against the grain. The story-world of the film, the Nazi-occupied Albanian village, is the antithesis of freedom, and so she stands out in belonging to the ideal. Villagers do come to her aid, specifically in getting her out of town as if she were a bride, but the decision is hers alone, and must ultimately rest on her subjectivity. The film thus evinces the existentialist philosophy.

Perhaps the main question in the film is whether human beings are willing to assume the responsibility of making difficult choices when they have nothing to fall back on but our own individual subjective experience, without even the order-conferring comfort of a societal social reality. In their dependence on a social reality provided by Hitler, the Nazi subjectivity is hardly such a feat. Although it is easy to beat up on the Nazis, the implication that relying on the vision of a leader evinces weakness may not be so convenient. Heidegger, after all, advocates an authentic life over one lived out in conformity. Nietzsche tells his readers not to be Nietzscheans; rather, have your own ideas. These are difficult words for people living in an age in which we are such organizational creatures and we pay such attention to the politics of our leaders.

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[1] Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), p. 66.

Eyes without a Face

The film, Eyes without a Face (original title: Les Yeux sans Visage) (1960), can be taken as a demonstration of the validity of Kant’s ethical theory. Whether or not viewers have studied Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the film is a good representation that it is unethical to treat other people only as a means. Kant claims that people should always be treated also as ends in themselves. In the film, physician Génessier literally goes into innocent young women with his scalpel, using them as means in his obsession to provide his daughter, Christiane, with skin on her face. She has no skin on her face because of an automobile accident in which her father was at fault. For our purposes, the film's message is relevant. Companies literally have  human resource departments and so many states use human beings as expendable soldiers. The very notion of a soldier can be viewed as an oxymoron to the extent that beings having a rational nature are sent out to be killed. It's not like having a flee killed. The film provides us with a great service in bringing Kant’s ethic to us, if only in that we don’t to read the philosopher's recondite ethical treatise (though Hegel's books are even more difficult).

Génessier tells Christiane that everything that he is doing, all the (as he later admits) terrible things, he is doing for her good. He also says that if he succeeds, the benefit would be “beyond a price.” Whereas for Kant, reason, or beings having a rational nature (such as us), has absolute value because we use reason to assign value to other things, the devious physician treats his daughter’s good as being absolute. This difference is crucial in terms of ethics. For Kant, rational beings deserve to be treated not just as means to someone’s goal (or interest), but also as ends in themselves precisely because being rational is of absolute value. What about when we don’t think (or behave) rationally? Kant would say that we still have a rational nature, and thus are worthy of being respected by other rational beings not just as means to another’s desire.

Does Génessier use reason—does he think rationally—in removing skin from two young women’s faces and grafting the skin on his daughter’s skinless face? I contend that the father does so because he has a strategy by which to achieve the good, which for him his daughter having a pleasant life. At one point in the film, it looks like the latest skin transplant will work. He tells his daughter that he would pay for her to take a vacation so she could enjoy life after having lived so isolated for so long. He uses the young women and potentially a vacation as means to his daughter’s good, and in this way he is using reason. It is quite another question whether he is being ethical. It is easy to see that he is not an ethical man.

In short, he uses people. Besides the two young women whom he kidnaps and operates on to give their skin to his daughter, he is using Gabrielle as an accomplice and nurse; he had fixed her face, so she feels obligated to do unethical things for him. Interestingly, the police also use someone in the film. Specifically, the police inspector uses a shoplifter as bait to catch Génessier. The inspector is not very concerned about treating the woman as an end in herself, hence he puts her at risk, as if the misdemeanor justifies doing so.

Christiane is the protagonist, and even the heroine, in the film, in resisting her father’s strategy. Whereas he admits that he has done terrible things but they are justified because they serve his daughter’s good, Christiane feels guilty in her new skin during the weeks when it lasts. Génessier remarks that her face looks angelic, but she disagrees. Interestingly, she says that it seems like the experience seems from the beyond. This allusion to religion seems at first out of place, especially given her father’s horrors. But her true, internal angelic nature comes through at the end when she kills the nurse to free the shoplifter. In fact, she goes on to free the dogs and white birds. Like them, she has felt as if she were in a cage. Her father hadn’t bothered to ask her whether she consented to his sordid strategy of abducting young women for their facial skin. In the end, she walks outside, past her dead father whom the dogs have attacked. One of the white birds sits comfortably on one of her arms. She is as though an angel come to liberate the oppressed, which includes herself, and in so doing see that the wicked are punished. Divine retribution. Indeed, Kant’s formulation of his categorical imperative in which the means/ends dichotomy is salient resembles the neighbor-love of Christianity. In other words, the Golden Rule involves treating other people not just as means to one’s own designs, but, rather, how one would want to be treated. Presumably no one wants to be treated only as someone else’s means to their goals. Of course, the difference between Kant’s imperative in this formulation and the Golden Rule is that rational nature is the grounding of the former whereas the soul, and ultimately God, is the basis of the latter. Benevolentia universalis, which Augustine imparts as he emphasizes having a good will (benevolentia), is essentially love, which transcends ethics. The bad doctor Génessier does not love the young women whose skin he flays as a means to providing his daughter with a face. His love suffers for want of universalis.

In Kantian language, which relates to the Golden Rule but is not itself religious, we might say that those who have a rational nature but do not treat others of the same nature as ends in themselves, but only as means, do not themselves deserve to inhabit a rational nature. We could even suppose that it is not rational enough to devise unethical (i.e., means only) means involving beings having a rational nature, so  Génessier can be seen as not reasoning well—not partaking sufficiently in his innate rational nature—in devising his strategy; even his notion of the good fall short in being confined to his daughter’s happiness. To evoke another of Kant’s formulations of his ethical imperative, a person’s maxim or policy for action should be universalized without falling apart in absurdity. The (theory of the) good that the ethic serves should also be universal, as in the good of humanity, or, more precisely, beings having a rational nature.

But such abstractions are not necessary for film to be an excellent medium for conveying ethical dilemmas and even relating them to religious themes that transcend ethics. It is enough that the viewer sees Génessier use other human beings so atrociously and then sees Christiane reject her father’s unethical conduct even though she herself stood (potentially) to gain from it. In the rejection and the demise both of Génessier and his assistant, we see the value in Kant’s ethical dictum that we should respect other people as ends in themselves even while we are using them for our own purposes.

Even if a person stands to benefit, such as a stockholder benefitting from a higher dividend, as managers use employees without taking into account that they have lives outside of work, the ethical obligation is to oppose such unethical business conduct and favor lower dividends. I refused a doctorate in business ethics because there were no ethics courses in philosophy in the program. At the very least, a seminar on Kant should be required of anyone who claims to be a scholar of business ethics. Bentham’s utilitarianism and Rawls' theory of justice also warrant coursework. I stood to benefit from that doctorate, but I could not regard myself as a scholar of business ethics (i.e., business, government, and society). Fortunately, I switched to the humanities—to historical moral, political, and ethical thought—but I did so in their own right—treating such thought as an end in itself rather than as means to understanding business (even though I still have a BS and MBA).

The value in going beyond rational nature to treat things as having value in themselves rather than merely functionally or in line with one’s self-interest goes beyond Kant’s theory of ethics, and yet the dynamic is consistent with Kant’s theory in broad outlines. Christiane kills the nurse and thereby consciously ends any chance of getting skin because like Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms, she finally says, in effect, Here I stand; I can do no other. I submit that even a principle can be treated as an end in itself, as partaking in absolute value, relative to egoist desire. But is it reason that assigns such value, or might feeling also be involved? Luther was probably acting on feeling, and Christiane has clearly had enough. Kant’s theory relies solely on reason; Hume’s ethic and even Adam’s Smith’s economic theory do not.