What philosophy would you suppose that the joker would subscribe to?

Question

Was the villain "the joker" in the dark knight a nihilist and an anarchist?

Answer 1

I would say he wouldn't even think about it. He said he is an agent of chaos so I guess that means that he would be an anarchist. Personally I just think he serves his own purposes and likes playing head games. Very brilliant but not a great philosopher. Not In the out there kind a way, more of a inside peoples minds kinda way

Answer 2

I believe that he is in fact insane, but his point (or the point that we can draw from him) is that sanity is just one of the many possibilities, a certain 'configuration of masks'. We say 'every sane and rational person acts like this and like that', but the problem is that sanity itself already involves a series of pathologies (a dose of narcissism, guilt feelings...), prohibitions (incest, child s*x...), etc. Furthermore, from a certain perspective, the Joker's perspective in this case, sanity is the most horrific self-delusion. The proof of this is in one of the last scenes (and a climatic moment for me): Commissioner Gordon, a sane man from beginning to end, grotesquely lying to his son ('everything is gonna be all right') because he could not bear the fact that the truth was so violent and destructive. Gordon was a sane and rational man, so he COULD NOT let his son hear the truth from his mouth. That is utterly pathetic.

I think that if the Joker were to talk about sanity in the movie, he would have said something like 'sanity, yes, but whose?'.

Answer 3

i would have to say that the joker would have to live by a philosoph that if there is a reason for something then there is a need to break down and test that reason, in every point of the movie he pointed out that his chaos was completely controlled, like give me so and so or i blow up a hospital, that was controlled chaos, he just tested the stability of the system, and spread the idea of descartes, and that is to question everything which is what people did throughout the entire movie