Dexter and Philosophy
Page 28
You use the right words, you pantomime the right behavior. But the feelings never come to pass. You know the dictionary definition of emotions. Longing, joy, sorrow. But you have no idea what any of those things actually feel like. (“The British Invasion,” Season 2)
Of all the other “villains” in Dexter who wear masks to disguise their alter egos, John Lithgow’s character, Arthur Mitchell, is perhaps the most interesting as he appears to be an extremely “normal”, church-going, family man. But he is revealed to be the “Trinity Killer,” one of America’s most prolific serial killers who has evaded the FBI for almost thirty years and who terrorizes and abuses his family within the confines of their home.
The fact that Arthur’s identity has been kept secret for so long, even from his own family, illustrates how successfully a person can masquerade within contemporary society. Even the show’s supporting characters know this, as they adopt various guises throughout the series. Angel disguises the breakup of his marriage. Deb puts on a brave face following the revelation that Brian is the Ice Truck Killer. In fact Deb’s foul mouth can be read as a kind of mask that disguises her vulnerability. Rita appears to be strong in front of Cody and Astor in Season 1, following her husband Paul’s release from prison. Even Harry, a police officer, is secretly harboring and managing a serial killer.
Dexter shows that we all wear masks and disguises and that doing so is not always a bad thing (as in the case of Rita, who pretends that everything is fine for the sake of her children). According to Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche realizes “how the removal of masks does not take one to the deepest level” of our true selves. For some, “she is but this veil itself” (p. 175).
So we need to ask, is Dexter just his veil? If masks are necessary and inevitable, is everybody “just this veil”? It may be that we all wear masks, but is there anything underneath them? Is there such a thing as “truth” about our identities?
True Blood
The very concept of masks implies that there is an opposition between reality and appearance and that there is an underlying truth that is hidden by the mask. Dexter, for example, believes that he has modeled his persona on normalcy. But Nietzsche would have doubts that there is an underlying truth that is more than a construction or fantasy. Dexter himself sometimes wonders whether there is anything beneath his mask; he asks himself, “If you play a role long enough, really commit, does it ever become real?” (“All in the Family,” Season 3). Nietzsche was suspicious of empirical truth throughout his writing and begins Beyond Good and Evil by asking, “What in us really wants ‘truth’?” He questions the value of truth through what can be called “perspectivism,” the view that that our world, our opinions, and our beliefs are determined by our particular situation or outlook. For Nietzsche,
there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. (On the Genealogy of Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 92)
In “Truth and Lie in the Extra Moral Sense,”68 Nietzsche asks, “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms . . . metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power.” Thus, everyone is inevitably bound to particular social, cultural, moral, and religious ideologies and so are their beliefs and identities. An individual’s knowledge and truth, whether about the world or about themselves is never objective, as it is bound to their particular perspective. As a result, “truth” may be different for each of us; two people can have opposing views of the same thing because they have different perspectives and outlooks on life in general, on the situation, and on self.
The evolution of Dexter’s character from bachelor, living on his own in Season 1 to married father, living with Rita and their three children in Season 4, to widower and again living on his own in Season 5 illustrates this changing nature of identity and truth. Dexter’s shifting opinions of his relationship with Harry, Rita, and Deb also illustrate Nietzsche’s perspectivism as new knowledge and information, as it comes to light, affects the core of Dexter and his relationships. As audience members, we too understand Dexter’s identity in different ways as our perspective of his situation shifts.
Since there is no truth about the self, Nietzsche also rejects the idea that we can interpret the self. No individual can ever know completely or understand either ourselves or others and thus, every truth is only partial. Nietzsche rejects that “final” interpretations or truth itself exists, arguing that “truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions” (p. 47). According to this theory, it’s impossible to ever understand any facet of our world or being.
Deeply Dissecting Dexter
Just like Dexter, we all also want to know “who we are.” Self-help books, which are a multi-million dollar worldwide industry, attempt to teach us about who we are and how we can better ourselves. It is this conflict between what Dexter considers to be his “mask” and his “true self” that constantly leads him to question the “truth” of his own identity. He explains that he’s not sure “where Harry’s vision of me ends and the real me starts” (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1). For Dexter, this is important because he wants to understand his unique place in the world.
His revelation in Season 1 that he “was born of blood” in the shipping container in which his mother was murdered when he was three years old gives him a way to understand, even justify, his behavior. In “Truth Be Told” (Season 1) Dexter says, “My mother was murdered before my eyes. It makes sense I choose a life where I find meaning in blood-when the sole memory I have of her is being covered in it.” But we have to ask if this mask really excuses Dexter for the kind of life he chose.
Dexter’s self-identity constantly changes according to his experiences. The many roles he plays and masks he wears—murderer, blood spatter analyst, husband, father, brother, friend, super-hero, victim—illustrate the complexity behind his search for understanding of himself. He comes close to understanding when he asks, “Am I evil? Am I good? I’m done asking those questions. I don’t have the answers. Does anyone?” (“The British Invasion,” Season 2). As Nietzsche challenged his readers, Dexter challenges his fans to question whether and how our identities can be more than various masks. Yet Dexter may have taken this question a step farther than Nietzsche by realizing that there is still a fundamental truth about each of us—one made up of many layers and many costume changes that are in fact the “truth” of everyday life.
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Neither Man nor Beast
PHILLIP DEEN
But he who is unable to live in society, or has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
—ARISTOTLE, Politics, lines 1253a27–30
I’m neither man nor beast; I’m something new entirely with my own set of rules. I’m Dexter.
—DEXTER (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1)
Every week, millions of people who are presumably not sociopaths tune in to watch the adventures of a serial killer. Inevitably, we’re led to wonder if there’s something really wrong with us. As a loyal viewer and someone who, it will soon become clear, has spent too much time thinking about this, I would like to believe that there isn’t. I’ll assume you feel the same way.
These opening remarks from Aristotle and Dexter express the tension that allows us to follow Dexter’s exploits without immediately retreating to therapy. Dexter is a conflicted monster, one caught between the ethical life fit for humans who should live with one another and beastly desires that exclude him from the full company of humanity. He’s murderous, yet like us. He’s trying hard to be a good person, yet unlike us.
Dexter is a monster (a self-described “wooden boy”) who aspires to be a real boy. This aspiration makes him interesting. He wants to do good, maybe, but he’s unable to stop killing and channels his dark desires into
socially beneficial acts of murder. In an earlier barbaric time, Aristotle asked why we do things that we know we shouldn’t. He explained that there’s a difference between being wicked and being morally weak. When confronted with an extreme example like Dexter, it’s natural to wonder if he is really bad or, despite all the murdering, a morally strong person.
Being Bad Feels So Good
Aristotle developed the concept of moral weakness as a response to his predecessors Plato and Socrates. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates argues that virtue is ultimately a matter of knowledge or wisdom. People do virtuous things because they know them to be good, and they do vicious things when they are ignorant. We always act with some good in mind, but we may be wrong about what we’re pursuing. When we eat chocolate cake for breakfast rather than a healthy, well-balanced meal, it’s because we have made an error of knowledge. Like the person who thinks their hand is larger because it blocks out a distant sun, we mis-measure the goods of nearby delicious cake and distant health. If we truly knew which was the larger good, then we would pursue it. Vice is always a matter of ignorance.
But to Aristotle, and probably to many of us, that seems too simple. Often, we do bad things even when we know them to be bad. I may know that I shouldn’t eat chocolate cake for breakfast and that health is a greater end to be pursued, but I eat it anyway. I act against my better judgment. To explain scenarios like that, Aristotle introduced the idea of moral weakness in Book VII of his Nicomachean Ethics—calling it akrasia, a lack of self-rule. He offers various explanations for why we act this way, but however we explain it, it certainly seems true that to know the good is not necessarily to do the good.
A person may be reasonable and know what ethics demands of them, but still succumb to temptation. Aristotle understood virtue to be a matter of our relationship to pleasure. The noble find pleasure in the proper things and to the proper extent; the base enjoy the wrong things and to the wrong degree. The difference between them is that the noble are governed by reason while the base have excessive desires that overstep their proper place in a good life. Moral strength—enkratia, the opposite of akrasia—is the ability to give our various pleasures their correct measure, to do what we know to be virtuous even when we’re tempted.
The Self-Controlled Person
But there are degrees of moral weakness and strength. Aristotle lays out four (and a half) levels of moral weakness in descending moral worth. Our question is how far down Dexter falls on this continuum.
The best type of persons are those whose pleasures are properly ordered. The Greek term has been translated as ‘moderate’ or ‘temperate’. They’re not tempted by base pleasures because they know them to be base. They know what human excellence means and they act in accordance with that ideal without being burdened by their baser nature. These are the people who do not cheat, steal, or murder because they would find doing such things to be shameful and a violation of their integrity. Think of Dexter’s and Debra’s image of their father. He is their moral ideal, a committed police officer and family man. (Of course, Dexter discovers that Harry was not as perfect as he thought, forcing him to re-evaluate the Code.) Rita is also a self-controlled person; at least once she comes to take the proper amount of pleasure in sex and in being courageous (among other things).
The Morally Strong Person
Most people would probably place themselves in the second category—the morally strong person. Such people have excessive desires and must work to maintain their integrity. This distinguishes them from the self-controlled person:
While a morally strong man has base appetites, a self-controlled man does not and is, moreover, a person who finds no pleasure in anything that violates the dictates of reason. A morally strong man, on the other hand, does find pleasure in such things, but he is not driven by them. (Nichomachean Ethics, lines 1152a1–3)
Morally strong persons know what it means to be virtuous and really want to be so, but are tempted by laziness, gluttony, rage and other vices of excessive desire. Under the right circumstances, they might get drunk or “let their anger get the better of them,” but these lapses do not define them. In Dexter’s world, Detective Sergeant Angel Batista is the morally strong man. He cheated on his wife, but it was an isolated act he deeply regrets. He sought the services of a prostitute, but out of weakness and loneliness. He gets into a bar fight with another cop, but only because his wife was insulted (“Hello, Bandit,” Season 5). Otherwise, he is the fundamentally decent man that his name “Angel” ham-handedly indicates. Dexter even tells Angel, “If I had to choose a person, a real person to be like, out of anyone it would be you” (“Left Turn Ahead,” Season 2).
The Morally Weak Person
Third is the morally weak person.
Here a man who pursues the excesses of things pleasant and avoids excesses of things painful (of hunger, thirst, heat, cold and of anything else we feel by touch or taste), and does so not by choice but against his choice and thinking is called ‘morally weak’ without the addition of ‘in regard to such-and-such,’ for example ‘in regard to feelings of anger,’ but simply morally weak without qualification. (lines 1148a7–11)
In the famous words of Oscar Wilde, morally weak people “can resist anything but temptation.” Their desires are in disarray and they lack the integrity of the virtuous person. While it is not a tight fit, this could describe Deb. Though she’s an excellent police officer and able, at times, to maintain healthy personal relationships, Deb takes excessive pleasure in booze, paternal fidelity, sex, smoking and, of course, swearing. In this, she is a foil for Dexter’s lack of emotion.
The Self-Indulgent Person
Fourth, Aristotle discusses a more extreme form of moral weakness we might call self-indulgence. A morally weak person rationally chooses what is virtuous or excellent, but habitually succumbs to excessive desire. But self-indulgent persons don’t know what is virtuous, or at least don’t care. They openly choose excess.
A man is self-indulgent when he pursues necessary pleasures to excess, by choice, for their own sakes, and not for an ulterior result. (lines 1150a18–21)
Self-indulgent persons don’t choose human excellence; they choose the pleasures of the body alone. At least morally weak persons regret their actions. “A self-indulgent man . . . feels no regret, since he abides by the choice he has made. A morally weak person, on the other hand, always feels regret” (lines 1150b29–31). The self-indulgent person does not feel regret, and is therefore incorrigible, for “a vicious man is not aware of his vice” (line 1150b35). Unlike the morally weak, who aspire to virtue, the self-indulgent are simply wicked. With a consuming love of power and advancement that leads her to ruin Esmé Pasquale’s career, Lieutenant Maria LaGuerta is a possible candidate. But Vincent Masuka is a better fit. His love of all things perverse suggests that he is interested in pleasure above all else. (This decadence also makes him a personal favorite.)
The Beast and the Saint
To round out our survey, there’s the brute, who may lie outside the very idea of what it means to be a human. Brutes do not desire what is proper for humans, those things that are pleasurable by nature. Rather, they come to desire what is vicious “through physical disability, through habit, or through an innate depravity of nature” (lines 1148b17–18).
Aristotle recounts brutish acts that we have a hard time imagining even Dexter committing: “the female who is said to rip open pregnant women and devour their infant; or what is related about some of the savage tribes near the Black Sea, that they delight in eating raw meat or human flesh, and that some of them lend each other their children for a feast; or the story told about Phalaris [the tyrant who roasted people alive inside a hollow brazen bull]” (lines 1148b20–23).
Those who are brutish by nature rather than habit or accident are called beasts. The beast does not fall within the scope of “morally strong” or “morally weak.” Where nature bears the responsibility, there is no moral weakness. They are not oriented toward human
excellence and those things it is natural and good for humans to desire. We don’t blame rabid dogs. We just put them down. Or, in the case of the beastly, criminally insane people, we do not hold them morally accountable. We just lock them up forever.
In this chapter, I’ll lump brutes and beasts together as ‘beasts’. We can set aside the question of whether Dexter is naturally homicidal or was “nurtured” that way.
Now that we’ve identified the beasts, a word on saints. Aristotle also criticizes those at the opposite extreme who are miserly with regard to the necessary pleasures. “There is also a type who feels less joy than he should at the things of the body and, therefore, does not abide by the dictates of reason” (lines 1151b23–24). Aristotle did not find pleasure itself to be wicked. It’s all a matter of our relationship to pleasure that makes us virtuous or vicious. Both excess and deficiency are vices. The virtuous person represents a mean between two extremes. The world-denying, ascetic saint would be wicked as well. But then, there have always been far more people who overindulge in bodily pleasures than those who underindulge, so we can forgive Aristotle for focusing on the former.