Alejandro Amenábar and the Embodiment of Skepticism in Abre los ojos

ALEJANDRO AMENÁBAR AND THE EMBODIMENT OF SKEPTICISM IN ABRE LOS OJOS by David Laraway Brigham Young University FOR most philosophers of the Anglo-American tradition, the problem of radical skepticism and its variants – i.e., the possibility that I could be massively mistaken in my beliefs about the external world, other minds, and even myself – no longer has the cachet it once did. Although it maintains a respectable place in contemporary epistemology it is clearly on the periphery of the discipline and no longer claims the attention once devoted to it by philosophers of the stature of Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Pride of place now goes, rather, to the task of naturalizing epistemology, which seeks to interpret questions about the nature and scope of our knowledge in terms consistent with those used in the physical sciences.1 Philosophers working within the framework of contemporary European philosophy are perhaps even less interested in the problem of radical skepticism. Whether their starting point is broadly phenomenological, hermeneutical, or something else altogether, the fact that the problem of radical skepticism can be formulated at all merely demonstrates the obsolescence of traditional metaphysical programs and the need for a philosophical methodology more responsive to our lived experience.2 If the problem of radical skepticism is somewhat passé in certain philosophical circles, the word, apparently, has not gotten out to contemporary screenwriters, directors, and the viewing public: a surprising number of popular recent films explore variations on the theme of radical skepticism and its corollaries.3 Abre los ojos, a 1997 film by Chilean-born Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar, is a case in point.4 The movie embodies the skeptical dilemma par excellence in its exploration of the protagonist’s inability to distinguish 65 between dreaming and waking states. Indeed, it has been noted that Abre los ojos belongs not only to a long tradition in Spanish letters that reaches back at least as far as Cervantes and Calderón; it also invokes the legacy of such thinkers as Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume (Martín 93). But I think it is important to note that the philosophical significance of the film does not lie in its deployment of a version of Descartes’ dream argument, intriguing as this may be. Rather, the real achievement of Abre los ojos, in my view, is the way it provocatively suggests that there is a deep connection between the challenge of radical skepticism and the phenomenological character of embodiment. Specifically, the film calls into question the notion that the phenomenon of embodiment somehow preempts or negates the threat posed by radical skepticism . But far from obviating the possibility that we might be radically mistaken in our beliefs about the world, it suggests that to be embodied is just to face the possibility that one might be in massive error regarding the external world and one’s place in it. Indeed, by interpreting the problem of skepticism as a corollary of embodiment, Amenábar makes a case for a reinvigorization of the problem, suggesting that it might still lay claim on us in surprising ways.5 My intention in this paper is to examine how the threat of radical skepticism in Amenábar’s work emerges as a consequence of an ineluctable tension between our pre-conceptual experience of embodiment and the conceptual resources we have available to us in articulating our relationship between ourselves and our bodies (and, more generally, between ourselves and the external world). A further aim, no less important if less explicit, is to suggest that the relation between the body and our knowledge of it may be fruitfully explicated as not only a problem to be addressed with the tools of traditional epistemology but with the resources of narrative in general and film in particular. If I am correct, Amenábar takes us a great distance toward reclaiming the legacy of radical skepticism, bringing out dimensions of the problem that have unfortunately been obscured or ignored in much of the recent philosophical literature. The film begins simply enough. Before the lights come up on the first scene, we hear a woman’s voice insistently repeat the phrase, “abre los ojos.” The words seem to...