Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  Like Clarice in the novel Hannibal, Dr. Lecter sees Will as a proper canvas on which to paint his own portrait. Given that Hannibal’s motives are primarily to satisfy his own needs, any resulting kinship would not actually be the Aristotelian ideal of friendship. The other in the relationship with Lecter—Will or Clarice—is simply a means to an end; people are mere tools. As Hannibal turns people to food, he is also willing to devour them psychologically to attain his own ends. Hannibal does not love the other in his friendships as an equal, he loves the idea of being loved and therefore must attempt a fundamental transformation of the other. Keeping in mind that a perfect friendship is one between those of shared virtue or goodness, we should also keep in mind that Dr. Lecter seemingly embraces the label of evil, seeing in God both the qualities of good and evil. In the novel The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter berates Clarice when she attempts to dissect him “with this blunt little tool” that reminds him of the census taker, accusing her of having given up the essentialist categories of good and evil for behaviorism. “You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil?” (Harris, Silence, p. 19). The other in a relationship with Hannibal Lecter must acknowledge and embrace their own evil in order to be his equal. The terms of friendship are dictated by Dr. Lecter for his own ends, with any friendship remaining a variation of base self-love and consequently imperfect.

  A Tale of Two Clarices (and Two Lecters)

  In the film The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter’s artwork depicts an idealized Clarice in flowing robes standing serenely upon the path to the crucifixion and cradling a lamb—the symbol of Christ as a pure offering. Through this sketch we see Lecter’s view of Clarice: Pure, noble, protective, sacrificial. In this idealization of Starling, derived from her heroic yet futile actions in trying to rescue just one innocent creature from slaughter (similar to Hannibal’s sister), we glimpse the nature and potential that Lecter sees and admires. It is interesting that in the final act of the film Hannibal this symbolism is explicitly evoked, with Dr. Lecter restrained by Mason Verger with arms outstretched as in crucifixion—Lecter is now in the place of Christ, the Lamb—his death clearly anticipated. It is Clarice who intercedes to bring him down from the cross, again attempting justice and thwarting vengeance. In this act, for Dr. Lecter, Clarice realizes the potential he envisioned for her—the salvation of a God-like man from imminent death. In the process Starling is wounded and the doctor in turn plays the role of savior and physician, cradling Clarice in his arms as she cradled the lamb, bringing her to safety, and tending to her injuries.

  From this point on there is a stark divergence between the actions of the literary and cinematic characters. The Dr. Lecter of the silver screen longs to see Clarice acknowledge and embrace her own principled and righteous nature, no longer dependent upon accolades from her government superiors: “Would they give you a medal, Clarice, do you think? Would you have it professionally framed and hang it on your wall to look at and remind you of your courage and incorruptibility? All you would need for that, Clarice, is a mirror” (Scott, Hannibal). In contrast, the literary Lecter seeks to manipulate and transform Clarice into something more in his likeness and fitting his desires. The cinematic Lecter would mutilate himself rather than harm Clarice, leaving her psychologically and physically much as he found her a decade before: First, do no harm. The literary Hannibal—who appreciates Starling’s prowess as a warrior—takes hold of those things which are admirable and noble in order to twist and transform them into something that matches his own character. In the television show and in the novel Hannibal, Dr. Lecter provokes transformation as he sees fit. Hannibal’s success in creating an equal worthy of his companionship is achieved only by the corruption of both the beautiful and the good in Clarice Starling. In this process there are echoes of Dr. Frankenstein’s ability to create a mate for his creature, using material that had previously served a substantially different life. The ideal kinship longed for in human nature is subverted by Dr. Lecter’s attempt to recreate his own quasi-divine image in another. Although the television Will and the literary Clarice come close to fulfilling Lecter’s desire for perfect friendship, it will forever elude him, for his equal must be created through corruption, through the deprivation of what was good.2

  We are left to wonder if the Clarice of the film and the Clarice of the novel are—before and after their respective interactions with Dr. Lecter—the same character. In one version of events Agent Starling is saddened and repulsed by Lecter’s unorthodox culinary lobotomizing of Paul Krendler, whereas in the novel she gleefully asks for more of what is being served and sits casually at the table as Krendler is killed. True, she is under the influence of powerful hypnotic drugs, but even after their administration has ceased she stays by Lecter’s side and becomes his companion. Was it always within Starling’s character, an unrealized potential within her nature, to succumb to Dr. Lecter’s corrupting influence? Studies in human obedience have revealed that we are capable of questionable and even cruel actions given the right circumstances, but afterwards we generally regret and then rationalize our actions. Is Clarice really just like any of us, or worse? Perhaps we would rather see Starling as the film presents her, ever courageous and incorruptible with Hannibal Lecter as her savage yet noble advocate. Based upon what we know of first principles, we are left to contemplate whether these two depictions really represent the same characters with the same natures. Perhaps the disparate behaviors of Dr. Lecter and Agent Starling between novel and film speak to distinct essences, or perhaps these really are the same characters, just on different journeys. Perhaps each had within them the potential for substantial change, good and evil. Something to ponder.

  I Do Wish We Could Chat Longer . . .

  Setting aside the idea that it is generally preferable to eat the rude, what can we learn from Dr. Hannibal Lecter? Even though Hannibal speaks of the great mass of humanity as “all those other poor dullards,” in his longing for companionship we see an essential part of human existence. Hannibal’s experience illustrates that although we can indeed choose our friends it is probably a mistake to mold our potential friends in ways that subvert their choices and their values, using them simply as means to an end. Doing so only creates a rather one-sided friendship based on utility rather than mutual respect. Also, plying people with mind-altering drugs may get you into trouble . . . but if you’re a cannibalistic genius with a God complex, it may be difficult to resist the temptation to remake someone in your own image.

  More helpfully, from Lecter’s emphasis upon first principles we should be careful never to trust mere appearances, not with others and not with ourselves. Observe carefully, over extended periods of time, and we’ll see character revealed. As rational beings we have the ability to reflect not only on the behavior of others, but on our own thoughts and behavior as well (what cognitive scientists would call “metacognition”). We can ask ourselves if our actions align with our values and who we wish to be and become. As the German poet, Goethe, once observed (and I translate loosely), “Behavior is the mirror in which everyone reveals their nature.” This applies to everyone and everything, not just to Dr. Lecter and Clarice. While much of our cognitive processing goes on without our awareness, we still possess the ability to be mindfully aware of our choices and behaviors, guiding the actions that will shape our amazingly flexible brains. These choices therefore shape our habits and what will later be known as our character. Dr. Hannibal Lecter was careful to conceal his actions and consequently his true nature, showing others little more than what his own psychiatrist described as a “well-tailored ‘person suit’ ” or a “human veil” (Hannibal, Season 1, “Sorbet”). What choices will we make, what behavior will we exhibit, and what nature will we reveal to ourselves and to the world?

  1 For a more extended discussion of Hannibal Lecter’s capacity for friendship, including in relation to Aristotle, see Chapter 10 of this volume.�
�Ed.

  2 For an account of the relationship at the end of the novel, Hannibal, as liberating for Clarice (and Lecter) rather than corrupting, see Chapter 18 of this volume.—Ed.

  III.

  They Say He’s a Psychopath

  7

  Psychopaths, Outlaws, and Us

  RICHARD MCCLELLAND

  Humans constantly seek to know “what kind of thing is it?” This is largely because we are biologically hard-wired to make such judgments. Thus, we can tell whether that blob we see in the distance is a human face. We can tell if the motion of that thing over there is caused by a biological agent or mechanical. We can distinguish natural sounds (the tree creaking in the wind) from artificial sounds (the axe falling on the wood). We can tell from a human’s gait what its gender is and often its individual identity. The neural systems that support these automatic judgments are largely reliable and accurate under normal conditions. Such categorical judgments undergird a great deal of natural science and philosophy both. Indeed, it is arguable that neither would be possible for an animal that did not make such judgments reliably. Faced with the startling character of Hannibal Lecter, it is not surprising, then, that other characters in Thomas Harris’s novels would ask, “what kind of thing is this?” Lecter appears in four of Thomas Harris’s novels, and most fully in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising. In these stories, a lot of people want to categorize Lecter. Some think he is a psychopath, some that he is “a pure sociopath,” some that he is “a monster.” Getting the category right is important, for categories, when accurate, often tell us what the basic causal powers of a thing are and thus what to expect from it under various conditions and in various circumstances. I will argue that Lecter is best understood to be a certain kind of outlaw. But first we must clear some ground.

  He Is Not a Psychopath

  Humans are remarkable for their capacity for empathy. We now know that empathy comes in two varieties or has two main aspects (and two independent neural networks to support them). One is the capacity to understand another person’s point of view, to “get” how the world looks to them. This is the thinking side, sometimes called cognitive empathy. The other is to have an appropriate emotional response to the condition of another person. This is emotional empathy, and it is often accompanied by the physical reactions that go with those emotions.

  We know that psychopathic personalities typically display normal or near-normal cognitive empathy: they understand us and our points of view, often very well. However, they show relatively little capacity for emotional empathy: they understand us but they don’t care about us.

  It is now customary also to divide psychopathic personalities into two types, primary and secondary. Primary psychopathy is largely inherited and thus tends to run in families. If one member of a pair of identical twins turns out to be a psychopath, the odds are high that the other member of the same pair will also be psychopathic. Secondary psychopathy (sometimes called sociopathy) is learned behavior (though it may very well otherwise resemble that of the other kind of psychopath). It is learned at the hands of other members of a subculture that cultivates such behavior. Both types tend to be unempathic, given to impulsive behavior, poor control of behavior, poor forward planning, and spontaneous aggressive reactions to others.

  The main reason for thinking that Lecter is not a psychopath, of either type, is that he shows a rich capacity for normal working of both kinds of empathy in concert. We can see this both in Lecter as a child and as an adult.

  His Empathic Childhood

  Hannibal is an extraordinarily intelligent and gifted child. In response to this, his father appoints Mr. Jakov to be his tutor. Jakov and Hannibal often go walking to discuss their lessons. Jakov often turns to speak into the air next to him, forgetting that he is walking with a child much shorter than himself. One day, Hannibal wonders to himself whether Mr. Jakov misses being able to talk with someone his own age. That kind of wonderment requires empathy to reach it.

  Hiding from German and Russian soldiers in the family hunting lodge in the forest, in 1944, Hannibal goes to great lengths to protect his younger sister, Mischa. Once, given a crust of bread by his captors, Hannibal puts the crust in his own mouth until it is soft, and then gives it to Mischa. That, too, is the mark of an empathic response, realizing she would be unable easily to chew the dried bread. Hannibal and Mischa have been taken captive by a group of six men, themselves formerly collaborators with the Nazis and now on the run from both retreating Germans and advancing Russians. Grutas and his gang are entirely ruthless (here’s your real psychopath). They have two other children captive when they come upon the hunting lodge, where all the adults have already been killed. They use these children for food. Eventually they come for Mischa. Hannibal tries in vain to prevent them from taking her, suffers a violent attack on himself, and loss of his beloved sister. Those efforts to protect Mischa also give evidence of empathy (of both kinds) in the young Hannibal (he is eleven years old).

  Two years later, Hannibal has been rescued from a Soviet orphanage by his uncle, who takes Hannibal back to his estate in France. Hannibal is entirely mute at this time (we will come back to this later). The uncle dies suddenly of a heart attack. At his funeral the beautiful aunt, Lady Murasaki, is weary and Hannibal senses her fatigue. To help relieve it, he talks to the other mourners, so that Lady Murasaki does not have to. This sensing of his aunt’s fatigue and his immediate use of his rusty voice to relieve her fatigue, is an empathic response: he consciously feels her fatigue and he deliberately and compassionately acts on that feeling.

  Years earlier, when Hannibal’s family has just recently retreated to the hunting lodge, Hannibal one day cuts loose from its vine a mature eggplant, polishes it up with his handkerchief and puts it where Mischa will see it. For Mischa loved the color purple. Here, too, we see the eight-year old Hannibal very directly tying his actions to his empathic awareness of someone else’s desires. Psychopathic characteristics, and especially those that plague the human relationships of psychopaths, we now think, begin to appear in childhood. They can be reliably measured in children as young as three years of age. If Hannibal were a primary psychopath, he would by age eight already give evidence of this. And he does not. Indeed, quite the contrary: his empathic abilities are as advanced as his other intellectual and artistic abilities. What about Hannibal as an adult?

  His Empathic Adulthood

  Lecter becomes a successful psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Baltimore. It is, of course, possible for a psychopath to become a psychiatrist. But it is extremely rare. Successful practice of psychiatry, and virtually any form of psychotherapy, requires empathic ability, both cognitive and emotional, working together. We may infer, then, that the adult Dr. Lecter is not a psychopath, whether primary or secondary. Moreover, we sometimes actually see him practice his profession.

  He treated Margot Verger therapeutically following her brutal rape by her brother Mason. In Hannibal we meet the older Margot, twenty years on. She reminds Lecter of their earlier encounters and especially the first one. She had stitches in her and was afraid of having to sit down. Lecter knew this and instead invited her to walk with him in the garden and to talk there, while they walked. For Margot to accept this treatment it would have been necessary for it to be a genuinely compassionate offer, one that took into account her possible suffering (without mentioning it) and did so honestly. False compassion would not serve the therapeutic alliance. And compassion is the handmaiden of empathy.

  Twice in his novels, Harris mentions Hannibal’s practice of going to public performances or public exhibitions and standing to one side to “read” the faces of the audiences. This reading is not literal: he is picking up the expression of human emotions from those faces. This is something that most adult humans can do very well, automatically and without thinking about it. The brain mechanisms of such emotional interpretation of facial expressions are well known and understood. Lecter is exercising his empathy.

  For the most part
empathy tends to cause us to act prosocially and cooperatively towards others. But there is no necessity about this and empathy can also be a weapon. Lecter is normal in this regard also. Senator Ruth Martin’s daughter has been kidnapped by the serial killer Jame Gumb and imprisoned in a dry well in the cellar of his house. Lecter is interviewed by Martin, who thinks that he has special information that can identify Gumb (as indeed he does). Lecter taunts Martin with having breast-fed her daughter as an infant. “Thirsty work, isn’t it?” Lecter says to her. Harris continues: “When her pupils darkened, Dr. Lecter took a single sip of her pain and found it exquisite” (Harris, Silence, p. 184). The whole exchange puts Senator Martin at a sharp disadvantage in her power struggle with Lecter.

  Eventually, Lecter becomes the lover of Clarice Starling, a woman thirty-two years younger and a special agent with the FBI who is hunting Lecter. They become lovers as a direct outcome of Lecter’s psychotherapeutic interventions with Starling following their joint escape from the certain death that Mason Verger conspires to bring them. That treatment succeeds in freeing both Starling and Lecter from neurotic fixations that have prevented both from forming intimate relationships with others in the past.1 Indeed, Lady Murasaki once offered to become Lecter’s lover (some time after the death of her husband). But Hannibal cannot respond to her offer positively, for he has already promised loyalty to Mischa. He has promised Mischa revenge for her own murder (for food). And until he achieves that revenge he is frozen in his virginal state. Starling suffers from a blockage tied to her memories of her dead father. Both find freedom eventually, and each other (as improbable as that may otherwise seem). This would not happen without an empathic ability in Lecter (at age sixty-five).