It is widely recognized as a truth about the scientific activity that, once the researcher begins to study a topic, he begins to see his object of study everywhere. If this actually happens to you, fellow researcher, this is a sign that you are following the right path. If it doesn`t happen to you, well… Find another object.
My object of study is the eternal debate community vs. society, reformulated by the debate between communitarianism and liberalism in the sphere of the Theory of Justice, as I am trying to obtain a master`s degree in Law. And since I am a die hard believer of the tenets of communitarianism (although the word believer is somewhat mischievously used as pejorative for people that believe without proof, I can guarantee that my belief is full of proofs — but I will not debate them here), I see this unveiling of the communitarian truth everywhere.
As I was feeling kinda sad yesterday, I began browsing my cable TV channels `till Wolverine popped on the screen. When I was younger, I liked comics, but I was never truly attached to the X-men, my heart lying beside Spawn. When I heard about Genosha, Magneto and that kind of “live free or die” thing that always made my blood pump faster when reading about U.S. history in the first (or the second, I don`t know) X-men movie, I became an admirer of the bad guys. Just like Fuzzy Lumkins from Powerpuff Girls, they seemed to be on the right side of history, the side that sacrificed acceptance from the mainstream society for its right to live a form of life compatible with its beliefs.
So Logan, the third installment of Wolverine cinematic series, was, from the beginning, proving itself a better movie than any other super hero movie that I had ever seen, not because of its moralizing message. God knows that I am an enlightened Christian and that the things that the Church and the Bible say are known by me, and I don`t need every other media medium to reinforce their presence in my daily life. But, as I have always been something like an outsider always, this perspective — the outsider not defined by the insider, but by himself — has always attracted me. Logan is, from the beginning, an outsider driven by a sense of duty, torn between the desire of letting go (represented in his behavior and in the adamantium bullet) and the desire (reinforced by duty) of standing by Professor X. However, this is a cliché in Hollywood, this is any Cowboy movie, this is pure individualism. Desire and duty, inner morality struggling with the atavism of egoism. The movie deals with that, by dealing with affect.
Whenever reading philosophers who were influenced by Spinoza, I have always been bothered by this “everything is affect”. No, man, somethings are duty and just that, something that Kant wisely said that can make you sick by doing, but that you cannot avoid doing without betraying something greater. Kant, nevertheless, made me kinda sick too, because he said that all men can, alone, find the substance of any duty by a rational process. That has never made any sense to me, since everywhere I look I find not equality, but difference. The gene X, what is it? Something that is beyond you as an individual, but which is not universal. This resembled me of Aristotle’s anthropology and ethics, his changeable definition of Natural Law, much more in tune with my own thoughts about order (some listed here, in Portuguese: https://medium.com/@guilhermealfradiqueklausner/projeto-de-proposta-de-comunica%C3%A7%C3%A3o-no-semin%C3%A1rio-desobedi%C3%AAncias-e-democracias-radicais-a-pot%C3%AAncia-54e156672012). Of course this does not deny that every man has some needs that are equal to every other man`s needs, like eating or pooping, but those are remnants of the other souls that a man`s soul carries, related to his biological (or, more adequately, zoēlogical) needs. In fact, even the reproduction cannot be conceived as something absolute and universal. But the political strings attached to a man`s life — and I want to displace political here from its modern topos, between him and other men, in the form of fellowship, not without conflicts, of course, but based on a common orientation in its actions — are universal.
Even when man thinks he is alone, he is not. The act of thinking is an act of establishing bridges, although these bridges can be established, sometimes, with unknown partners. Every man thinks alone, but his thoughts are never only his own. He can be, of course, a special thinker, and his thoughts may not establish bridges with his contemporaries, but if they don`t establish bridges with any men, any time, we are facing either a god or a beast, as old Aristotle said. For there is not a reality inhabited by only one man, and although elements may vary, every world vision is shared by at least two people.
That, I think, is all contained in the basic works of Aristotle, and his empirical proof is, when pushed to its extremity (only two men sharing more or less the same vision of reality), much stronger than the individualistic vision of a world built on relations between individuals that share nothing that is not expressed, a world where contract is the basis of human conduct. That has always made Kant look like an odd contratualist, because his point was that beyond the oath that seals the contract lies a duty that obliges the celebration of this oath. But his universalism has never sounded right, because of his different approach to Reason if compared to Aristotle`s approach to reason.
You see, the difference is truly the capital letter. If, in Kantian ethics, Reason was the way of getting the substance of ethics, in Aristotle reason is an instrument that allows you to get to an ethical system dialogically. Voice is what constitute the human as human, the ability of expressing logos. In the Kantian system, if all men behave accordingly with their human nature, they don`t even need to speak — they could act forever as ethical, but unhuman, machines. If, as some say (Agamben in his work Opus Dei, for example), the Kantian ethics are developed upon a tradition that lies in Aristotle`s shoulders, I opt to reformulate this sentence: Kantian ethics is one of the possible developments of a dialogical ethic as the one crafted by Aristotle. And it is not the best one.
In Kant, the world as a confederation of republics is the only world possible, and duty is the only form of virtue, unadaptable to circumstances, because duty, unlike virtue, is not a way of acting alone, but the reason of the act and the meaning of the act — so, if telling the truth may kill a loved one, prepare the funeral. In Aristotle, a myriad of worlds is possible, based on the needs of the political communities established, and virtue, as any action, is determined by its circumstances — for example, John Snow facing the Bolton`s army alone can be or cannot be virtuous, depending on the circumstances (this example was used in class, to the chagrin or approval of different groups of students).
Logan does this leap, even to the point of letting us forget the relationship established between the homonymous character and X-23, a relationship that, in its roots, is not founded on a representation of roles, as the daughter-father relationship is pictured by the mainstream western liberal morality (father loves daughter; daughter in danger; father sacrifices his life to save his daughter), but on the substance that lies beyond the representation, the love for something greater. This love is the cornerstone of the human community.
There are animals that can live together for a dozen of reasons, genealogy and necessity being the most obvious examples. The search for the part of the communal living within human experience that is properly human is the question that haunts us here. It seems, during the movie, that we can explain what propels the young mutants to run away by returning to their similarities or to the persecution they suffer, but this motives are all put aside when we consider that, if they wanted, they could have simply become killing machines and, as long as they obeyed, they would have been, we could even imagine, well treated. It is not the well being of their bodies that motivates them, it`s the well being of their souls; they don`t want to kill, therefore, they must die. They accept the menace and run away, as a defined group. Not fighters for mankind, but fighters for their form-of-life.
This is what makes Logan change his heart. He was not protecting children — not only does he let them fight, but he also asks for their help in the fight; he admits having suicidal thoughts to his “daughter” — he found in their communal spirit his own spirit, the hope of a peaceful life, a life that Professor X defines as the most adequate model of life to anyone, but that, in itself, displaces the person from the adequate life as it is lead, unreflected (as a killing machine, for example), to the field where action, virtuous action (action defined by the persecution of an end, I mean), is the norm. This action is the action of the philosopher, not defined by the achievement of social praise (the political life) or by the achievement of the means to reproduce the natural life, with the increase of comfort (the life of the slave), but by the employment of reason to define the meaning (in Aristotle`s ethics, the end) of the action.
And it is not simply affect that makes this change of heart, for affects are fickle. Not necessarily constant, the basis of Espinosian ethics must consider these changes of heart, however, as long as they are truthful, valid. Nevertheless, this is the Caliban`s (the character from the movie, not Shakespeare`s Caliban) question: can I change sides based on my belief, or solely thinking on advantages I could gain? No, for this would be betraying people whose moral commitment affected me. This question, not deontological, but ontological, can be reversed, easily. Of course, treating the question as a fact, Caliban could change sides as many times as he wanted; however, if he did that, he would become a traitor.
The question here, ethically speaking, is not about defining which side is good and which side is bad, but about defining which actions can be considered ethical, and although the change of heart can be ethically motivated, opening you heart to change every time it is touched by a passion is the destruction of the very concept of ethics, for ethics is based on constancy. The origin of the word “ethics” is the greek word for habit, hexis, because ethical living was considered to be a life directed to a concept of arete, excellence, and, in Aristotle`s view, the moral excellence was directed to eudaimonia, the good life. So, the constancy of a habit (in this case, the virtue — but could be the techne of shoemaking) could make you achieve its excellence, which would bring its own consequences (in this case, the good life — but could also be success as a shoe maker). The good life for the human, among many other factors, involved the use to the fullest of the most humane tool, reason — that is why the contemplative life for Aristotle was the summit of human experience. But reason is a tool, a way of creating a good life, not the good life itself. There are no answers in Aristotle, considered the instruments provided. The concept of the good life is crafted while living. For Kant, it is all already there, before the human being appear upon the face of the Earth.
Spinoza, however, due to his not severing man from the other elements of reality, attributes to passion (affect) the supreme role in defining what is ethical and what is not ethical. But this only makes sense if you agree with him that man is not severable from the other elements of reality, which does not make any sense because only then passion could achieve the metaphysical role of something more than a simple desire. Reality is made of elements and the interaction between these elements. This, ethically speaking, has no value, for if it had any value, dogs could be ethical subjects too. But dogs do not reason, they don`t even feel their feelings like humans, for they have a different brain, when compared to us. A dog that seems to love you can bite you because you accidentally stepped on its tail. However, they have affects, just like us. Only the severance between all the elements of reality could explain the superiority of some affects, even between and inside human beings, over others. Spinoza wasn`t able to allow that (although he conceived something like that, when talking about the contemplation of God, the meaning of the universe, nature, reality), defining the affects that heighten vital activity as good and classifying the affects on this basis, what can only mean comprehending the humane psychological pleasure system, even if, when doing so, he apparently defined some hierarchy of affects. Even though his theory could create an explanation about the existence of ethics, when compared to ethical systems like the Kantian system or the Aristotelian system, it proved not to be one of them. Ethics, in these systems, were defined in reference to an Other, be this Other the political community or the mankind. Espinosian ethics are defined by its relationship with the being and reality as part of it. Not the being as part of reality, but the reality as part of the being. Only in this system the fluctuations of our will can be considered something valid per se, equal to the reflection on the subject of communal living. Logan, clearly, does not follow that path.
He, in the second act of the movie, that begins just when he and X-23 arrive in Eden, makes us read again the 4th paragraph of this text, to understand that the movie is not about affect, as Spinoza understood it (or not all of it): the movie is about meaning. And meaning, as long as we`re humans, is a collective endeavor, not of all mankind considered as an abstraction, but of a group of people, a political community, that must be as great as it is possible to make every voice of its components heard by all of the other components. The substance of this conversation, then, is not what matters here. We can find in Logan the meaning of a political community.
There was this game I liked, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a role playing game set in the universe of Star Wars, and what I liked the most about this game was the alternation between situations of battle, exploration and interaction outside the spaceship and situations inside the ship, with its crew. I loved to create a history with my crew that played a role when we were outside the ship. The crew is a very political concept. When Plato talks about the government of a political community, he compares it to a ship. And, of course, every ship has its crew. The crew is functional, of course, but is intimate, in the sense that they recognize the reality of the political: us against the sea, against other ships, against beasts, against the weather. There will be good climate, there will be friendly vessels. But the ship is not the good climate, not the friendly vessel. The ship is a union against whatever is against the ship (and Schmitt was right about that), and a union that has one reason to be. Those young “muties” (mutants) were a crew. They had their captain. And if Logan surely had a change of heart, he knew that he was not betraying his history by siding with them, but opening another chapter, for we can`t imagine community without history. But that is another text.
When I was beginning to write this text, I remembered somehow of the words of Troy Southgate, about a future based on autonomous communities that can interact with one another on a fellowship basis, like (his words), the Fellowship of the Ring, on the Lords of the Ring, that could act together, despite their differences, to achieve a single objective. And I was thinking about the supposed difference between Aristotle and Plato, defined by the former in the beginning of his Politics. Aristotle, and I think I follow him on this subject, used to say that, while Plato thought of unity, he thought of plurality. A polis, for him, was about plurality. But that was because Plato, in his Republic, defined the life of the perfect polis in every detail, including points which Aristotle, a precursor of the scientific method, considered valid to be definable by the citizens or, at least, considered as variable depending on the circumstances. Aristotle is a more articulate thinker than Plato, and if that does not mean opening spaces for doubt when thinking about the reason, meaning and end of the political community — points of agreeance or at least approximation between him and Plato — this means considering the polis itself closer to a fellowship, a crew, than an unity.
Logan, as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Genosha, the colonization of America and the American War of Independence, Aristotle`s concept of polis, them all, remind me of a truth about the political community which nowadays we are used to mingle with the concept of democracy: it’s all about being an active member of the decision making process. We are totally state-centric when talking about politics, and this can happen due to two reasons: either we truly feel represented in the government of the community by the State or we forgot what is the concept of the political. Politics is about communion. If we want to be something more than robots controlled by the Big Brother (be him the State or the international financial forces that control labor), let’s remember why we are together here. Be our judgement of this union favorable or not, this is the only path out of slavery.
