Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Films

Solaris

Albert Filice looks in the mirror and observes an alien consciousness through the eyes of Hegel.

I look at myself in the mirror and wonder, ‘Who am I? What is it that constitutes my individual self – my personal identity?’ In light of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), I realize that I am nothing without my social relationships: I cannot be fully aware of myself unless I am aware of how others see me, for I define myself in relation to others. To the extent that I’m not being recognized by other people, I will be nothing more than an “empty abstraction” or “a motionless tautology”, to use Hegel’s phrases. Thus I desire recognition by others so I can substantiate and add meaning to this apparently elusive ‘I’; and yet I find the need to struggle and maintain my sense of independence from other people in order to establish who I am.

I’ll discuss the concepts of freedom and the self in Hegel’s Phenomenology by drawing connections with Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s philosophically insightful 1961 sci fi novel Solaris (also made into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972). I’ll show how from Hegel’s perspective the notion of the self only makes sense within a social context; and thus how the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’ loses its intractability when understood from this perspective.

…