Voluntarism in The Vanishing

The reputation of 1993’s The Vanishing has suffered because critics judge it inferior to the 1988 Dutch movie of which it was a remake.  But considered on its own terms, it is a solid enough little thriller.  Jeff Bridges is effectively creepy as the oddball family-man-cum-kidnapper Barney Cousins.  I had reason to re-watch the flick the other day, and was struck by what I take to be an underlying theme of the contrast between voluntarist and intellectualist conceptions of human action.

To oversimplify, intellectualism in the sense in question is the view that the intellect is prior to the will, whereas voluntarism holds that he will is prior to the intellect.  That is to say, for the intellectualist, the will only ever wills what the intellect first judges to be in some way good; whereas for the voluntarist, the will wills what it does independently of the intellect, and the intellect follows along for the ride.  The dispute is thus over whether it is ultimately the intellect or the will that is “in the driver’s seat” of human action.  Naturally, things are more complicated than that, but this characterization will do for present purposes.

Applied to the issues of free will and moral responsibility, the dispute between voluntarism and intellectualism cashes out in the difference between what theologian Servais Pinckaers calls the “freedom of indifference” and “freedom for excellence.”  On the former conception of free will, associated with Ockham, the will is of its nature indifferent toward the various ends it might pursue, and thus is freer to the extent that it is at any moment equally capable of choosing anything.  The implication is that a will that is strongly inclined to choose what is good rather than what is evil is less free than a will that is not inclined in either direction.  By contrast, on the conception of free will as “freedom for excellence,” which is associated with Aquinas, the will is inherently directed toward the good in the sense that pursuit of the good is its final cause.  The implication is that the will is more free to the extent that it finds it easy to choose what is good and less free to the extent that it does not.

How is this relevant to The Vanishing?  Let’s start with a brief summary of the plot.  (I’ll leave out the most crucial spoilers, for any readers who haven’t seen it.)  The movie begins with Barney elaborately planning a kidnapping, for reasons that are only revealed later and made especially hard to fathom given that he otherwise seems like an ordinary, middle class loving father and husband.  Meanwhile, we’re introduced to writer Jeff Harriman and his girlfriend Diane (played by Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock, respectively) who are on vacation and stop at a large and busy gas station, where Diane goes into the snack shop to pick up supplies.  After waiting in the car for an unusually long time, Jeff goes to look for Diane but can find her nowhere.  The employees, customers, and police all prove to be of no help in finding her, and she has vanished without a trace.

The movie then flashes forward three years, and we find that Jeff has during that whole time been looking for Diane without success.  He has posted fliers with Diane’s picture all over the vicinity of the gas station, appeared on television to discuss the case, followed any lead he can find, and repeatedly badgered the police, all to no avail.  The search has become an obsession, and has exhausted him.  When he starts a new relationship with a waitress named Rita (played by Nancy Travis) it seems he may finally abandon the search.  But then Barney, who has been following the case during this time, decides to contact Jeff and reveal that he is the one who abducted Diane.  He promises Jeff that he can at long last find out exactly what happened to her, but only if he agrees to experience what she did – beginning with allowing Barney to drug Jeff with chloroform to knock him out, just as he had drugged Diane. 

I’ll leave it to the interested reader to watch the movie and find out what happens.  The relevance to voluntarism is this.  When explaining to Jeff why he did what he did, Barney begins by describing actions he had performed through the course of his life despite their being dangerous.  One of them involved saving a drowning girl, which had made Barney a hero in the eyes of his daughter.  But rather than gratifying Barney, his daughter’s admiration troubled him.  He worried that he could not be worthy of being thought by her to be a good man unless he was just as capable of doing great evil as he was of doing good.  And so he decided that he would prove to himself that he was capable of such evil by doing the worst thing he could think of to another person – which turned out to be Diane (and where we find out exactly what he did to her by the end of the movie).

Barney’s tale reveals, first, a fixation on the power of the will.  He recounts jumping off a roof as a boy even though he knew it was dangerous, and indeed resulted in him breaking his arm.  Throughout the movie he is almost always unflappable even in moments of distress, as when he suffers a serious beating with equanimity.  But the truly voluntarist element is his apparent belief that a praiseworthy action could only flow from something like what Pinckaers calls the “freedom of indifference” – that is to say, from a will that was not in any way aimed at the good more than at anything else, but opted for it anyway.  This, it seems to me, is the best way to make sense of Barney’s claim that he could only be worthy of praise for his good action of saving the girl if he was no less capable of an evil action like what he does to Diane.  The kidnapping was, in effect, his way of proving to himself that he did indeed possess the “freedom of indifference.”

Had he not been able to bring himself to do such an evil thing, and had he saved the little girl because of an inclination toward benevolence, this would have been perfectly consistent with what Pinckaers calls the “freedom for excellence,” and would have been morally praiseworthy on that conception of freedom.  Barney’s dissatisfaction with himself evinces an implicit rejection of this conception and of its implications concerning what makes a person praiseworthy.  But neither do his actions flow from any positive inclination towards sadism, nor from a rejection of moral norms.  He is portrayed as, in general, a pleasant enough person.  And he acknowledges that it is just for Jeff to want Barney harmed for what he has done.  He never evinces the slightest enjoyment of causing others pain.  All his actions are performed in the bloodless manner of a scientific experiment (and indeed, it is revealed that Barney is a chemistry professor).  He simply wants to make of his will something capable of anything. 

Only a good action that flows from this kind of will is, he thinks, praiseworthy, and the reason seems to be that he thinks only this kind of action would flow from the sheer arbitrary freedom of the will alone rather than from any natural sentiment of benevolence or from a respect for rational criteria.  This is, to be sure, a curious conception of freedom and moral praiseworthiness, and quite perverse (indeed, depraved) from the point of view of an intellectualist like Aquinas.  But reading Barney as implicitly committed to a conception of freedom as the “freedom of indifference” makes intelligible what might otherwise seem a simply bizarre and incoherent character motivation.

If Barney takes the voluntarist emphasis on the will to an extreme, there is also a sense in which the other main character, Jeff, can be said to take the intellectualist emphasis on the intellect to an extreme.  His new girlfriend Rita grows increasingly frustrated with his inability to overcome his obsession with finding Diane.  She is, more than anything, jealous of this lost former girlfriend she has to compete with.  Jeff explains that Rita is the one he loves, and that romantic longing no longer has anything to do with his obsession with finding Diane.  It is not knowing that bothers him.  He admits that if he had a choice between two scenarios, one in which Diane is alive somewhere and happy but he never finds out what happened, and one in which he does find out but she is dead, he would prefer the latter.  Whereas Barney has made himself into a blind will divorced from intellect and its standards of truth and goodness, Jeff has made himself into an intellect obsessed with attaining a certain piece of knowledge to the exclusion of willing what is in fact good. 

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