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Photo: Katalin Balog
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"The Oscars’s best foreign language film delivers a moral imperative as well as an aesthetic choice." according to Katalin Balog, associate professor of philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark.
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Christian Harting, left, and Geza Rohrig in a scene from “Son of Saul.”
Credit Sony Pictures Classics, via Associated Press |
Art is often the
subject of philosophy. But every now and then, a work of art — something
other than a lecture or words on a page — can function as philosophy. “Son of Saul,”
a film set in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust, is such a work
of art. It engages with a profound set of problems that also occupied
the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
Written and directed
by the Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes, “Son of Saul” won awards at
Cannes, the Golden Globes and elsewhere before making its way to the
Oscars to win the award for best foreign language film. It follows a day
in the life of Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of mostly
Jewish prisoners the Nazis forced to assist with herding people to the
gas chambers, burning the bodies and collecting gold and valuables from
the corpses. The film creates a direct, experiential and visceral
engagement with these events by maintaining a relentless focus on the
minute-to-minute unfolding of Saul’s world...
Much of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a warning against the tendency —
greatly accelerated in modern times — to take an increasingly objective,
abstract perspective on the world. While the paradigm example of this
is science, it is most problematic when applied to one’s own life and
existence. To identify life with its abstractions is, in Kierkegaard’s
view, a dangerous but all too common error.
There are generally
two, radically different ways to relate to the world: objective and
subjective. Objectivity is an orientation towards reality based on
abstracting away, in various degrees, from subjective experience, and
from individual points of view. A subjective orientation, on the other
hand, is based on an attunement to the inner experience of feeling,
sensing, thinking and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living.
This distinction has been brought into contemporary philosophical
discourse most notably by Thomas Nagel, in a number of his essays, most
famously in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
The spectacular success of science in the past 300 years has raised
hopes that it also holds the key to guiding human beings towards a good
life. Psychology and neuroscience has become a main source of life
advice in the popular media. But philosophers have long held
reservations about this scientific orientation to how to live life. The
18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance,
famously pointed out, no amount of fact can legislate value, moral or
otherwise. You cannot derive ought from is. But there
is another, in some way more radical concern, expressed in Western
philosophy most forcefully by Kierkegaard, and in literature by
Dostoyevsky — two religiously inspired thinkers — namely that our
experience of life matters in ineffable ways that no objective
understanding of the world can capture...
One does not have to agree with Kierkegaard’s single-minded, hostile
rejection of objective thought and objectivity to still consider what he
has to say about the cultivation of subjectivity, because that is where
his major insights lie. So what about his exhortation to become subjective?
Why is there even a need for this? Isn’t it true that, given our
experience of life, we already are? It seems that one cannot fail to
be a subject, to be subjective. However, as Kierkegaard points out, the
mind can flee its own subjectivity; instead of dwelling in the presence
of one’s experience, one can escape into alienation; into theorizing
about needs, goals and happiness, and live by abstract principles and
objective measures. As Freud has described, there are various ways of
doing this: by repressing experience, dissociating from it, numbing it,
turning away from it.
Source: New York Times (blog)
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