Question about the philosophy of the movie "fight club".?

Question

the movie obviousely had a deep meaning and a nihilistic view of modern day society.

can anyone explain in detail exactly what "tyler durden" was trying to express about society, god, and our animal instincts?

what did he suggest we act like?

Answer 1

Every one has 2 sides

Which side controls you?

Answer 2

Not philosophical... about as philosophical to Americans as the Smurfs are to five year olds.  Its made for entertainment, nothing more.  People confuse being swept away in a story for "depth"

Answer 3

Fight club is perspective on masculinity in society that has come to include violence and aggression as being the test of "manhood".

Young men in particular can be manipulated into a variety of actions through the play on their perceptions of masculinity.

it is beneficial to society to manipulate its members to serve a variety of functions.

Answer 4

poor use of the word philosophy.  Movies do not have philosophies.  They have plots, subplots, themes, scripts, climaxes, actors, blocking, etc., and perhaps present ideologies.

Answer 5

I find it more a study of the psyche. The split personalities and how he deals with them is the key. He learns from his own character unwittingly sometimes. He used charisma to control the goons while all along he was trying to reconcile his own mind. Shooting himself was the ultimate physical control that he wrestled away from Tyler.

Answer 6

Fight Club was neither deep nor philosophical, but if you convince your buddy to crack you in the head hard enough I'm sure you will have visions. -_-

Answer 7

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Even with Westerners’ facile understanding of martial arts, the idea that spiritual growth can come hand-in-hand with disciplines of Eastern defense practices like judo or karate is plausible. But what about spiritual growth from violence itself? One should note that Buddhism does not view violence as something that is inherently evil or to be necessarily evaded. In fact, Buddhism enables the individual to see past social judgments and principles that deny justifications for violence in any form. Alan Watts,[i] an author and interpreter of Eastern traditions, describes the Buddhist experience as “liberation from conventions of every kind, including the moral conventions.”[ii] While Buddhism is not a revolt against convention, it “does not share the Western view that there is a moral law, enjoined by God or by nature, which it is man’s duty to obey.” [iii] The Buddha did prescribe precepts of conduct in his Eightfold Path, including no killing, stealing, lying or using intoxicants. But the precepts are intended only to remove hindrances from clarity of awareness, rather than impose moral retribution for violent acts that an individual commits.[iv]

But another interpretation of Fight Club, as spiritual allegory, gives a different view: the guy gives up all his possessions, gains a following of monks and then shoots himself and lives—at the same time destroying his illusion of himself and becoming liberated from samsara, which translated from the Buddhist term, is the vicious circle of suffering that people experience in life. While getting rid of possessions and finding liberation is not limited to Zen Buddhism, the tradition’s openness to make use of violence as a means for spiritual growth may be, indeed, uniquely Zen Buddhist. The central character Jack uses fighting and terrorism as his yoga to destroy the abstractions of maya, or illusion, that he uses to identify himself. By constantly defining himself with the illusions of a consumerist lifestyle—foisted on today’s modern society by an advertising machine that perpetually imposes unattainable desires—he feels frustrated because he can never achieve those illusions of identity. With insights about the Zen Buddhist tradition from Alan Watts’ lectures and his book, The Way of Zen, we can see how Fight Club is a Buddhist spiritual journey, where the path is a search for identity in a world of consumerism and abstraction. [v]

To Be Somebody

[6] Search for identity is initiated by the very first line of the movie where the narrator, spoken by actor Edward J. Norton (let’s call him “Jack,” from the quote “I am Jack’s medulla oblongata” etc.), says “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.” We assume that Tyler Durden is not the narrator who’s got a loaded pistol wedged in his mouth. At the end of the movie we of course learn that Jack and Tyler are the same person. The line thus immediately sets up an inquiry of how an individual is identified, both by others and by the individual himself. Do you know Tyler Durden? Do I know me?

At this point, whoever Tyler Durden is, Jack is not. Jack is a self-professed yuppie whose search for identity leads him to ask, “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” His identity is defined by the furniture and clothes he owns. As Jack describes to the arson investigator, “I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that was destroyed. It was me.” He wants to be someone, in the postmodern, consumer sense of “environmentally-friendly unbleached paper” and “Planet Starbucks.” Even his apartment complex is called “Pearson Towers”—one letter away from “person”—which is “A Place to Be Somebody.”

But the possessions are merely representations of what he wants to be. He doesn’t really care about the actual stuff—where it came from, how it was made or what it really looks like—as long as it reflects the desires being fed to him by the “Ikea nesting instinct.” For example, the “green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections” are “crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of… wherever.” As he scans the apartment, his mind fantasizes, populating rooms with abstractions right out of the catalog. His identity is an abstraction of his material goods lifestyle—he is what the goods represent, and not what they actually are. The stuff represents a type of consumerist spirituality for Jack, as when he pines for his sofa destroyed in the blast: “I was so close to being complete”—the same completeness that he feels later when crying in the bosom of the Big Moosie, played by Meat Loaf Aday, when he feels “lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete.” Even his work is based on formulas (which are simply mathematical symbols) for deciding who lives and who dies: “If A times B times C is less than X, we don’t do a recall.”

By seeking identity from abstractions, Jack is not really a person—he is just a representation of one, like the color pictures of furniture in the catalogs he reads. He literally sleepwalks all day, “where nothing is real” and “everything is just a copy of a copy.” In Buddhist terms, Jack’s state is samsara, which is the cycle of birth and death, also known as wandering—the perpetual daze that Jack finds himself in. Watts puts samsara in more modern terms: “a squirrel cage … the rat-race,” “a vicious circle.”[vi]

According to Buddhism, samsara is caused by desire in any form: desire for wealth, s*x, love and, indeed, identity—the need to define one’s self. People desire because of maya, a Hindu term that, generally speaking, means illusion.[vii] According to the Hindu tradition,[viii] maya is that which overlies Brahman, which Westerners might conceive of as God. In terms of identity, maya leads people to come up with ideas about themselves. Indeed, consumerism is a form of maya, leading individuals to desire beautiful but unattainable images, such as the body by Calvin Klein. “We’re by-produces of a lifestyle obsession,” as Tyler observes. “We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars—but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” In not measuring up to the abstractions that an individual identifies with, one feels frustrated and suffers.

Buddhism is to help people find freedom from maya and samsara—to become liberated from endlessly needing to define one’s self and measuring up to that definition. In Sanskrit, the title “Buddha” literally means “the awakened one”—one who is released from the very sleepwalking rut that Jack is stuck in. As Watts observes, liberation can be seen as “the discovery of who or what I am, when I am no longer identified with any role or conventional definition of the person.”[ix] Jack can be liberated when he does not need to define himself with any abstractions, such as those represented by material possessions.

At this point, however, Jack is a “consumer,” and to deal with his suffering, reaches for an opiate of today’s masses: sleeping pills. But his doctor refuses to prescribe them. Instead, the doctor sends him to, of all places, First Methodist, a church where self-help groups will show Jack “real pain.”

Initially, the meetings help. Jack is able to sleep soundly and has feelings of liberation: “I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.” Participants are told to “really open ourselves up,” which is to say, become open to who you are, and let go of the abstract standards and conventional thinking about whom you are supposed to be.

[14] But Jack isn’t really liberated. He is identifying himself with another representation, this time a poor, sick little “me” that gets recognition because of a lie that he has testicular cancer, AIDS or tuberculosis. He only pretends to be the identity of Rupert, Cornelius or “whatever name he gives himself each night,” as Marla points out. The liberation Jack experiences, when “every evening I died and every evening I was born again, resurrected,” is just a vacation from samsara. He is a tourist who is “addicted” and “needs this.” Jack also starts desiring Marla, whose chicanery of identity—by attending the testicular cancer group, she even feigns gender—reflects Jack’s.

[15] Single-Serving Friend

[16] Once Jack confronts Marla and exposes his own lie to himself, he considers the question, “If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?” The question is significant because it involves a discussion about how the past is another abstraction of identification that Jack must be unburdened from to realize liberation from samsara.

[17] As if to answer Jack's question, Watts points to a few lines from T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets which echo Jack’s inquiry: “When the train starts, and the passengers are settled… You are not the same people who left that station/Or who will arrive at any terminus.” The individual who gets on a train—or a plane, in Jack’s case—is not the same person who gets out at the next stop. Who someone was 10 years ago, a month ago, yesterday and even two minutes ago are long gone and not the same person he or she is right now.

[18] But people don’t see that. They see the illusion, the maya, that the individual who got on the plane is the same one now stuffed into the economy-class seat. Belief in the continuity of one’s self from one moment to the next is based on the need to define and hold one’s own identity. “The desire for continuity is the desire for the perpetuation of a past self or a string of selves, with which we identify ourselves,”[xi] Watts observes. “To identify one’s self with [the past] is

Answer 8

So, I finally made it through the entirety of Fight Club two weeks ago. What I gathered from it (philosophically) is, as you said, a Nihilism, brought on by the social constructivism of a mass consumerist society (not a Nietzschean "Death of God"). I took Durden to be an Anarcho-Primitivist, and the theme of this philosophy certainly underlies the events carried out by the Fight Club members.

Essentially, we are Natural agents which have, vis-a-vis the development of agriculture and "civilization," severed ourselves from our "mother" if you will, which is Nature. We have thus devolvd rather than evolved.

My belief is that, if (and only if), the society collapsed in the context of the movie, that Durden would have lead his followers to a Neo-Hunter-Gather culture of their own making. The "fighting" of Fight Club would become a mere tool, a means to an ends which would disappear upon fulfillment of the Neo-Primitivist state of existence, as returning to Nature would invalidate its necessity.

The Nietzschean elements to which you "might" be referring, perhaps, are "Master Morality" and "The Will to Power." However, by severing themselves from the "Slave Morality" of the social order, it only appears that the members of Fight Club are creating their own "Master Moralities" - when they "conform" then to Fight Club they are, yet again, in the quagmire of a "Slave Morality."

Yet, they are all following their own "Will to Power" for sure...

P.S. Remember that Nietzsche was not a Nihilist himself, he simply predicted the Nihilism which was to come as a result of the Death of God; a Nihilism which we would have to transcend lest we go mad and destroy ourselves.