Philosophy, broadly conceived, is a practice of critical reflection on our beliefs and practices. In this sense we all philosophize at some points in our lives. We may think that little will come of it, but we are all concerned with understanding ourselves and with finding meaning in our own lives and in the lives of those about whom we care. Everyone confronts death and wonders how to make sense of this ending to the enterprise that is his or her own life. Similarly, we all confront issues of justice: we wonder what we should do for others or how much we can demand that others do for us. These are issues in the home, the community, the church, and the workplace; they are subjects of deliberation and decision in politics and law.
Philosophy begins with these common experiences. It takes these moments of inquiry further and adds to them an element of critical self-reflection. Socrates wants to know the nature of justice, courage, and piety, but he wants also to understand what it is to know and why it matters. Philosophy situates itself. Classically, it did so by detaching itself from the particularity of the philosopher’s actual circumstances in order to explore the universal. When we ask, “what is justice?” we are asking more than what do I happen to think it is. Lately, some philosophers have questioned this effort to achieve a universal perspective, moving instead in the opposite direction: they have embraced the particularity of a contingent position.
Both classical and contemporary inquiries begin by thinking about the nature of inquiry itself and the conditions that make it possible. So do I. Accordingly, I don’t begin by asking directly what we can learn about ourselves from film. Instead, I begin by asking what the background conditions of such an inquiry are. What is it to learn about oneself, and how, if at all, might we expect such knowledge to be useful? These are the subjects of part 1, in which my primary effort is to turn philosophical inquiry toward an examination of the imagination as the common source of action and understanding.
In
chapter 1, I assess the need for a new direction in philosophical inquiry. For those who believe that something serious is at stake, the need will be clear. I explain the stakes of the inquiry and the reasons why I approach it as I do. Philosophy has become an academic discipline, addressing a professional readership. Philosophy should be exciting. It should be, at least in substantial part, an accessible form of self-discovery. After all, everyone has a deep interest in the traditional subjects of philosophy: the nature of the self, the meaning of life, the possibility of free action, the character of justice, and the nature of truth. We are born with a great capacity for wonder, and philosophy should engage that wonder.
Chapters 2 and
3 situate my inquiry with respect to the traditional philosophical problems of action and knowledge. In both cases I shift the point of inquiry, looking at the way in which we occupy a meaningful world, a world created by the imagination and maintained by narrative. We can think of narrative as the account I give when explaining who I am or what I am doing. We cannot really answer the question of whether the imagination is a faculty of action or of knowledge, for narrative always links the two. Explaining who I am sets forth a range of possible actions that express my identity; conversely, explaining what I am doing will lead me to offer an account of myself.
Chapter 2 argues that we misunderstand the nature of freedom if we think that the role of philosophy is to discover principles or values that are to be applied at moments of decision. Freedom is indeed a matter of taking responsibility, but this is misunderstood if seen as a sort of practical syllogism in which an abstract, normative proposition is applied to a discrete set of facts. Rather, we decide when we see our way forward, and we see our way forward when we have been persuaded. Focusing on the imagination, the problem of action becomes that of understanding what it is to persuade and to be persuaded. This is no less a problem of freedom, for only a free subject can enter into this exchange of reasons that is the process of persuasion. Philosophy, I argue, won’t tell us what to do, but it can illuminate how our practices are situated in a complex world of norms, values, and meanings within which we find our way.
Chapter 3 extends the inquiry into the imagination from action to interpretation by looking directly at the nature of narrative. We have a meaningful world by virtue of our capacity to offer narratives to ourselves and others. Meeting someone, I get to know that person, and she or he gets to know me, as we reciprocally construct accounts of each other. The same process is at work when we locate ourselves in a community. We know the various communities of which we are members when we can give an account of them. Those communities extend from family to town to nation to world; they include religious and ethnic groups, as well as unions, corporations, and churches. Each is sustained by an imaginative project of narrative construction: each has a history that leads us to see distinct, possible futures. These narratives are not descriptions of causal chains, as if we were describing a natural process. Rather, narratives describe free subjects who have created their communities by choosing some possibilities over others. Thus, narrative invokes the possible to explain the actual.
My objective is not to resolve the traditional, philosophical problems of action and knowledge. I don’t try to explain how free will is possible in a causal universe; I don’t try to explain the nature of scientific truth. These, after all, are subjects that have generated argument and controversy for thousands of years. Nevertheless, part 1 orients the inquiry into specific films(part 2) by breaking with certain assumptions about the nature of decision and knowledge. I reject the idea that abstractions exist as principles to be applied either in the act of deciding or in the moment of comprehension. Thinking and acting are ways of occupying an entire world of meaning, which is always a product of the imagination. We act freely when we can give an account of ourselves. To give that account is to construct a narrative.
The first three chapters, part 1, might be of particular interest to philosophers. These chapters can stand on their own as philosophical reflections on the problem of meaning as it shows itself in action and knowledge. Nevertheless, the chapters are intended to interest the nonphilosopher in the possibilities of this project. My intention in part 2 is to put my conclusions to work by turning directly to popular films. I hope to demonstrate what philosophy can be by actually doing it. Thus, I take up a practice of critical self-reflection by looking at the work of the social imaginary as I find it in contemporary popular films.
Films offer a common resource throughout this study. Nevertheless, because the questions I ask in the two parts are different, the way in which I make use of films differs as well. In part 1, I use films to illustrate my arguments about the nature of practice and interpretation. I choose examples that offer access to these issues. The arguments and analyses that I offer in each chapter must stand independently of the films I use to illustrate my points. In part 2, however, I interrogate films not to understand the way in which the social imagination works but to understand its products. These products include not just films but the meaningful world within which we find ourselves. Part 1 focuses on the way in which the social imagination works, while part 2 examines those historically contingent products of the imagination that constitute our own lives.
Just as part 1 can stand on its own, so can part 2. There, however, the question is not whether I have properly analyzed the nature of action and knowledge but whether I have convinced you of the meaning of the popular films that have captured your attention lately. Just as those interested in philosophy might stop after reading part 1, those interested in film might skip directly to part 2. My hope is to find a common ground in a democratic enterprise of philosophy that will convince both kinds of readers to attend to the whole.
