The Film Collateral and Metaphysics

I think the early Wittgenstein’s remark about the world of the happy man and the later Wittgenstein’s ‘being held captive’ by a picture of the world says a lot about the way individuals come to hold certain philosophical positions. I have already analyzed House MD in this respect. Now I want to give another example, the movie Collateral with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

 

Collateral follows Max (Jamie Foxx), a cautious and intelligent Los Angeles taxi driver who dreams of someday starting a limousine company but has become trapped in routine and hesitation. One night he picks up Vincent (Tom Cruise), a calm, sharply dressed man who offers him a large sum of money to drive him to several destinations across the city. Max soon discovers that Vincent is a professional hitman carrying out a series of murders connected to a criminal case. Forced to drive Vincent through the night, Max becomes unwillingly drawn into violence, police pursuit, and moral confrontation. During the course of  the film  we get  less a conventional thriller than a philosophical encounter between two radically different attitudes toward life. Vincent presents a cold, nihilistic vision of existence shaped by detachment, anonymity, and cosmic indifference, while Max, despite his fears and compromises, still retains a sense of human dignity and moral responsibility. Over the course of the night, Max is pushed to confront both Vincent’s worldview and his own passive way of living.  I am no movie critic, but it was artistically very well done at every level from the acting to the directing. Great job creating the atmosphere.

 

The first scene in the taxi, where Vincent tells the story of the dead man riding unnoticed on the train for hours, is an expression of a picture of the world: human beings are isolated, anonymous, fundamentally insignificant. After the first victim falls on Max’s taxi, Vincent expresses surprise at Max’s all-too-human horror and confusion over the murder, and this exchange takes place, in which Vincent tries to dissolve moral seriousness into statistical insignificance: “Max, six billion people on the planet, you're getting bent out of shape cause of one fat guy.” Then he continues: “Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye, Max?” And finally, in response to Max’ reply he didn’t know any of them: “You don't know the guy in the trunk, either.” Vincent treats moral concern as irrational inconsistency. Since Max cannot emotionally respond to all suffering, Vincent implies he has no rational basis for responding to this suffering. It is almost a nihilistic parody of universalism: if compassion cannot encompass everything equally, then no individual life has ultimate weight.     

 

The last scene I want to mention is the explicitly cosmic one, as Vincent tells Max: “Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, and a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?” This is closely connected to the comment about how anonymous life in LA:

“Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A... Nobody notices.” Vincent moves between cosmology and urban anonymity. The immense universe and the disconnected megacity mirror each other. In both, the individual disappears into statistical insignificance.

     Vincent’s tragedy is not merely that he believes life is meaningless, but that he has become unable to see meaning anymore. Wittgenstein might say that an aspect of reality has disappeared for him. The world has become spiritually flat. And the ending matters here. Vincent dies in the same anonymous way he described earlier, alone on public transport, unnoticed by the world. The point is not simply irony. It is that he has interpreted existence through anonymity and emptiness for so long that he finally inhabits that very world completely. Vincent’s belief about the universe being indifferent or meaningless are not conclusions reached by detached reasoning. They function more like a lens through which all experience is interpreted. Wittgenstein’s remark in the Tractatus that “the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man” is helpful here precisely because he does not mean that two different physical universes exist. Rather, the same events appear under radically different aspects depending on one’s relation to reality as a whole. The “world” changes because significance changes.

      Max, though anxious, compromised, and not fully alive, still inhabits a world where human beings matter. His concern for his mother, his unrealized dreams, his hesitations, even his moral fear, all testify that he still experiences persons as more than objects moving through empty space. Vincent sees these same things almost as illusions. He strips everything down to functionality, contingency, survival, and death. The film undermines Vincent’s world version. Max’s horror at the dead man in the trunk already refutes Vincent’s worldview existentially. Max cannot help noticing. That is why Vincent keeps trying to break him psychologically: Max’s spontaneous moral response threatens Vincent’s entire metaphysical posture. Thus Wittgenstein’s ‘world of the unhappy man….’ Vincent’s “world” is not a theory. It is a world emptied of aspect, presence, and human meaning. The unhappy man inhabits a world in which persons become interchangeable instances within a meaningless totality. Max for all his shortcoming still sees persons as persons.

 

. . .

 

Metaphysics is only theoretical when disconnected from life. Metaphysics is in the case of Vincent interwoven with fate (bad childhood); life choices and evil actions; resulting core attitude toward life; then the metaphysical pictures (he thinks about it, has to justify his life) to which is in then held captive for to question it would be to face the unbearably painful truth of his life. This seems like a paradigm of how philosophies are born, as interpretations crystallized out of suffering, action, guilt, love, disappointment, temperament, and fate.

     Vincent’s philosophy does not appear first as a syllogism. It appears first as a way of coping and rationalizing. If the world is fundamentally indifferent, then his emotional isolation makes sense. If persons are ultimately anonymous specks, then killing can be absorbed into the general machinery of existence. If meaning itself is an illusion, then his own damaged life no longer stands under judgment. And once a person has lived inside such a picture long enough, questioning it becomes existentially dangerous. For Vincent to truly see one victim as infinitely significant would threaten the entire structure holding his soul together. The metaphysical picture protects him from remorse, grief, vulnerability, perhaps even despair. The picture becomes spiritually necessary. This is very close to Wittgenstein’s notion of an Einstellung or “attitude toward the soul.” One does not merely believe certain things. One comes to see reality under certain aspects. And these aspects are bound up with forms of life. It is also close to what Nietzsche suspected when he asked whether philosophies are really disguised autobiographies. Or what Blaise Pascal meant when he observed that people almost always believe what suits their condition. Or what Iris Murdoch argued: that moral vision is conditioned by the quality of consciousness itself. A selfish or wounded consciousness literally sees a different world.  You could even formulate the process almost genealogically: fate → emotional formation → choices → habits of attention → moral injury or deepening → characteristic attitudes (Einstellungen) → metaphysical interpretation → reinforcement of the original life pattern. Then the metaphysics ceases to be merely theoretical. It becomes self-protective. To abandon it would require repentance, mourning, forgiveness, humility, or hope. Sometimes that is harder than maintaining even a bleak philosophy. This is why arguments alone rarely overturn fundamental worldviews. At the deepest level, people are not simply defending propositions. They are defending a lived orientation to reality, often one bound up with pain and identity.

   But the reverse can also happen. A person encounters goodness, beauty, forgiveness, love, or genuine attention from another person, and suddenly an older metaphysical picture becomes impossible to sustain. A new “world” appears. That too is deeply Wittgensteinian: the facts may remain the same, yet the world changes because significance changes. Thus philosophies are often less like mathematical systems than spiritual interpretations of existence.

   What makes Vincent philosophically interesting is that he may not simply be “held captive by a picture.”  Wittgenstein often speaks of philosophical confusion as captivity to misleading abstractions. But Vincent’s worldview feels less like conceptual confusion than like a hardened existential stance. His metaphysical outlook has become embodied in habit, profession, emotional desolation, and fate. His nihilism is lived before it is articulated. In that sense, the film points to something that thinkers like Gaita or Murdoch emphasize: metaphysical vision is morally and spiritually enacted. A person gradually becomes capable or incapable of seeing reality under certain aspects. Vincent has trained himself to see the world as fundamentally deadened. His “philosophy” both justifies and expresses the kind of man he has become.

    There is also something deeply anti-Cartesian about this. The film implies that metaphysical outlooks are not primarily produced by abstract proofs. They emerge from ways of inhabiting the world. Vincent’s ontology of meaninglessness corresponds to emotional isolation, instrumental rationality, and violence. Max’s lingering decency corresponds to a still-living sense that some things matter absolutely. A philosophically interesting film.