“Haha, now I REALLY want to know what The Dark Knight has to do with Schopenhauer.”
–mlawski
Alright. You asked for it.
Mlawski’s own fine post on utilitarianism and The Dark Knight, “The Philosophy of Batman” inspired me — can we delve deeper into the philosophy at the heart of The Dark Knight? I figured I’d go to the well and hash out some German philosophy for this one, partially because I thought it fit, and partially because, like Bruce Wayne, I’m just that crazy.
Now, that time is upon us, and you can decide whether or not I was wise.
Find out about more about the WIll-to-Batman and the Will-to-Joker, after the jump —
Are you there, God? It’s me, Batman.
To me, Batman origin stories have always seemed forced. Something about them didn’t quite fit. So, I’m very glad The Dark Knight didn’t reference Batman’s origin story at all.
Okay, raise your hand if, the first time you encountered Batman, you thought, “You know, there’s an orphan who’s gone through considerable ninja training!”
I can’t count the hands, and if they’re all up right now I’m kinda screwed, so I’m going to assume there aren’t a lot of hands out there right now and run with it.
Most of us were introduced to Batman midstream. The old Adam West show. Superfriends. Batman the Animated Series. A comic. A pair of our own underpants. He didn’t come with an explanation, but we understood him immediately.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who came out of the Kantian school but ended up carving out his own little niche that was then carved up by Nietzsche. But before that happened, he talked about the Will a lot. The Will-to-Life, and the Will as distinguished from Representation.
Schopenhauer is complicated and difficult to explain. Kinda like Batman. He’s like the Dark Knight of early 19th century Berlin philosophers. Like the Batman to Hegel’s Superman. Sort of.
A Batman In Full
Batman doesn’t need explanation (even though I’m going to go to great lengths to do it anyway), because the story of Batman does not aspire to explain a person. He is also not an allegory. What is Batman? Batman is a hero for a civilization that has cast aside external agency as a first principle. He’s a superhero who is his own cause in a world of supervillains who are their own causes, but they’re all vaguely aspects of the same drive.
Batman is an intuitive, but not simple, symbol of an aspect of Will.
Batman doesn’t have to do the things he does — nothing really causes him to do them. He does it “Because he can take it” — because there’s a quality of him that is inherently motivated, that is driven to survival in an extraordinary way and that strives alongside the other projections of Will in the universe. Bruce Wayne didn’t “make” Batman. He is Batman on a deep level not even he truly understands — because sure, there’s the representation of it, the suit, the batarangs, the batmobile — it’s more than adequately represented. There’s the image. But there’s also the Will of it — not the Batman-in-itself, separate from and bossing around Batman and controlling everything he does (Alfred is a servant, not a master), but the guy actually out there in his suit with nothing but his wits, his batterangs, and maybe his Bat shark repellant.
Hang in there, old chum.
Let’s talk about the difference between Kant and Schopenhauer for a hot second. Kant argued that for each person there was a “thing in itself” that was separate from the universe we could perceive with our senses and that is the ultimate cause of what we think and do. Sort of like a soul, but not really. More like a mind. (I’m boiling this way down, and so forgive me and flame me in the comments if you like) Schopenhauer argued that there was no reason to separate this function — the part of us that makes decisions and adds value to things — from what was already in the universe. That the thing in itself wasn’t distinct, its functions were just an invisible, separate aspect of ourselves. The subjective versus the objective. The will vs. the representation.
Ra’s Al Ghul’s in Batman Begins is like the Kantian thing-in-itself — he stands separate from the League of Shadows, invisible, undetectable, indestructible, immortal, not subject himself to any of the demands of the universe, but he expresses his own authority over all material and immaterial truth surrounding the League of Shadows and is its ultimate cause. (And here I am saying I’m not getting into origin stories! Sheesh!)
Bruce Wayne is similar — he is masked, undetectable, powerful, unrecognizable as himself, but still Batman’s ultimate arbiter. But Bruce Wayne, or, more precisely, the expression of Will that makes Batman happen, is not distinct from Batman. He’s in the suit, you just won’t be able to take his mask off. When Batman punches somebody, that’s the same as Bruce Wayne punching somebody, that’s the same as Bruce Wayne’s desire to be Batman striving for justice.
The relationship between Bruce Wayne and Batman is not cause-and-effect. The Will expressed through Batman is present with and in Batman all the time — you just can’t see it; or rather, you see aspects of it through Batman’s actions, but there’s a facet of it that remains mysterious and outside perception.
A Batman for All Seasons
You could further express a Batman-related Principle of Sufficient Reason that divides Batman into three parts:
- Batman as he is visible in the Batsuit
- Batman as he is Bruce Wayne
- The fragment or aspect of the Will as a greater thing in the universe that is present in the act of being Batman – not as a domino striking another domino, but as electricity and a spark – something that is perceived as a root or cause, but is really just an intrinsic aspect to the thing happening.
And if we go by Schopenhauer’s reasoning (which is pretty good, albeit really hard to follow), you can’t really judge one part by the rules that govern the other parts. There are fundamentally different ways of thinking that have to be employed depending upon how we try to describe Batman.
This is why, when Bruce Wayne becomes Batman and does the things he needs to do as Batman, he wears a mask. Because whatever allows him to do these things is obscured; incomprehensible. And I would posit that if we ever act like Batman, any description of what we might be up to is also going to be incomplete and somewhat mysterious, as the Will does not yield fully to comprehensible expression.
The characters in The Dark Knight basically heighten that phenomenon as they orient Schopenhauer-style notions of agency and the will to survive not towards ethics or the Good Life, but towards heroic drama. I’ll get to that in a minute.
I’m not saying Batman is about Schopenhauer, but at the time of this writing, Googling Batman and Schopenhauer returned a downright staggering 91,700 hits. Batman is hits upon the same mysterious qualities of the Will that Schopenhauer discussed, Batman’s characteristics express other similarities to Schopenhauer’s work by extension, and Batman and Schopenhauer give us clues for understanding one another.
Right. The Point. Here goes.
Christopher Nolan’s Movie
Because we’re talking about Schopenhauer!
I’m sorry, Memento Guy, I know it’s confusing. Don’t worry, you won’t remember it anyway.
Most of the above would go for pretty much any interpretation of Batman (especially in Batman Beyond), but this post is about The Dark Knight. I wouldn’t have brought this all up if it weren’t specifically pertinent to this movie.
Because at some point, Batman isn’t just a form of mystery or obscurity. He isn’t just a hiding place or a tool to do good. At some point, Batman develops an heroic identity. And if we’re proceeding from a world in which things happen because of the Will, it’s pretty hard to have heroes. Well, it’s easy to have tragic ones, but it’s hard to have ones that get to ride their Batpods off into the mist in triumph over evil.
I’m not talking about Nietzsche’s Will to Power — it’s easy to have heroes there, and there’s a whole other way of looking at Batman through that, though I don’t think it really hits it on the head, especially not for The Dark Knight.
Schopenhauer describes a world in which individuals, with their principle of sufficient reason, break up the Will (which is one big thing, not a separate thing for each person, not an intention or willpower) into a whole mess of tiny shards that find themselves striving against one another for survival and procreation.
The Will is this massive, incomprehensible, impersonal force that drives the universe to move forward by its nature and inseparably from its substance. The universe has no larger, benevolent guiding hand (although he ends up an ethics conveniently similar to Christianity). People each have the Will as an aspect of their own being, so they’re destined to always want more and want to have more babies and consume each other and themselves and never be satisfied. The more they achieve, the more they want and the more they suffer. It’s another way of coming to a Hobbesian war of all against all, except also with sex.
Gotham City in The Dark Knight is this world. Corruption is everywhere — but not because everyone is a villain. Everybody is equally helpless against a common but not mutual self-interest. Every time somebody does something, there’s something selfish about it that ruins it for everybody else. No precinct is free of corrupt cops. Every politician has a skeleton in his closet (dude that mayor guy who played Batmanuel in The Tick sure was creepy!). The city needs one honest man, but when it has him in Commissioner Gordon, even he’s pretty close to hopeless.
Schopenhauer posits that the way to escape this petty and ultimately deeply unsatisfying existence (suffering, really) is to use your capacity for reason to contemplate platonic forms. He recommends a quiet life of art and music, where you try not to want too much, be all civilized, do unto others and all that, and liberate yourself from your own desires by putting your mind to things other than your own satisfaction. This is the origin of compassion, which he thinks is pretty good.
Needless to say, Batman comes to a slightly different conclusion.
The Way You Wear Your Bat
In Batman Begins, Batman struggles with whether to himself become this special hero guy, or whether to just give it up or live by somebody else’s expectations. He chooses to be this larger-than life hero, this Will-in-symbol, this walking tribute to trying to make things better.
In The Dark Knight, he has to confront a reality where he isn’t the only one like himself — where the world actually has a number of larger-than-life heroes, Will-in-symbols, people who have strong subjective experiences of Will and objective representations that reflect their intentions. The costume that denotes action. And they can’t all survive at the same time.
Still, there’s this sense of Kinship — they recognize similar aspects of Will within one another.
For one, you’ve got the imitation Batmen — the people who dress up like him, try to take the law into their own hands, and get themselves capped. Batman can’t live with these guys; they get in the way of his work and his mission, which is to keep people like that form getting capped. But he can’t stifle them, either, because once they get an idea in their head that they’re more than just a hungry stomach, well, the idea that you can’t stifle that sort of thing is kind of intrinsic to his worldview. It’s his own tactic, and he understands how difficult it is to stop.
For another, you’ve got Harvey Dent — a different vision of a hero that Batman identifies with strongly, a different fragment, but still cut from the same cloth, or so he thinks. Add the fact that he’s schtupping Batman’s main squeeze. That’s got Schopenhauer written all over it (Schopenhauer liked talking about sex and the competition or sex. He thought it was very important — “Nothing less than the composition of the next generation.”).
And finally, and most importantly, you have the Joker — He gets his own section.
The “Agent of Chaos”
It’s really cool when a movie villain lies. Like just lies. About himself, about stuff around him. It’s silly when a movie villain tricks and deceives everyone around him for the movie, and then when he’s got a moment to talk about himself, he’s totally honest and explains everything exactly the way it works.
I love how the Joker in The Dark Knight doesn’t do that. The second time he explains his scars (and the second explanation is totally different from the first one) is one of my favorite moments in the movie.
Which is why I don’t really take the Joker at his word when he says he’s an “agent of chaos.”
As one of my friends said it better than I could – “For an agent of chaos, he’s awfully well-organized.”
I think he’s speaking to an important point — that, as far as guys like Batman are concerned, with their vision of the world, their own representations to build, their own will-to-life to conduct, the Joker is a destroyer. He just comes in and annihilates power structures, institutions, and, perhaps with the most pleasure, the psyches of people who consider themselves to be righteous and in control — people who feel the are successfully projecting their own version of the Will into the world.
He doesn’t do it for power. He doesn’t do it for money. He does it with a couple of cans of gas and a few bullets, and he burns all the cash he wins in return. He doesn’t seem to have desires that yield to satisfaction — He seems as happy when he’s failed as when he’s succeeding.
I really don’t think he’s anybody else’s agent. There’s nobody “causing” the Joker, and no principle, not even chaos, no Ra’s Al Ghul, no thing-in-itself that pushes the Joker to do the things he does. There’s something made in the movie about how the mobsters “set him loose,” but that’s kind of forced overplotting and I don’t buy it. The key to the motive behind every Batman villain is how everything they do is somehow thematically connected with their own expression of self. It’s not just good enough to kill somebody. You’ve got to Joker-kill them.
The Will-to-Joker is part of the Joker. It’s in there under the makeup, underneath the custom clothes. But it’s also in the makeup and the custom clothes. The thing that keeps him going and makes him tick is indistinguishable from what he is. And it is so strong that as an aspect of himself, this WIll projects quite a mighty Representation. The Joker costume is the Joker. So is the trick with the boats. So is the trick with the hostages. So is his insulting the guard’s friends until he beats them (how’s that for a scene about the Will-to-Life?). It’s all his trademark, it’s all the same Will in the world.
The Joker is the heightened, perfect Schopenhauerian warrior (which is somewhat of a contradiction, but bear with me). The Will-to-Life is unfettered in him to so great a degree that he reimagines everyone and everything around him as projections of himself. Each bomb, each prank, each murder is an act, not of achievement, but of reproduction. The Nietzschean Dichotomy of the Dionesian and the Appollonian is nowhere to be found — he’s all bound up in one agent.
And when he sees Batman, he instantly recognizes somebody like himself. “You’re not like the others,” he says. He gleeful exclaims that Batman is “Like me!”
And this is the villain Batman must strive against to prove his heroism and establish an epic for Gotham.
We Built This City
I’m a firm believer in the importance of epic — that most heroic stories are about setting down the foundation of a civilization or way of living — that a heroic story is a foundational act. Aeneas founds Rome, King Arthur founds Britain and Adam and Eve found the human race. Batman founds Gotham City – our own dark and rich citizenship of common pursuit of individual gain.
And the way he does it is by a redirected ascetism.
He gives up time he might spend as a billionaire in a hedonistic lifestyle and dedicates himself to helping others, just as Schopenhauer might suggest someone should do in order to get away from the Will always pushing him, always tormenting him, always making him suffer for not having everything he wants and reproducing to fill up the whole world.
But instead of quelling his part of the Will and his own representation of it, he recognizes its mightest benefit — it helps him outcompete others like him. It enables him to survive. It has this facet that looks like a Bat that scares the shit out of people and is totally awesome and sometimes gets him to the warehouse before it blows up (although sometimes it doesn’t).
The problem with this for Bruce Wayne is that in embracing the part of himself that is like the Joker – the part of himself that doesn’t want to give up his post to Harvey Dent and lead a simpler life, the part that wants to keep that armor on and keep striking that visage – he’s going to be subjecting himself to suffering, and he’s not going to rise that far above the corruption that’s around him. If he seeks to remain separate, he won’t succeed. It’ll stick to him. He’ll flee for his survival from the very people he’s sworn to protect.
But he recognizes through this journey and in vanquishing this nemesis (who may be recast in a sequel, who knows), that this quality of his is strong enough and precious enough to use to set an example for everybody else to live by, or at least live alongside.
And he still doesn’t escape from the fate of a world always plagued by corruption and common, but not mutual interest, which as Schopenhauer knows, is generally that it will come to a bad end.
. . . eventually.
So, through the Will and Representation, through creating a villain along the lines of Schopenhauer and confronting the need to defeat him, we arrive at the philosophy of The Dark Knight:
To distract ourselves from own desire for pleasure by creating artistic objects in our own image, but also to harness our obsessive hungers. To stamp our own impression on ourselves and the world around us because we think it is a good impression (and because it is a proxy for making babies). To compete with evil even as we see ourselves in it, and, sure, living long enough to see ourselves become the villain — but recognizing that, while our own subjective experience of being the hero is not something anyone else can experience or understand, it is still part of our existence inseparable from the perceived consequences of our actions.