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John Malkovich Dualism

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The Mind/Body Problem of John Malkovich

Charlie Kaufmann’s Being John Malkovich portrays a struggling puppeteer who lives his fantasies by recreating scenarios through his puppets. Obviously miserable with his life and marriage he sought an office job where he ends up discovering a portal that led to the mind of actor John Malkovich; where one can see and experience life through his eyes. Although comedic and eccentric in nature, the movie tends to raise some interesting philosophical questions in relation to the mind/body problem with one of the responses of it being substance dualism. Using arguments from Rene Descartes and J.P Moreland, I will discuss how this film supports substance dualism but also contradicts it through notions of the …show more content…

I think. I feel. I suffer.” For purposes of this paper, I can say that consciousness, as depicted in the movie, is existent as the mind because when one travels through the tunnel to John Malkovich’s head their conscious mind is aware of what he is experiencing but we are unsure of where the body goes until the 15 minutes is up and the body is thrown into the ditch. This idea of the conscious mind of a person being able to inhabit John Malkovich’s mind temporarily further supports Descartes notion that we are a thinking thing and that our minds are able to live without our bodies as he says, “If I stopped thinking, I would stop exisiting.” (Descartes pg 5) In essence, I don’t need my body to keep my conscious mind thinking because once I stop thinking, I will cease to exist. The film also supports this idea because Craig tries to enter the tunnel again to John Malkovich’s mind; however, John Malkovich’s body (also referred to in the film as a ‘vessel’) is ripe at the age of 44 and entering after the 12 AM would lead Craig to a larvae vessel- Emily, the daughter of Maxine and Craig’s wife Lotte (Maxine was impregnated by John Malkovich while Lotte was in his

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Descartes finishes up this Meditation with some more ethics about the self. Information of the self, or psyche, is more particular and sure than knowledge of the body. The technique for uncertainty in the First Meditation seemed to debilitate all information, yet in the Second Meditation Descartes discovers something that cannot be questioned. I think each of us must affirm our own particular presence and set up the means of our own

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In his tremendously successful, award-winning novel, Of Mice & Men, worrisome themes like the meaninglessness of life, the loneliness of being a “thinking” individual, and the received futility of existence are all artfully employed by Steinbeck in order to illustrate the brittleness of the human condition. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck introduces an absolute parade of desperate, defective, and defeated characters to promote several of the dominant catastrophic concepts connected to existentialism. Similarly, the movie of the same name - released in 1992, and starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich - employs all of those same characters, and many of the same dark themes, to encourage the philosophy of existentialism, yet three stand out most prominently: the absurdity of life, the dizziness of freedom known as anxiety, the idea of

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In his philosophical thesis, of the ‘Mind-Body dualism’ Rene Descartes argues that the mind and the body are really distinct, one of the most deepest and long lasting legacies. Perhaps the strongest argument that Descartes gives for his claim is that the non extended thinking thing like the Mind cannot exist without the extended non thinking thing like the Body. Since they both are substances, and are completely different from each other. This paper will present his thesis in detail and also how his claim is critiqued by two of his successors concluding with a personal stand.

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He argues that the body and soul are two elements that have the same underlying substance. He maintains that a person’s soul is the same as his nature of body; however, he argues that the mind differed from other parts of the body as it lacked a physical feature. In this case, he maintains that the intellect lacks a physical form, and this allows it to receive every form. It allows a person to think about anything, including the material object. In this case, he argues that if the intellect were in a material form, it could be sensitive to only some physical objects.

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When I try to conceive of the self, I do not think of the mind but bodily behaviour, i.e. physical displays of anger. If we cannot gain an impression of the mind, then we cannot possess an idea of the self. The assertion that Descartes has a clear and distinct perception that he is “... a thinking thing” is therefore made redundant and his conceivability argument is

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