Friendly Neighborhood Philosopher

Every now and then, a work of art comes along that helps us think through the thicket of mysteries that is the human condition, shedding new light on the questions that have occupied the finer minds of our species for millennia. Such was the Iliad. Such was Hamlet. Such was Don Quixote. And such is Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

No, really.

The latest installment in Marvel’s interminable superhero saga is not only one of the highest-grossing films of all time—it is the fastest film ever, entertainment media reported breathlessly, to cross the $800 million mark—but also among the most soulful. The problem it raises is one that has been bedeviling us for ages, and is only getting worse: the conundrum philosophers like to call the problem of other minds. 

How do we know the people around us—the cashier in the supermarket, the mayor of our town, our second cousin twice removed, anyone and everyone—actually have minds of their own? How can we be sure that they aren’t merely hallucinations we’ve summoned out of fear of being lonely or bored?

The question may sound silly. There’s a reason people sometimes say that philosophers spend too much time in their own heads. But the question has been central to Western thought for centuries, a thread connecting René Descartes to John Stuart Mill to Bertrand Russell. And as so many of us retreat into the sterile, disembodied platforms of cyberspace, the problem of other minds is getting more pressing by the hour.

Put crudely, it’s this: As we conduct more and more of our interactions online, we have no real way of knowing who (or what) is tweeting, posting, emailing, or messaging back at us. Things were bad enough before the rise of artificial intelligence. Recall the famous New Yorker cartoon of two hounds sitting in front of the computer, with one reassuring the other that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” That cartoon was published in 1993, long before Claude and ChatGPT could captivate us with conversations that, too often and for too many, are indistinguishable from those of another living person blessed by his Creator with the gift of cognition. 

And so, baffled and terrified, we tend to revert to one of two extremes. The first is solipsism. We have a menu of digital distractions at our fingertips, and we peruse it for our enjoyment. We send a message to a friend on Facebook. We spend fifteen minutes playing a video game. We don’t necessarily care that one activity involves a real person somewhere, typing back at us with real, fleshy fingers, while the other involves avatars generated by a computer program. The whole wide world of pixels, we tell ourselves, was created simply for our enjoyment, and as soon as our minds wander, we pick up some other pastime to amuse ourselves. 

Then there’s telepathy, solipsism’s exact opposite. Because the thought of being alone in the world terrifies us, we tell ourselves that not only are other people real, but they must be able to read our minds, perfectly and coherently. If not, how could we ever communicate? Unless you understand me perfectly when I tell you I’m in pain, how could you empathize? And if our respective, subjective ideas of pain differ wildly—one of us wailing when he stubs his toe, the other merely wincing when she slices open her finger while chopping vegetables—how could we ever understand each other?

Into this morass of other minds swings the beloved web-slinger, Spider-Man. 

There’s no need for a summary of previous installments of Spidey’s adventures. All you have to know to enjoy the latest one is that Peter Parker, the young man in the red-and-blue spandex suit, in order to protect his loved ones, arranged to have their memories wiped. His best friend, Ned, and his love interest, MJ, don’t recognize him now when they run into him at the corner bodega. 

Spider-Man, in short, becomes the ultimate solipsist. He speaks only to E.V., the AI assistant he built to help him keep his arsenal of high-tech gadgets in fighting shape. And his loneliness is, quite literally, killing him. A few minutes into the movie, we learn that because he no longer interacts with other humans in a meaningful way, his delicate DNA balance—half man, half spider—is shifting. He’s turning all spider now; his eyes grow black and arachnid-like, and his humor and decency fade into an animal-like rage. He’s no longer our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, but just another predator in New York’s concrete jungle, fighting not for justice but for singular supremacy. 

This change terrifies the affable Parker, who spends his evenings alone, staring at the letter he has written to MJ in case he ever finds the courage to tell her they were once in love. He’s very lucky, then, that Jean Grey is around to help him out of his funk.

Remember her? The most celebrated, perhaps, of the X-Men? As Marvel prepares to relaunch the beloved series of movies about “mutant” teens endowed with superpowers, it gives us a delightful crossover for the ages. Grey is a telepath, able not only to read minds but to control the people whose thoughts she commandeers. If Spider-Man is alone in his world, Grey’s world contains multitudes, and part of the film’s visual pleasure is watching the gorgeous choreography that ensues as she hops from one mind to the next, leaving her hapless victims confused about what just happened to their bodies and their brains. 

If you’re older than eight, you already know how this movie ends. You should watch it nonetheless. Spidey—like that other famous superhero before him, Ludwig Wittgenstein—learns that “private language” cannot and must not exist.

Imagine, Wittgenstein proposed in one of his most famous thought experiments, that everyone had a box where he kept something called a beetle. And imagine no one but the box’s owner could ever open it and look inside. In that case, Wittgenstein argued, the word “beetle” couldn’t possibly mean “the thing in the box,” because, available only for its owner to behold, it could be anything or nothing at all. The beetle in a box, like thoughts in a brain with no way out, wouldn’t make any difference to that which we call language, the tool that allows us to understand each other and learn to live side by side in the world. As the Austrian philosopher put it, “A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it is not part of the mechanism.” 

Spider-Man only arrives at the same conclusion after fighting a bunch of ninjas, the Incredible Hulk, a sinister government organization, and his own hormones. But arrive at it he does, and we can only hope that his young fans, not a cohort likely to seek out old Ludwig and his ideas, take the same philosophical journey. 

The film—no spoilers!—ends with a truly touching act of selfless sacrifice. Our beloved superhero returns to the land of interpersonal communion, where we share our thoughts, and sometimes ourselves. And therein an important philosophical lesson is artfully portrayed: Carping about Cogito ergo sum is all fun and games for philosophers and superheroes, but the rest of us live right here in the imperfect world, needing each other’s love, withering without community, desperate for something bigger than ourselves to believe in. And that need won’t be satisfied unless we step out of our private world and take the risk of relating to that scariest (and most precious) of things—other people. 

Spider-Man ultimately finds all of the above: love, community, and something he cares about more than himself. Even if just a few of his internet-addled and AI-dependent admirers feel moved to seek the same, Spider-Man: Brand New Day will merit its place as a truly great and important work of art.