The Twilight Zone and Philosophy
“A Nice Place to Visit”
Have you ever seen an episode of the Twilight Zone? Each is a small, beautifully strange slice of the human experience. The episodes take on a definitively moral, existential undertone and overtone. That is to say, they’re moral and existential through and through. Though, it’s left as an “exercise to the viewer” to decipher the so-called “moral of the story”. The Twilight Zone thus imparts, in addition to its already meaning-rich content, the further opportunity for personal existential engagement and reflection.
By now, you are probably getting the sense that my main agenda is for an individual to develop a personal connection to philosophy. I want to work with and understand my thoughts, ideas, beliefs…and I invite you to do the same. This is your mind and your life, after all: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And unlike a used car salesman, I’m not here to scam you. (Though I assume by selection bias my readers are already philosophical and thus I ought not sound too preachy, I think this is an important point to reiterate). Furthermore, while I think my philosophy classes are excellent, I often feel constrained by standards of academic rigor or by the narrower subject material with which we are working. I find myself working in the confines of other people’s thought, all the while longing for the chance to ponder and explore freely. This column thus serves a beautiful purpose in allowing me to freely share my thoughts with others.
Today I’m writing about my favorite episode of the Twilight Zone. It’s called “A Nice Place to Visit”. If you’d like to pause now and watch the episode, feel free; I won’t know the difference. In any event, I don’t think you’ll need to have watched the episode to understand what I am going to write here—but there is something to be said about direct, first-hand experience, so it is my gentle suggestion that you watch it! It’s season 1, episode 28.
Doomed to Get Everything You Want for Eternity
Imagine there is a chain of take-out restaurants that gives out fortune cookies whose predictions are always 100% accurate for their recipient. All of these fortune cookies, I might add, are precise in their choice of words, and the intention is never to mislead the recipient, but merely to state that which is to be the case. Each fortune cookie in this particular restaurant tells the recipient their fate in the afterlife.
Imagine you’re a bad person. Imagine you’ve violently robbed people your entire adult life. You don’t need what you steal, but instead you steal out of your sheer (and sole) desire for material goods. You also physically harm the people you’re stealing from if you “need” to in order to get what you want. And, in fact, you stole the very fortune cookie that has your ultimate fate sealed within it. It would seem fitting for the fortune to foretell punishment for you, but instead, it says something that appears quite different: You will get everything you want for all of eternity. You smirk and eat the fortune cookie, then wad the fortune up and flick it at someone. How do you feel about your fate? You’ve never felt better in your life. You then suffer a massive heart attack, the result of years of too much MSG, and are pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
A Response to Fortune Cookie Fate
The simple response is that the fortune cookie is simply deceitful, because there is a second-order consideration to which we might want to attend. That is, you may get everything you want for all eternity, but is it true that you want to get everything you want for all eternity—is this something you could in actuality desire?
This is essentially what “A Nice Place to Visit” explores—the idea that a person whose sole focus and pleasure in life is on gaining material goods would in fact become miserable in the afterlife if they were granted everything they ever wanted. In life, the villain protagonist of the episode thinks his true end is the material goods, but might it in fact be the struggle of getting them? For instance, if you need to steal from people to get what you want, there is no instant gratification. Theft takes, in most cases, prior planning, or at the very least brute physical force in the absence of pre-meditation. When the struggle to obtain material goods, for instance, is removed, the futility underlying the pursuit of them is revealed. This is what I take the moral of the episode to be, put very simply. But let us interpret it further. Assuming we are not morally “evil” (whatever that might mean), or aren’t habitual criminals, what meaning can we derive from “A Nice Place to Visit” (which I think should be be sub-titled “But Not to Stay”)?
Material Goods Aren’t Enough
We might just counter that this is not really a problem of order (i.e., wanting to get everything we want) because if the goods in question are inherently valuable, it should automatically follow that to the nth order, we would want to want them, even eternally. It might instead be a category error: that is, we are assigning a status to material goods that belongs only to another type of good, such as immaterial goods; therefore we get the absurdity that “getting everything you want for all of eternity” is a curse, not a blessing, but only when the goods in question are of the wrong sort. But then, how do material goods differ from immaterial goods? Let’s give some examples.
A material good might be the following: jewelry, a fancy car, and maybe things with value insofar as they can be used to obtain other, in this case material, things (e.g., money). Material goods can also be modest necessities like food, shelter, clothing. Think back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and recall Augustine’s contention that no substance, i.e., thing, is bad in and of itself. What we call “evil”, according to Augustine, is a privation of good that is the result of a misdirection of the human will towards an overvaluation of lower (i.e., material) goods, and away from higher goods—the immaterial ones.
So, the issue in “A Nice Place to Visit” is not that material goods are valued or pursued, but rather that they are pursued as ultimate goods, which they are not. The villain protagonist of the episode, furthermore, has no ability to transcend the material and get to something greater. Hence, it would be impossible to derive any eternal fulfillment from material goods because by nature they are transient and mutable.
This is leaving something out though, in focusing exclusively on “ends”. What about the means we use to obtain certain ends, regardless of what the ends themselves are?
Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine and The Idea of Overcoming as Granting Meaning
If you’ve heard of Nozick’s famous Experience Machine thought experiment, you may want to respond to “A Nice Place to Visit” by further claiming that the issue lies in the fact that if we are just “granted” everything we want, we are deprived of our individual agency. Perhaps by nature, metaphysically or psychologically, we want to feel we are exerting effort in accomplishing our goals: that we accomplish things not just through natural law, or chance, or divine intervention, but through our own efforts. So, we would then suffer if our ability to struggle against the world to pave our own way were suddenly taken away from us in the form of a supposed “gift” (the gift being ‘whatever you want, instantly, forever’).
In essence, do we desire to struggle? Desire itself seems like a sort of struggle. For instance, we often want something until we get it—the desire is strongest until we receive the object of our desire, then we move onto desiring something else, until we either run out of desires or run into an unfulfillable desire. To extend this to the means we use to pursue goods, the process of pursuing goods itself might have some inherent value insofar as working to gain what we want—whether this is by “moral” or “immoral” means—gives us fulfillment and meaning in life. Perhaps it even gives us a sense of identity. The thief is defined not just by what they steal, but that they steal. The philosopher is defined not just by the ideas they propose, but by the often arduous thought process they utilize to arrive at certain conclusions. Without a sense of identity in the world, with only the external (material) goods taken as an end, where are we in the equation of life? It would then make sense that we’d feel empty and without meaning.
We might further stipulate that there is another, deeper distinction between material and immaterial goods that has to do with internal agency. That is, internal agency and effort inheres within an immaterial good like knowledge or wisdom. Unlike a material good, where you can in theory have one (the object) without the other (the effort to gain it), in immaterial goods, the two are conceptually inseparable. For instance, when you know something, you possess it, and you possess it in a way unlike a physical object. Your knowledge that 2+2=4 is universal, and yet particular. Most everyone knows this mathematical truth, and you own it in the sense that you comprehend it with your own rational faculties. However, material (or sensory, if you like) goods are not like this. We cannot all have the same cake and eat it, too. (For more information on this general thesis, consider the Medieval Problem of Universals and Aristotle and Aquinas’s discussions of the different types of the intellect. I believe Avicenna and Averroes had much to say on this matter as well).
Confusing the End with the Means
In general, we might confuse an end with a means. By this I mean we might think the ultimate end in life is to get some “thing”, when it may really be to strive for something—not a new idea. Ultimate fulfillment may then very well be a confused concept, as the absence of desire (fulfillment) might be an undesirable state, or, on the contrary, the absence of all desire might be a desirable state. This all sounds weirdly paradoxical, so could desire itself even be an ultimate good? Could the ultimate end be a means? That doesn’t sound right either.
We might then arrive back to the immaterial, wherein means and ends might be united. In the pursuit of the immaterial and in the immaterial itself (e.g., in knowledge, understanding, and wisdom), we utilize our individual capacities, possess Truth in a way more profound than from possession of mere material goods, and may attain lasting fulfillment—truths are neither transient nor mutable. So if by “getting everything we want for all of eternity” we mean working to attain self-knowledge and knowledge of eternal truths, this may not be a curse after all.
In any event, all of this is contingent on what the randomized fortune cookie deity says, so we may as well relax in our fate, whatever it may be, for now, in this twilight zone of our musings.
Thank you and goodnight.
– Ashley Gasdow