Family movie for the weekend, “Mission: Impossible 7.” Aristotle would say a franchise is a continuity of substance with ever changing irrelevant accidents. In one of the farewell scenes, Luther gives a short speech to Ethan in which he says, “Whether we like it or not, we are masters of our destiny. Nothing is set in stone. And our cause, however just, pales in comparison to the impact of our effect. Any hope for a better future comes from wanting that future to come true. A future that reflects the measure of good we carry within us. And all the good within us is measured by the good we do for others. We all share the same destiny, the same future. The sum of our infinite choices. Such a future is built on kindness, trust, and mutual understanding—if we choose to accept it. Leading unquestioningly toward a light we cannot see.”
And I had a eureka moment. It seemed to me a perfect example of mental chaos in this modern world, of the lack of basic premises of our civilization and our individual lives. Let’s dissect the corpse:
“We are masters of our destiny.” Only through our freedom and our decisions do we take command of our lives, but those decisions must be based on an idea of life and of our own humanity. If there isn’t a human conception of life, a metaphysics of our own life, as Julián Marías would say, we simply adopt the options given to us; we don’t exercise our freedom. Life isn’t made; I have to make it myself; I can’t make it alone. I have to make it with things, which transcend me and are beyond me. Before doing anything, I need to have an idea (an a priori) of that reality close to me and of my reason to be ( raison d’etre). Life in human terms is a project, a futurity, so I have to imagine… and I can only do that with decisions based on my premises.
“Nothing is written.” This lie is a deep-seated premise in our society. It is one of the most damaging and ignorant lies of this modern world. The divergence, the fundamental schism in this modern world is between those who, following Hegel, Descartes, Sartre, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, and a long etcetera, think that man conquers himself from within, man as self-creation, with a beginning and end in himself and those who believe that the substance of man is given and man follows or deviates from his calling beyond life with his decisions in a personal and individual struggle; man is not invented, he only fulfills his destiny in freedom. In this modern world nothing is predetermined, premises change, and one can construct oneself from one’s own universe of premises .i.e. today I feel like a woman so I am a woman. This self-creation is something contingent and without future, since the temporal horizon is the only one at hand. It is a wandering and mechanical dissertation of human nature.
“ Any hope for a better future comes from willing that future into being” … We all share the same destiny, the same future. The sum of our infinite decisions.” This is a false premise, but one that has been repeated for at least 200 years since Hegel in his “History of Philosophy,” stated that human history is nothing more than progress in the awareness of freedom. The following phrase is also Hegelian and depressing. The unity of destiny and the sum of all our decisions is the axle that will carry us to that dreamed future. Hegel said that personal individual freedom is not valid because it is conditioned by circumstance, something that Ortega later developed in depth and Heidegger also points out with his concept of “Dasein” (that being there), where he once again highlights the immediacy of life and the inseparability of that experience in spirit and flesh, Plato’s game. Hegel finds the unity of individual satisfaction and freedom if they conform to the social ethics of an organic and changing community. This Hegelian simplism has permeated modern philosophy since the 1920s with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, which seeks to identify the contradictions and transformative forces in society, with the aim of promoting emancipation and liberation. But it denies the fundamental freedom of man, his individual and irreducible freedom.
“Leading unquestioningly towards a light we cannot see.” After several assertions that understand life as a pure mechanism without a transcendent horizon, now…we seek the light. The truth is that we always seek the light, that destiny that calls us as Saint John of the Cross describes “This light led me, more surely than the light of noon, to where (who could say!) he who knew me well waited for me.” This modern world pretends to understand life as pure mechanics in which each man creates himself from nothing but then we seek a light beyond our individuality because it is clear that mechanistic premise falls short. William Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” There’s no way to reconcile these views. Despite this mechanical, impoverishing materiality of life…in the end, we seek our destiny beyond ourselves.
The film is a series of well-shot action sequences, in which Tom Cruise (who hasn’t acted in decades) does his own stunts (hard-working guy), and a Hollywood screenwriter who was commissioned to create a farewell piece with a sense of depth between the bullets, jumps and fights … but not much, this is an action franchise. I think it’s a beautiful example of the disorientation and unbearable lightness of this world.
References
Metaphysical Antropologie by Julián Marías 1970
Meditations on Quijote by José Ortega y Gasset 1914
Being and time by M Heidegger 1927