Warning: This essay contains a major spoiler of the movie Dead Poet Society. If you’ve not seen the movie, try to watch it before reading what comes below.
My wife and I were in Paris yesterday to attend the play Dead Poet Society, a theatrical version of the famous movie starring Robin Williams in the role of the professor John Keating. Though I had already seen the movie twice, the second time being relatively recent, it never occurred to me how much the philosophy that the character of John Keating tries to teach his students shares a lot with John Stuart Mill’s celebration of individuality that we find especially in the third part of On Liberty.
Keating’s philosophy is exemplified by the Latin expression carpe diem, literally “seize the day.” Keating is telling his students that they should not be the slaves of conformity and profit from every opportunity to make their lives extraordinary. This is distilled in a small number of memorable scenes, such as when Keating tells his students to reap the pages of a book pretending to devise a scientific method to assess poets or enjoins them to walk in their own style. The general idea is that you will find value in your life by discovering who you are and by defining yourself as an individual constituted by the values, projects, and interests that you endorse as a person. Social conformity quite the contrary pushes individuals to submit to the prevailing opinion, to literally refrain them from discovering and expressing their individuality.
John Keating (Robin Williams) expounds his philosophy in the movie Dead Poet Society.
The movie is set in the 1950s in a fictional elite English school. This is not quite the Victorian England context in which John Stuart Mill was writing. The pressure of social conformity is however a common feature that serves as a background to affirm the value of individuality. The title of the third part of On Liberty, “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” gives a good idea of Mill’s thesis. Individuality is valuable both socially and as part of the fulfillment of one’s life. There are many inspiring paragraphs on those pages such as this one that Keating could surely have read to his students:[1]
“He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first of importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery – by automatons in human forms – it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”
This long paragraph admirably encapsulates what I understand to be Keating’s philosophy. Human beings are not machines programmed to blindly follow social rules or the prescriptions of some social authority. To be an individual is to make your choices your own through the exercise of reason. This requires qualities that make her an autonomous being and this is what makes her life valuable.
The enemy of individuality is the “despotism of custom.”[2] Defeating it requires liberty and so liberty and individuality go hand in hand. But that’s not enough. Referring to Tocqueville and von Humboldt, Mill argues that “human development” requires a “variety of situations,” something that, as Tocqueville with respect to France, he considers is diminishing in the England of his time.[3] Uniformity of situations discourages the expression of individuality because it leads to the uniformity of values, ideas, and projects that individuals endorse. It makes it more difficult to escape the despotism of custom by strengthening the commonality of opinion, thus reinforcing the authority of “society” on its members. In the movie, John Keating’s to his students to express their individuality creates dramatic tension precisely because the institutional environment of the elite school erases any difference in situation, thus making it even more difficult to resist the despotism of custom. But other institutional environments can prove inimical to individuality. Mill, again following Tocqueville, acknowledges that democracy can be a threat to diversity by favoring “the ascendancy of public opinion in the State.”[4] The philosophy of John Keating is thus not only relevant for students at an elite school but also to citizens in a democracy.
Now (spoiler upcoming), the movie ends in a tragic fashion. Following Keating’s philosophy and encouragement, one of the students decides against the will of his father to get involved and perform in a play. This leads the student to commit suicide and Keating to be fired by the school after the father discovers it. This tragic ending reflects in a way the underlying cost of expressing one’s individuality, as conceived by Keating and Mill, especially when the environment is not hospitable. In his philosophical analysis of Mill’s life and philosophy, the philosopher Elijah Millgram defends the idea that Mill’s conception of individuality in terms of a unitary life project is directly responsible for Mill’s troubles in living a happy life.[5] Living a valuable life as Mill conceives it is extremely demanding because it requires permanently confronting social opinion. More fundamentally perhaps, it demands to impose a discipline on oneself that can be mentally exhausting and lead to cut social and familial ties – after all, your friends and family are among those who contribute to the “despotism of custom.”
More generally, we may have here an insight into what I would call the “tragedy of perfectionism,” at least the kind promoted by Mill and Keating. A society organized along perfectionist principles that make the expression of individuality the ultimate value is probably too demanding and impossible to realize.[6] Too many people would not be able to live by its requirements. If it cannot be established as a social morality, perfectionism may constitute a personal ethics. But this may be a painful one to follow when the rest of society rejects it.
[1] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 58.
[2] Ibid., p. 69.
[3] Ibid., p. 71.
[4] Ibid., p. 72.
[5] Elijah Millgram, John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 2019).
[6] For sure, other forms of perfectionist liberal philosophy also promote autonomy and individuality that may be less demanding and therefore avoid the tragedy. See for instance Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press, 1986).