The Basic of Philosophy

 

“The bondage of the affections consists in man’s inability to moderate and restrain his affections.” 

— Baruch Spinoza 

A premise: the form of this film does not live up to its content: an almost elementary form, at times even impoverished, becomes the accidental container of a philosophical structure of astonishing complexity. 

The Basics of Philosophy is formally basic, scarcely seductive on a strictly cinematic level, almost understated in its visual construction. And yet this very disproportion ultimately produces a peculiar effect: the more the form seems incapable of sustaining the ambition of the work, the more the radical nature of the problem Schrader deposits within it emerges. It is a film that demands a mental, psychic, existential immersion. 

At its centre is John Jorissen, a philosophy professor and author of a book on Spinoza, a man who has transformed his existence into a kind of laboratory of rationality. But philosophy, which should be an instrument of liberation, gradually reveals itself to be a sophisticated defence mechanism as well. John knows the concepts through which human beings can understand their passions; he knows that freedom does not consist in arbitrary whim, but in the ability to understand the causes that determine us. And yet he remains a prisoner of precisely what he understands. 

This is where the film becomes far more interesting than its mise-en-scène. 

The question is not simply guilt. It is the relationship between understanding, rationality, forgiveness and change. 

John seems to have been almost handed over to philosophy by his father: instead of becoming a pianist, he is directed towards academic study as a consequence of what he has done and of his father’s need to see in his son what he himself had been unable to become. Philosophy is born under the sign of guilt. It is not a free, original vocation, but a form of destiny constructed around a moral fracture. 

And this makes Spinoza anything but ornamental. 

Spinozian rationalization should enable the individual to understand the causes of their passions and, through that understanding, free themselves from their bondage. Knowledge changes the relationship between human beings and that which determines them. But Schrader introduces a question that Spinoza, at least in the dramatic form assumed by the film, cannot definitively resolve: does understanding really mean being able to change? 

Or does change require something that reason alone cannot produce? 

This is the point at which philosophy becomes an existential dilemma. 

We may perfectly understand the reasons why we have become what we are and yet continue to be what we are. We may recognize our passions, reconstruct their causes, analyse them, even place them within a rigorous conceptual architecture, without thereby managing to interrupt their power over us. 

Knowledge can therefore be a condition of freedom without necessarily being freedom itself. 

And above all, it does not seem to contain change automatically. 

John’s paradox is precisely this: he has devoted his life to understanding the human being and is unable to understand himself to the point of freeing himself from himself. 

Here forgiveness enters the picture. 

Because to truly understand someone perhaps means reaching the extreme limit of judgement. It means practising a kind of epoché, suspending, at least provisionally, that sedimentation of moral, cultural, familial and social judgements through which we interpret every human act. But is the suspension of judgement truly possible? Can we come to understand an act down to its ultimate causes without our own judgement continuing to inhabit us? 

And, above all, can we truly forgive what we have understood but continue to regard as unforgivable? 

The film seems to suggest that John’s true antagonist is not Miguel. Nor is it his father. It is consciousness itself, that zone in which rational knowledge and the feeling of guilt continue to contradict one another. 

Miguel is the return of the real. 

He is what thought can no longer keep at a distance. He is the body of guilt reappearing in the life of a man who had attempted to transform guilt into thought. 

And this is where the title assumes an almost cruel irony. The Basics of Philosophy seems to promise an introductory lesson, something elementary. But beneath this apparent simplicity lies a vertiginous question: what can philosophy really do for life? 

It can explain freedom, but the question remains whether it can make us free. 

It can explain passions, but perhaps it cannot free us from their power. 

It can explain guilt, but who knows whether it can erase it. It can explain forgiveness. 

And above all: can reason produce that transformation of the individual which reason itself identifies as necessary? 

Schrader performs a genuine philosophical operation, opening a series of questions without satisfying them. Indeed, he seems deliberately to construct a contradiction between the sophistication of thought and the impossibility of existence conforming to it. 

John is a man who knows an enormous amount, and precisely for this reason what he does not know how to do becomes even more evident: live beyond his guilt. 

The film thus reaches an almost Cartesian dimension: doubt no longer concerns what we can know, but what we can become. Rationally understanding oneself does not mean being able to change. Rational choice is merely a preliminary condition, while change remains something further, something not guaranteed by the choice itself. 

Freedom might therefore be a possibility without yet being a transformation. 

And perhaps this is the film’s focal point: rationality can administer the passions without necessarily redeeming them. 

For this reason, The Basics of Philosophy is a strangely deterrent work. Its formal poverty becomes almost inversely proportional to the force of the problem it raises. Schrader seems to tell us that we can construct highly refined philosophical systems, devote an entire existence to the study of freedom, understand the determinations governing our behaviour and, in the end, discover that the human being remains there: before himself, before his guilt, before the impossibility of knowing whether understanding is enough to change. 

It is perhaps a film that does not fully succeed in becoming great cinema. 

But it manages, surprisingly, to become a great philosophical problem. 

And perhaps this is precisely its most fertile contradiction: an almost elementary cinematic work that ultimately poses a question that is anything but elementary. 

Not whether we can understand ourselves, but whether, once understood, we are truly capable of becoming something other than what we have been. 

It is a minimal difference in words and an abyssal one in existence. 

“Without being forgiven […] our capacity for action would be confined to a single act from which we could never recover.” 

— Hannah Arendt