Collateral: The Things That Matter to Us

"Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?"

That line comes from Vincent, the coldly efficient hit man in the movie Collateral.  It's arrives at a pivotal point in the story, and it expresses Vincent's extremely nihilistic outlook in a simple and straightforward manner.  It's a clear-cut moral rationalization, and yet it has a sort of enticing logic to it.  It would seem that from a far enough perspective, and on a broad enough scale, that the problems of three little people really don't amount to a hill of beans.  Vincent's night of systematic elimination might seem brutal and tragic in close, human terms, but to him it's all "a speck on a blink."

This statement, however, leads to an unintended epiphany for Max, the cab driver which Vincent has coerced at gun-point into driving him around all night as he runs his "errands."  Max's epiphany and his subsequent actions reveal the fatal flaw in Vincent's philosophy.  Here he is declaring that nothing really matters on the grand cosmic scale, and yet all night long he has been using the things that matter to Max as leverage against him: his life, his mother, his job, his hopes and his dreams.  This blatant contradiction throws Max into a rage, and yet it also gives him the clarity to see through the things that have been holding him back in his life.  What Vincent takes as a nihilistic blank check that justifies murder, Max takes as a liberating affirmation that allows him to see the concerns that have been restraining him for the petty trivialities that they really are.  He takes Vincent's philosophy to its logical conclusion, jams on the gas, and flips the cab at full speed, nearly killing them both.  Perhaps Vincent would have been better off keeping his rationalizations to himself.

But Collateral, after all, really is Max's story.  Through-out the night we're given enough information to piece his life together.  He has been driving a cab for years, but he harbors a secret dream of someday owning his own limousine service.  "Island Limos", he calls it, and he grows somewhat wistful when he speaks of it, "You never want to the ride to end."  He says that he's just waiting to get enough money together, the right client list, ect., but there's a sense that underneath it all that the dream will stay a dream, and deep down Max fears that he'll spend the rest of his life driving the cab.  Vincent cuts immediately to the core of this fear and he needles Max relentlessly with it.  He taunts Max with it, rubs it in his face, because...well, maybe just because that's where Vincent's predatory mentality drives him.

Vincent arrives in Max's life like a walking personification of the kind of near-death experience that kicks someone out of the comfortable complacent place they've settled into.  He starts off as just another fare, but even then he's waving a wad of money in Max's face, asking him to bend the rules and chauffeur him around for the rest of the night.  Max reluctantly agrees, already a little out of his comfort zone.  When the first of Vincent's victims falls out of the night and lands on the windshield of Max's cab, he suddenly discovers exactly what kind of insanity he's gotten himself into here, and now there's far more than his cab license at stake.  His life itself is at risk, minute by minute, as Vincent turns his gun on him and tells him to get in the cab and drive.  It's the kind of thing that puts your life in perspective.

But Collateral is more than a movie about a man taking stock of his life in a dangerous situation.  It pivots on Vincent's philosophy.  For Vincent it is a bleak declaration of despair and meaninglessness.  For Max it is an awakening to the fact that his life is his to take control of, and make the most of.  In a pointless "speck on a blink" what does he have to lose?  Isn't "Island Limos" a small risk to take in the great scheme of things?  That's what Vincent is missing.  The things on this little speck matter, because they matter to the creatures living on this little speck.  Max sees liberation, because he cares about something, because he has a dream, and because he sees that the dream only matters because it matters to him, and it's up to him to do something about it.

By confronting us with a man who lives beyond the concerns of morality, who murders his victims with the cold efficiency of checking off a laundry list, Collateral propels us out there to that place beyond the galaxies and stars where it all becomes meaningless.  And then through Max, it draws us back to Earth with a renewed appreciation for the things we truly care about, and the fact that we alone give them meaning.  "Island Limos" might mean next to nothing on a speck of dust in limitless space, but it's Max's piece of that speck and it means something to him.  A powerful argument against Vincent's nihilism, and an elegant display of philosophy in action.  It's a deceptively simple movie that raises some complex issues.            

Sartre's Consciousness

You have before you the picture of an apple.  You see it.  You are aware of it.  At some point you become aware that you are aware of it.  And now that I've mentioned it, you've become aware that you are aware of your awareness of it and...well, we could go on like this all day.  Consciousness is an elusive little bugger.  It constantly slips away.  Try to catch it working, and you find yourself falling into this kind of infinite regress.  Many people have misinterpreted this as a layering of consciousness, but actually it's a demonstration of its method of operation.

For instance, when we say that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, we mean that you've set up camp across the hill, trying to catch consciousness in the act.  But once you've done this, the immediate awareness of the apple that you're trying to perceive at work is only a concept of awareness.  It has no living vitality.  You're no longer viewing the apple through this "awareness."  You're no longer see anything through it.  You're only seeing the apple indirectly from your vantage point across the hill, as part of a composition involving the apple and this concept of immediate awareness.  When we say that you are aware that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, this mean that you've moved to yet another hill more distant than the other.  Now you've postulated two concepts of awareness, and you've positioned them in a relationship with one another, one viewing the apple, the second viewing the first.  But again, these are just concepts, ideas of awareness.  You're not really there.  You're up on the distant hill, viewing a broader composition involving the apple and these inter-related concepts of awareness.  So, you're not descending through layers of consciousness; you're shifting its vantage points.  You're only ever viewing the situation from one perspective.

Sartre's idea of consciousness is like a perfectly translucent lens having neither depth or substance.  You can never get around behind it or beside it or above it to see it, because it's consciousness itself that does the seeing.  Furthermore, consciousness only exists as consciousness insomuch as it is consciousness of something.  It is a subject exhausted entirely in its object.  It's existence lies completely in its function.  Your awareness of the apple exists as a view of the apple, as a relationship with the apple and nothing else.  And yet this awareness is not the apple.  It is a perception of the apple.  It is something other than the apple.  This gulf between subject and object was the crucial point for Sartre.

It is when consciousness is turned inward, that this gulf becomes significant.  Consciousness is the seat of our being.  It is the nucleus of ourselves.  It is the eye of our soul that peers through this lens.  When I am aware of the apple, it is I who has the immediate involvement, consumed entirely for the moment in my focus on the apple.  When consciousness shifts to consider this awareness, it is I who am viewing it from the new vantage point.  I am the subject, always withdrawn from my object.  I am not the apple.  I am not my concept of my awareness of the apple.  I am always something else.

So when we turn this lens on ourselves and view the things which constitute our person, we find this same withdraw.  I possess a body,  I own it, but yet I am not my body.  I am not my job, or my house, or my name, or my memories.  I'm not even my thoughts.  I am removed from these things as a subject is to an object, just as I am from the apple.  I have these things.  In some cases, I control these things, but yet I am not these things, not at the core foundation of my being.  I find myself constantly retreating to the far hill to gain a perspective on them.

Thus Sartre proposes the fundamental paradox of our existence.  Our consciousness, which holds our very being, continually slips free from any defining attributes or any substance that could constitute its identity.  It's always somewhere else.  It is always something else.  It exists entirely in not being the object of its focus, and yet its existence lies entirely in its focus on those objects.  You chase it down and it falls continually away into the dark.  It is a void, a tiny black hole drawing perception into it, and existing exclusively through this perception.

This will be the starting point of my next post on this matter.    

Sartre's Defense of Free Will

Free will seems to make good common sense to us.  It appeals to our gut instinct.  It fits naturally and comfortably with our sense of ourselves.  It feels right.  But yet, it's a very difficult position to defend on philosophical grounds.  Try to make a rational argument for free will, and you'll probably find yourself stammering incoherently.  Finally, you'll end up blinking and shaking you head in confusion, as you realize that it's all a little more complicated that you thought.  Meanwhile, the advocate of determinism will stand there, smiling smugly with their arms folded.  They believe they have logic and causality on their side.

Determinism is the idea that choice and free will are an illusion, that all human actions are "determined" by a combination of environment, biology and conditioning.  Just as everything in nature has a root cause that leads to an inescapable effect, so too with every human action.  Just as the tides rise and fall not by choice, but by cause, so too, as the determinists would have it, whether a man goes to a doctor or refuses to see a doctor, it's all still determined by factors beyond him and beyond his control.  The belief that the decision was his to make is just a lie he tells himself.  It was all "determined" in advance by his childhood, his genetics, and so on.

If you're like me, you immediately get the feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with this idea.  It's not just that you don't like it.  You get the sense that something is being overlooked, but you can't quite put your finger on it solidly enough to form a decent rebuttal.  Well, I'm not one to let sleeping dogs lie, and I'm definitely not one to let such depressing claims about the nature of my existence go unaddressed.  Free will is a big deal to me, and I would pool all my resources into constructing and argument in its favor, if someone, thankfully, hadn't already done the job for me.  Jean-Paul Sartre has constructed such an argument, and it's far more brilliant than anything I could dream of coming up with.

Make no mistake about it.  I'm not proposing some radical interpretation of Sartre.  Free will always held a prominent place in his ideas, and he was clearly a firm believer in it.  However, a casual reader might not fully appreciate how central it was to his ideas.  In fact, free will is a big part of existentialism in general.  While the determinists had environment dragging human nature along behind it and human nature in turn dragging human being like some fatalistic daisy chain, the only objection the traditional defenders of free will could make was that there was some mystical element in human beings that rose above mere causality.  The existentialists took this whole argument and turned it on its head with their dictum "existence precedes essence."  This is really just a fancy way of saying that a human being is a work in progress.

Existence is given to us, but, the existentialists argued, its up to us to define the essence of that existence.  A chair is just a chair, but a human being is a creative process generated from within.  The determinists had the environment and society creating human nature, but the existentialists had the human being creating their own nature, day by day, second by second.  For the existentialists, a person didn't run away because they were a coward; they were a coward because they ran away.  To them, the action emerges first, freely chosen out of a kind of void of our existence and then it comes to define the person afterwards.  More importantly, the person is always free to redefine themselves by a new act.  A man who has defined himself as a scoundrel is free to choose to be a hero at the next opportunity.  We aren't bound and confined by our past.  The choice is always open.  Or as Sophia put it in Vanilla Sky, "Every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around."

Now this "existence precedes essence" might sound arbitrary and unsubstantiated, but it was the roads the existentialists took to get there that that made all the difference.  Different philosophers of the school approached the problem from a variety of angles.  Friedrich Nietzsche rearranged the furniture of morality around the creative act.  Soren Kierkegaard proposed a leap of faith, suggesting that there will always be a chasm of doubt between us and even the most fundamental things that we hold to be the truth, a chasm that evidence and argument alone will never be able to fully bridge, and so ultimately it comes down to making a choice, a "leap", an act of will.  

Sartre approached the problem on more....I guess you could say "psychological" grounds for lack of a better word.  He placed consciousness itself under careful analysis, and under his microscope he revealed things about its nature too problematic for the determinists to dismiss.  He showed that a human being is not a rock or a chair and so can't be held subject to the same causality.  A human being isn't just a different kind of thing.  A human being has a completely different kind of existence.

Following the road Sartre took is going to take much more than one post.  Consider this as just a preamble.  From here we'll take his ideas step by step, and I'll post new installments through-out this 2nd season(?) ...semester(?) ...whatever.  It may not be apparent at first how any of it relates to free will, but as the ideas build upon each other like layers of brick onto a foundation, the design of the entire edifice will start to come into focus.  It's a fascinating theory.  It's definitely my kind of theory.  It's definitely a nuclearheadache kind of theory.