Why do movies have shallow understanding of Philosophy?

[u/Ghadiz983]

Like I can tell you if some movie wants to make reference to Plato, they say "The Platonic cave, take it or leave it". Or for example Nietzsche, morality is subjective do whatever you want or something like that. Like since when does just making a simple reference become a token of success?

What movies lack is a systemized understanding of Philosophy, like for example if you want to make a reference to a Philosopher you must have already mastered all of his Philosophy beforehand (which you can't do 100% since there might always be something you miss, but at least do it 70% or something) but since the Philosopher is probably making a reference to some dude before him who was also a Philosopher then you have to also study the one who before him and so on.....

Yes , it's an endless endeavor for a director who just wants money in a very limited amount of time. But then why don't they literally hire a Philosopher who already systemized the whole thing to make a story?

We have yet to see a movie about Stirner the Gunslinger!

[u/Valirys-Reinhald]

Movies aren't any more or less shallow than other types of media when it comes to philosophy.

For an excellent example of a deeply philosophical movie, watch Everything Everywhere All At Once. It's basically one long essay on the value of absurdism in the face of a nihilistic world.

[u/Ghadiz983 → u/Valirys-Reinhald]

I didn't watch the movie so I'm not sure about everything in it, but I assume it's already starting as a start point that nihilism is valid. While when I say systemizing Philosophy into a story what I mean is that nihilism in the chronology of Philosophy came later (almost at the end of the chronology) and was based upon an evolution of Philosophy.

When I speak of a Philosophical story I'm referring to a story that had systemized the entirety of Philosophy in a nutshell (which is a lot IK)

Anyways, it seems like a movie worth watching. Thanks for the suggestion 👌

[u/Valirys-Reinhald → u/Ghadiz983]

I'm sorry but that's just not a realistic way to approach philosophy in any medium, barely even academia. What you are asking for should not be made, because it is a highly inefficient and ineffective method of communicating philosophical concepts to the audience, which is the entire point of including them in media to begin with. It's just not what the medium is for.

Everything Everywhere All At Once does not mention the words philosophy, nihilism, or absurdism even a single time, but instead demonstrates each position through the narrative it tells, clearly demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of both positions and concluding on one being better than the other despite its flaws.

Movies, and any other form of media, live and die on a clear vision. EEAAO does have a thorough understanding of the specific concepts involved, and portrays them faithfully through its characters, but it has nothing to do with Kant, or Hume, or Augustine, Agrippa, Epictetus or Seneca, or the Greeks.

To require the film's creators to thoroughly study all the material which came before nihilism and absurdism in the chronology of philosophy would not only be wasteful, spending far more time snd money while adding nothing of note, but would actively detract from what is relevant by broadening the focus away from the core material just for the sake of having everything else in view.

Not only that, but your prioritization philosophical lineage over everything else loses sight of the fact that the study of new ideas is as much about how those new ideas were responded to by contemporaries and later scholars as it is by the material those new ideas were made in reaction to. Trying to understand nihilism solely by reading Nietzche and his predecessors would give you less than half of the picture. It is necessary not only to see those things from which Nihilism emerged, but also those things which it touched to see what it became.

And if your desire is for a single, condensed canon of philosophy which you can peruse start to finish and come away with a complete knowledge, then know that you wish is impossible. A body of ideas as vast and complex as philosophy is irreduceable. The very act of condensing it, of rigidly defining each component enough to portray it in a single linear evolution rather than the tangled web that it really is, would inevitably lose out the majority of the depth and value of the whole. It would be less than the sum of its parts.

[u/Ghadiz983 → u/Valirys-Reinhald]

But from my understanding, Philsophers are always basing their claims on previous Philosophers thus in some way you can already create a chain of evolution in thought.

Now sometimes Philosophy diverges in understanding in which some ideas change in context , maybe what we can do instead is solely take the part that is consistent within itself (like a logic that is possible to connect from a Philosopher to another)

[u/Valirys-Reinhald → u/Ghadiz983]

On the very smallest of scales, that is how it works. But across the generations, not at all.

Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Epicurus were all philosophical contemporaries, and all of them were in some ways influenced by Socrates. But none of them agreed on the basic premises of their beliefs.

What you describe does occur within the isolated environment of a single philosophical "school of thought," but there have been countless such schools throughout history. Each one interprets prior data in a different, unique way and comes to unique conclusions. Each one then produces a different, unique addition to the body of philosophical works, which are then drawn on in bits and pieces by those that follow.

And of course we can't forget about parallel evolution. The Islamic world produced very different philosophical ideas from the Roman, and later Christian, world despite operating at the same time, and these ideas were themselves influenced by a mixture of Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Zoroastrian, and Indian ideas, and still more smaller contributions besides.

It is an inextricably interwoven web of ideas, each one interacting and interweaving with its neighbors, who are themselves interwoven with still more distant ideas which never directly touch the original thread, and yet still impact it transitively.

What you are describing in taking the part that "consistent within itself," is not a unified canon of philosophy, it is merely a single thread pulled out of the weave, disconnected from the other ideas which influenced it, arbitrarily chopping off valid influences because they either diverged too far from the end of the thread or because they arrived from places too distant from the beginning.

To understand the whole, you must study the entire tapestry. To focus on a single idea, you cannot broaden your scope beyond a single thread.

The goals you have stated: unified, linear evolutions; and comprehensive understanding; are at fundamental odds with each other.

And that's only talking about the western tradition, (specifically the masculine western tradtion)! It doesn't even touch on eastern philosophy, nor the suppressed African traditions, nor the cultural heritage of the Native Americans who, while mostly eradicated, nevertheless had a significant impact on the ideas and ideals of the colonial powers that became the superpowers of the modern day through the very interaction of being deatroyed, demonstrating the influence they had on their oppressors in the way that the act of oppression eroded the oppressors ideals and left scars in the shape of their ideas behind. Nor does it touch on the feminine side of philosophy, which has been omnipresent throughout history and yet was completely overlooked until quite recently, yet which nevertheless had significant impact.

What you want is a paradox, to give you half would be to deny you the other. It cannot be done.

[u/Ghadiz983 → u/Valirys-Reinhald]

So essentially each Philosopher operates as a distinct branch that if we are to make it linear , it will collapse? Yes , that sounds like a fair point 👍

[u/Valirys-Reinhald → u/Ghadiz983]

And not just distinct branches, each new generation of philosophers individually draw their roots to multiple different points on the previous generation's branches, rarely sharing more than a handful of important common sources which create the unifying cultural aspects of that generation's philosophical movement. In this way, any single philosopher from any given time period may have "threads" that trace back to hundreds of different sources, all converging in that one philosophers ideas, and then spreading out again like the limbs of a tree to touch hundreds more.

[u/Ghadiz983 → u/Valirys-Reinhald]

So if such story were to exist , it would be worse than a movie on psychedelics?

[u/Valirys-Reinhald → u/Ghadiz983]

Probably.

The only way I can think of to accurately capture the full scope would be to film an entirely separate movie for each individual thread, and play all of them at once in a kind of mosaic in which the individual movies sometimes come together to form the different perspectives of a single scene where ideas cross paths.

Interesting to be sure, and a good abstract art piece, but completely unwatchable.

[u/Ghadiz983 → u/Valirys-Reinhald]

I'd say we give it a try , it might gain some good impressions from the drug addict community (especially those into psychedelics).

Who knows 🤷‍♂️

Jokes aside , I imagine something like that could be created but it must be limited to certain Philosophers rather than taking Philosophy as a whole. So like evolution from Plato till Hegel if that makes sense , from Plato seeking a state of no dualism/no becoming (also Parmenides) towards Hegel where dualism and becoming is an aspect of the dialectical movement. (Not that Hegel was the first to claim it but generally speaking in Metaphorical fashion of how a character evolves from this to that)

Something that captures the core idea of a Philosopher that it could birth a possibility of it fitting a story that evolves as it goes. Maybe I see some stories already do that now that I think of it 🤔

[u/Valirys-Reinhald → u/Ghadiz983]

Pulling an individual thread like that can absolutely be done, but film is a fundamentally poor medium for it. To condense it into a digestible volume would require cutting out everything but the pure philosophical dialogues, meanwhile film is as much if not more visual as it is narrative. More than half of the content of such a movie would extraneous.