Reflection on a scene from Annie Hall (Woody Allen)

I want to reflect on a hilarious and unsettling scene from Annie Hall (Woody Allen). Alvy is ostensibly neurotic. Given the knowledge that humanity's life is limited, that the existence of the earth is limited, that, absent the Divine, everything we do, everything and everyone we love, all we care about, anything at all intrinsically good will perish and it will be again as though it never was, given all that, the young Alvy doesn’t see the point of doing his homework. The mother and the therapist are ostensibly rooted in common sense reality and find Alvy’s attitude neurotic, even ridiculous. Who is the neurotic party in this exchange?  Here is the transcript of the scene, the young Alvy being brought before a therapist by his mother:

 

Mother: He’s been depressed. All of a sudden he can’t do anything. 

Dr. Flicker: Why are you depressed, Alvy? 

Mother: Tell Dr Flicker. It’s something he read. 

Dr. Flicker: Something he read, uh? 

Alvy: The universe is expanding. 

Dr. Flicker: The universe is expanding? 

Alvy: The universe is everything. If it’s expanding, someday it will break apart… and that will be the end of everything. 

Mother: What is that your business? He stopped doing his homework. 

Alvy: What’s the point? 

Mother: What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding! 

Dr. Flicker: It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we’re here, uh? Uh? Uh? (laughs)

 

I want to say that Alvy's thought is not irrational. It is, in a sense, perfectly rational. If the universe is destined for extinction, if every human achievement will disappear, if every civilization will vanish, if every beloved person will die, and if there is no reality beyond this process, then Alvy has stumbled upon what many philosophers have regarded as the deepest problem of human existence. There are echoes of Pascal, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Camus. Tolstoy describes almost exactly Alvy's question: if death annihilates everything, why continue with the ordinary business of life? There are perhaps two kinds of people: those who are deeply struck by Tolstoy’s question (Alvy) and those who think he went crazy (Alvy’s mother).

     The mother is not entirely foolish either. "You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" is funny because it expresses a genuine truth. Human beings cannot live constantly at the level of cosmic abstraction. There is breakfast to make, children to raise, books to read, students to teach, gardens to tend. Much of life would become impossible if we continually held before our minds the eventual heat death of the universe. The mother embodies the finite horizon of life. Meaning is found within life. Alvy is looking beyond life to the ultimate horizon. The problem is that the ultimate horizon threatens to swallow the nearer meanings. Both perspectives seem true.

    I always thought that the therapist's response was inadequate. "We've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here" is not really an answer to Alvy's question. It is more a recommendation for coping. It resembles the response of Epicureanism or perhaps Camus: the universe may be indifferent, but we must nevertheless live. But Alvy was asking whether enjoyment itself is stupid, pointless. If everything perishes, why should enjoyment matter? Why should love matter? Why should truth matter?

   Many religious thinkers have argued that the problem is not merely psychological but metaphysical. Without some participation in an eternal reality, the destruction of all finite goods seems to undermine their ultimate significance. One hears this in Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and in modern figures such as Hans Küng. The longing that love not perish forever points toward a question about the nature of reality itself. 

    I guess one could say that Alvy's neurosis lies not in asking the question but in being unable to live with it. Many philosophers have distinguished between confronting mortality and becoming obsessed by it. A person may fully acknowledge death and finitude while still being able to love particular things. One thinks here of Martin Heidegger, for whom authentic life requires facing death rather than fleeing from it. 

    What strikes me most about the scene is that the adults are treating Alvy as though he has made a childish mistake, when in fact he has encountered one of the oldest and most profound human questions. The comedy comes from the mismatch between the depth of the question and the banality of the answers. The therapist laughs. The mother talks about Brooklyn. Yet Alvy has stumbled into the same abyss that troubled Pascal, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and countless others. Perhaps the neurotic person is not the one who sees the problem, but the one who thinks the problem has been solved simply because there is homework to finish and dinner to eat. But the converse danger is also real: perhaps the neurotic person is the one who cannot return from the stars to Brooklyn. The film never quite decides between those possibilities. That is part of why the scene remains memorable. It is funny because both sides are right, and because neither side seems fully satisfying.

 

. . .

 

What's the point?  I think of Nietzsche's definition of nihilism: 

"Was bedeutet Nihilismus? – Daß die obersten Werte sich entwerten. Es fehlt das Ziel; es fehlt die Antwort auf das 'Warum?'." 

"What does nihilism mean? – That the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; the answer to the 'Why?' is lacking."

 And this:

 "Wer ein Warum hat, erträgt fast jedes Wie"

 “Whoever has a Why to live can bear almost any How.”

 For Nietzsche, Christianity had supplied Europe with a cosmic answer to the Why. Human life had a purpose. History had a direction. Suffering had meaning. Human beings had an ultimate destiny. Once faith in that framework collapsed, people often continued to use its moral vocabulary while no longer believing its foundations. The result was nihilism: we still want meaning but no longer know where meaning comes from. Thus Nietzsche feared nihilism more than atheism. Atheism is a belief. Nihilism is a condition.

      Nietzsche’s thought was developed by the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. His central tenet is that human beings do not live merely by pleasure, comfort, or survival. They need meaning. Meaning comes ultimately from a metaphysical root. To live practically we must have metaphysical roots, or completely "forget the question of Being" altogether (Heidegger). We cannot live without at least an implicit answer to the Why? Without being hopelessly, almost inhumanly shallow. This is the anthropological truth (or not) that I am interested in. Nihilism is the collapse of the answer to "Why?" It is the discovery that the traditional sources of meaning no longer command belief – the metaphysical roots of life have died – leaving us naked before the cold, cruel indifferent, meaningless universe and our impending annihilation.

     Nietzsche's point is that human beings cannot simply dispense with the Why. We may suppress the question, distract ourselves from it, or inherit an answer without reflecting upon it. Yet when the answer collapses, nihilism emerges. And similarly, Heidegger argues that ordinary life is possible largely because we do not continually confront the question of Being. We are absorbed in projects, routines, concerns, and practical affairs. The world is already meaningful enough for us to get on with things. This is what Alvy’s mother embodies. But occasionally, as with the young Alvy, that practical horizon collapses. In anxiety, for example, beings as a whole lose their obvious significance. One asks, "What is the point of any of this?" Young Alvy is experiencing something like a child's version of Heideggerian anxiety. The mother's answer is essentially the answer of everydayness: "Brooklyn is not expanding." "Stop asking ultimate questions and return to the practical world." This need not imply shallowness. I assume she takes the metaphysical roots of her Jewish culture for granted. The difference between her and Alvy turns out to be that for Alvy “God is dead” i.e. the traditional sources of meaning no longer command belief.

 

. . .

 

    Can human beings ultimately live without some answer to the Why? Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre would say that humanity must learn to live without metaphysical comfort. Meaning must be created, affirmed, or disclosed within finitude itself. But thinkers as different as Leo Tolstoy, William James, Josef Pieper, Raimond Gaita, and many religious thinkers would question whether this is psychologically or even conceptually possible. I find this second answer more plausible.

    I was very impressed with Tolstoy’s Confession as a student. His crisis was almost exactly Alvy's crisis and can almost be read as a commentary on Nietzsche's definition. He repeatedly asks: Why should I live? Why should I do anything? What will come of what I do today or tomorrow? When every answer ended with death, he felt he had reached a dead end. He discovered that all the ordinary purposes of life – success, family, achievement, pleasure – were undermined if death ultimately erased everything. His famous question was essentially: Why should I do anything today if tomorrow death destroys it all? The practical projects of life depended upon a horizon of meaning larger than mortality. Nietzsche and Tolstoy are strangely close. Both agree that human beings cannot live without an answer to the Why. Their disagreement concerns whether that answer can be created by human beings or must ultimately be discovered in God.

    Even many secular people seem to live as though certain things possess an enduring significance that exceeds their empirical lifespan. We treat love, truth, justice, friendship, and beauty as though they matter absolutely, not merely temporarily. The mother who grieves her child is not simply regretting the loss of a useful object. She experiences the child's existence as something that ought not be annihilated. That "ought not" is already pointing beyond a purely naturalistic description of the world. So I think the anthropological question is exactly this: Can a human being genuinely live without an answer to the Why, or can he only live by forgetting the question?    In the Annie Hall scene, the young Alvy is asking whether Brooklyn itself still makes sense once the universe has become a question mark. The adults have an answer to how to live. What they never provide is an answer to why.

      Perhaps most people do not possess an explicit metaphysics. But they possess a hinge belief or Einstellung (fundamental attitude toward life). They unreflectively trust that life is worth living, that love matters, that truth matters, that their actions matter. These convictions function as practical answers to the Why even when they are never formulated philosophically. Nihilism asks whether these roots have any foundation at all.

 

. . .

   I also think of Chesterton's discussion of the madman in Orthodoxy as an aid to understanding the scene. He argues that the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. Rather: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." Chesterton's point is that many forms of madness are characterized by a terrible logical consistency. The paranoid person often has an explanation for everything. Nothing is left unexplained. The system is airtight. The problem is not that there is too little reason but that there is too little reality, too little openness to the richness and mystery of existence. He writes that the madman's mind "moves in a perfect but narrow circle." Everything fits. The circle is complete. But it is small.

   Now consider young Alvy. In one sense, no, Alvy is not Chesterton's madman. He has stumbled upon a real philosophical problem. The mortality of the universe is not a delusion. The question "What is the point?" is not irrational. Chesterton himself took that question with great seriousness. Much of Orthodoxy is an attempt to answer it.

     But there is another sense in which Chesterton might criticize Alvy. The child takes one fact about reality – the eventual destruction of the universe – and allows it to eclipse every other fact. The logic looks something like this:

 

Everything eventually ends.

Therefore nothing matters now.

Therefore there is no point in doing homework.

 

Chesterton would say that the conclusion does not necessarily follow. The beauty of a flower is not disproved by its mortality. The goodness of friendship is not refuted by death. The value of a mathematical proof is not erased because the sun will one day burn out. For Chesterton, the mistake is allowing one abstract truth to swallow all the concrete truths. Thus he often contrasts the philosopher with the child. The child can delight in particular things before possessing a complete theory of the universe. The madman, by contrast, demands a theory that explains everything before he can delight in anything.

   Chesterton would probably be even more critical of the therapist than of Alvy. The therapist's answer – "We've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here." – is not really a rational answer at all. Chesterton would likely ask: Why enjoy ourselves? Why value happiness? Why value life? In other words, the therapist does not answer Alvy's question. He merely changes the subject. Alvy is right that the question cannot simply be ignored.

But he is wrong if he concludes that finitude automatically destroys meaning. The therapist is right that life must be lived. But he is wrong if he thinks living removes the need for an answer to the Why. In a way, the conflict between Alvy and the adults resembles the tension Chesterton saw at the heart of modernity. Alvy asks a metaphysical question. The adults offer practical answers. Chesterton's complaint is that practical answers alone cannot satisfy a creature who naturally asks, "Why?" What Chesterton ultimately proposes is not less reason but a larger reason, one that includes wonder, gratitude, love, mystery, and what he regarded as the gift-character of existence itself.

    And that brings me back to Nietzsche's definition of nihilism. The deepest problem is not that the universe expands. The deepest problem is that the answer to the "Warum?" seems to have disappeared. Chesterton, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and in different ways Heidegger all agree that this question is unavoidable. Their disagreement concerns whether there is, in fact, an answer.

 

. . .

 

And Chesterton’s lightness here points to a metaphysical root. Chesterton does not usually begin with a cosmological proof or a chain of syllogisms. He begins with a certain experience of reality. The beautiful flower is not first a neutral object to which he later adds theological meaning. Rather, he experiences the flower as wondrous, gratuitous, unexpected, gift-like. The experience itself already contains a kind of religious intimation.

    Chesterton's thought moves something like this - there is no necessity that there should be a flower at all. Yet there is a flower. And not merely a functional object, but something beautiful. The appropriate response is wonder and gratitude. Gratitude naturally seeks a giver. That last step is the big move. Gratitude is unlike admiration. Admiration can stop at the object. Gratitude seems directed beyond the object. Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy that the hardest thing is not to be grateful when things are pleasant but to be grateful simply because things exist at all.

    Chesterton points to God because of how he experiences the flower. Not because the flower logically proves God, but because the flower is experienced as disclosing a world that looks more like a gift than an accident. This is why Chesterton is often a poor fit for both modern apologetics and modern atheism. The apologist sometimes wants an argument. The atheist wants evidence. Chesterton keeps returning to a transformed perception of ordinary things. I think he is close to Wittgenstein in this: "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." Or Simone Weil's attention to the sheer reality of another person. Or Murdoch's account of beauty drawing us out of ourselves. Or Gaita's descriptions of seeing a human being as precious beyond all calculation. None of these are deductive proofs. They are attempts to describe a way of seeing.

    The disagreement comes afterward. One person says that this experience reveals something real about the nature of reality; another says that the experience is psychologically powerful but tells us nothing about ultimate reality. All the thinker I treasure belong firmly to the first camp. My own hesitation and doubt have never been about the experience itself. I am certain that beauty, love, goodness, fidelity, and wonder disclose something deep. My hesitation comes at the next step: Does this disclose God?

Or does it merely feel as though it does? Chesterton answers that question with a confident yes. But his yes emerges from the experience of the flower, not merely from a prior doctrine about flowers. Chesterton begins from a phenomenon many people recognize. The debate concerns what that phenomenon means. I am like that. Meaning is real. My love of my children, my family and friends, of all the beautiful and good things of the world: I cannot question the reality of that love or the intrinsic love-ableness of what I love. Which implies it is “good, very good” that they exist. That is the root. I am not sure what that implies metaphysically, but I know it is incompatible with nihilism.

. . .

The scene (for me) is very funny. Which affects how I think about the problem it raises somehow. The scene juxtaposes two radically different horizons of human existence. On one side, there is Brooklyn. Homework. Parents. School. Daily life. The world of practical concerns. On the other side, there is the question that haunted Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Pascal, Heidegger, and countless others: Why live at all if everything ends? The comedy arises because these two horizons collide in the same room.

    A little boy has inadvertently stumbled into a question that belongs in a seminar on metaphysics or in the pages of A Confession. His mother responds as though he were worried about a pothole on the street. "What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn!" It is funny because she is both completely right and completely wrong. She is right because human life actually takes place somewhere. We do not live in "the universe." We live in Brooklyn, Potsdam, Jena, Bowling Green. We have children to raise, classes to teach, meals to prepare. But she is wrong because Brooklyn exists within the universe. The local cannot finally escape the cosmic.

    What gives the scene its depth is that the provincial answer is not simply mocked. In a sense, Woody Allen understands that most human beings survive by inhabiting the provincial horizon. If every morning we fully inhabited the thought of cosmic extinction, many of us would struggle to get out of bed. The scene therefore dramatizes a permanent tension in human existence. We are finite creatures who ask infinite questions. The child is already asking a question far larger than he can bear. The adults are living answers they cannot adequately articulate. The therapist says: "We've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here." That is not a philosophical answer. Yet it is how millions of people actually live.

  This is where the scene becomes almost Tolstoyan. Tolstoy's crisis began when the practical routines of life stopped shielding him from ultimate questions. Suddenly farming, writing, family, and success all appeared against the backdrop of death. The therapist and the mother are still protected by the practical horizon. Young Alvy is not. But there is another layer. The scene is funny because philosophy often appears ridiculous when translated into ordinary life. Imagine Socrates refusing to pay his taxes because he is contemplating the immortality of the soul. Imagine Heidegger being unable to finish the shopping because he is preoccupied with the question of Being. Imagine Tolstoy refusing to mow the lawn because death renders all achievements finite. There is something absurd about allowing cosmic questions to interfere with ordinary tasks. Yet there is something equally absurd about believing that ordinary tasks somehow answer cosmic questions. The scene captures both absurdities at once.

   I like the scene because it exposes a genuine feature of the human condition. Animals seem capable of living entirely in Brooklyn. Human beings cannot. But human beings cannot live entirely in the universe either (would a Buddhist agree?). We are suspended between the two. We must somehow finish our homework while wondering why there is anything at all. And perhaps the funniest irony is that the mother may be wiser than she knows. "Brooklyn is not expanding" is philosophically ridiculous. Yet there is an ancient wisdom hidden in it. Aristotle, Aquinas, and even Wittgenstein in very different ways would remind us that meaning is encountered first in concrete forms of life: this family, this friendship, this classroom, this flower, this city. We do not begin with the universe as a whole. We begin with particular things. The danger is forgetting the universe. The opposite danger is forgetting Brooklyn. The genius of the scene is that it shows both dangers in less than a minute and makes us laugh while doing so. Great art.