Inessentials

Chapter two in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. Earlier posts: overview, chapter one.

This chapter responds to three general objections to the possibility that films are philosophy. Wartenberg calls these objections “a priori” because “they do not refer to actual films, but make general claims about what films cannot do” (16). This is an unfortunate way of putting it because more than one author he responds to includes the discussion of an individual film in their general argument. But the point is clear enough. Before turning to his analysis of particular films and how they do philosophy, Wartenberg will address three objections that try to deny that possibility from general considerations.

The explicitness objection

The first objection is that “film lacks the explicitness to formulate and defend the precise claims that are characteristic of philosophical writing” (16). A film may brush up against philosophical ideas or arguments, but those will always be in the background. Wartenberg focuses on an argument by Murray Smith that “works of art are inherently ambiguous, but not so philosophical texts” (17). Wartenberg responds in two ways. First, “Just because an argument is philosophical, it need not be unambiguous” (20). Second, “just because an argument is implicit, it does not therefore have to be imprecise” (19). Wartenberg is probably right on both of these points. But what do they tell us? They respond to Smith’s (alleged) conflation of implicit and imprecise. But that is only one reason to make the explicitness objection. Besides claiming that implicit arguments are automatically imprecise, one could also say that failure to make one’s arguments explicit often signals that one is not primarily interested in making a philosophical argument. Or that implicit arguments are often ones that a person is not aware they are making. Or that implicitness is a mark of an assumption rather than an argument. All of these point to a general claim that one mark of philosophical argumentation is that it is presented as such. Regardless of whether it is posed in dialogue form, or geometrical form, or standard prose style, philosophical arguments are marked as such. Films seem to lack such marking. Now, I don’t want to make too much of this altered explicitness objection, partly because I don’t want to beg the question against films as philosophy and partly because I’m not especially confident in it. I just wish Wartenberg had done more than address a particular argument and paused to address other ways that the explicitness objection could be raised.

The generality objection

This objection does attempt to point out a characteristic of philosophical argumentation that is absent in film. Specifically, “the abstractness and generality of the issues that characterize philosophy” are absent in film, especially narrative fiction film (21). Wartenberg looks for parallels with other disciplines. He concedes that a filmic recording of a person doing mathematics would not itself be a film doing mathematics; so too a recording of a person doing philosophy would not be an example of a film doing philosophy (22). However, he claims that history is a discipline in which films can contribute to its field of knowledge. Using the examples of With Babies and Banners and The Labor Wars, he claims that documentary films have made arguments within the field of history. I don’t know how controversial that claim is, but his explanation strikes me as more controversial. “The reason that history could be screened was that narrativity provided a link between film and history” (24). In other words, both history and film use narratives, which is enough common ground for films to contribute to the field of history. His goal is to find a similar link between film and philosophy. He claims to have found this in the method of the thought experiment, but we’ll have to wait until Chapter 4 to get the details on that.

The imposition objection

Finally, Wartenberg considers the objection that “films can be used for philosophically interesting purposes,” but this is not something the film does, rather it is a prompt for a philosopher to use the film in a philosophical way (25). Wartenberg agrees that this can be a problem for philosophical interpretations of a film, but this is a problem for those interpretations and it would be wrong to characterize all philosophical interpretations as impositions. I am with Wartenberg in his response here, with one caveat. This objection gains force if it is combined with the explicitness objection to claim that philosophers read into films there own interests that are at best implicitly and therefore inchoately contained in the narrative. But I’ll concede that the burden of proof is on the objector to show that this objection always holds.

Final observations

• Wartenberg is not interested in Stanley Cavell’s approach to the philosophy of film that would identify the essential features of film and philosophy and show that they overlap (27). Wartenberg is correct that Cavell’s reading of the history of philosophy and of film are both idiosyncratic. Cavell is also open to charges that his focus is too narrow (skepticism, moral perfectionism). Instead, Wartenberg advocates a “local” approach that addresses individual films and is empirical in its approach (28).
• Wartenberg sidesteps offering a definition of philosophy quite nicely. He offers three conceptions (“a discipline that addresses a rather limited set of what are often termed ‘eternal questions,’” “a discipline that asks questions about other disciplines,” and a “methodological” approach that focuses on “ways of addressing topics” rather than subject matter) (29-30). He will address all three; the third through the structure of the book and the first two through individual chapters.
• The early pages of this chapter were burdened with an unfortunate attempt to accuse his critics of rehashing a Platonic divide between reality and art. There’s no obvious link between “the relegation of art to a realm of reality inferior to that reserved for philosophy” (as in Plato) and the claim that “film lacks the explicitness to formulate and defend the precise claims that are characteristic of philosophical writing” (16). His argument is in no way improved when he tries to claim that Smith epistemic critiques repeats a false divide in Platonic metaphysics (17).
• An important caveat to the response to the imposition objection. Wartenberg says, “For a philosophical film interpretation to be at least prima facie plausible, it needs to posit a meaning that the filmmaker(s) could have intended. If it does not do so, then it would make sense to say that while the interpretation is philosophy, the film is not, at least on that interpretation” (26). I think this will bother other readers more than it bothers me, since I have no principled objection to an author’s intent playing an important role in limiting legitimate interpretations of a text. I just thought I’d flag this passage for those who do object.
• I can’t say I’m any more convinced after this chapter that films can be philosophy. At most, I’m bothered that the objections to film as philosophy haven’t been more forcefully or carefully stated. But of course, I’m relying here on Wartenberg’s characterization of his opponents, so I can’t say whether there are better arguments out there. If anything, I’m shifting toward a position that I’ve been flirting with for a while: films can do philosophy, but they’ve only done it (can do it?) badly.
• In the coming chapters, we’ll get to discuss individual films, which should be more interesting to my seven readers.