Better Call Saul and Philosophy

Joshua Heter, Brett Coppenger, Joshua Heter, Brett Coppenger

• Publisher: Open Universe
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781637700266
• eBook ISBN: 9781637700273
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Essays

Better Call Saul and Philosophy: I Think Therefore I Scam is a collection of twenty-three essays exploring the philosophical themes in the hit television show Better Call Saul, a prequel to the TV show Breaking Bad. The sixth and final season of Better Call Saul, with thirteen episodes, began airing in April 2022.

The central character is Jimmy McGill, whom we know from Breaking Bad as Saul Goodman. In Better Call Saul he first takes the name of Saul Goodman from the phrase "S'all Good, Man!" Jimmy/Saul is a natural con artist who not only scams from self-interest but also because he enjoys it. He has a strange relationship with his brother, the distinguished lawyer Charles McGill, who resents Jimmy's delinquency and advantage in parental affection. Jimmy/Saul becomes a lawyer for a drug cartel, and most of the people he meets are criminals and other kinds of villains.

Like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul raises a wide range of philosophical issues including the nature of good and evil, personal identity, free will and determinism, the law as it relates to morality, the ethical implications of the war on drugs, death and dying, and many more. Better Call Saul and Philosophy offers thoughtful fans of the show deeper and more provocative insights into the story and the characters.

Topics covered include: the morality of keeping promises to wrongdoers, the nature of psychosomatic illness, difficult moral choices facing lawyers, just how good or bad are some of the compromised characters in the show, the unintended consequences of the War on Drugs, the similarities between drug cartels and governments, whether bad people are just unlucky, the perils of self-deception, and whether we ever really have much of a choice.

Better Call Saul and Philosophy is Volume 8 in the path-breaking series, Pop Culture and Philosophy.

IV Confidence is good—facts on your side, better

12 A Cave of His Own Making

TIMOTHY J. GOLDEN

My brother is not a bad person. He has a good heart. It’s just—he can’t help himself. And everyone’s left picking up the pieces.

—CHARLES “CHUCK” MCGILL

What I find so interesting about Better Call Saul are the relationships in Jimmy McGill’s background. As the story unfolds in each episode, it’s easy to see that the “Saul Goodman” whom we have all come to know and love—or hate—from Breaking Bad has many complex relationships that help to make him the compelling character that he is.

Of course, Bob Odenkirk’s excellent acting has a lot to do with Jimmy’s charisma and charm, but it is how these attributes of Jimmy present themselves in his relationships that make Jimmy so compelling. For example, Jimmy’s relationship with Kim Wexler seems to move between a complete disgust that Kim directs at Jimmy for his irresponsibility and manipulation on one hand and a Bonnie and Clyde–styled couple committed to con artistry on the other hand. What a rollercoaster of a relationship!

And then there’s Jimmy’s relationship with his big brother, Charles “Chuck” McGill. Despite Jimmy’s charm and his charismatic ability to manipulate, it is in this relationship that Chuck seems to be in total control, even in his own death. Chuck is unable to overcome his hypochondria and yet is perfectly capable of being rational enough to discern Jimmy’s role in the Mesa Verde numerical transposition scandal. But why?

Chuck’s Life in a Cave

One way to answer our question about Chuck’s ability to point out Jimmy’s involvement in the Mesa Verde scandal while being unable to overcome his hypochondria is to interpret Chuck with Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave,” which is found in Book VII of Plato’s dialogue, Republic. Plato, speaking through Socrates, tells the story of people who are chained to their seats in a cave so that they can only see what is in front of them. Behind these people are another group of people who are carrying various objects in front of a fire. The light from the fire casts shadows of the objects onto the cave wall in front of the prisoners, who, looking at the shadows, wrongly assume that the shadows of the objects are the actual objects themselves. One day, a prisoner escapes the cave and sees what is actually happening. This same prisoner goes outside of the cave and beholds a world that is very different from the one inside the cave; a world that the rest of the prisoners do not even know exists. When this prisoner returns to the cave and tries to liberate the other prisoners, they reject what he has to say and even want to kill him. The point of the Allegory of the Cave is straightforward: the world that we see inside the cave is not the true reality. All we see in this world are shadows that we believe are real, but actually are not. Beyond this world of the cave (the world in which we live) there is a true reality that none of us will ever see, except those who are enlightened enough to make it out of the cave through the use of philosophy (our reasoning) that will help us distinguish between the false reality that we see and the true reality that our reason can know.

So, we often associate Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with intellectual freedom from the bondage of our social and cultural beliefs—the chains that bind us and force us to look forward inside of the cave. But here I want to think of the Allegory of the Cave differently. Instead of the cave being a place where we’re imprisoned against our will, Chuck enslaves himself through the use of his imagination in a way that thrusts responsibility onto Jimmy to care for him as punishment for his past wrongs, all while helping him to avoid responsibility for a healthy relationship with Jimmy.

We can see the reasons why Chuck wants to get back at Jimmy in the episode titled “Rebecca.” In “Rebecca,” Chuck explains the family background to Kim, detailing how his and Jimmy’s father was good-natured to a fault. According to Chuck, their father was unable to recognize wrongdoing at all, often allowing customers to take store merchandise without paying for it. In fact, his father indulged Jimmy so much that although Jimmy stole money from the register for years, he was never held accountable for any of his thefts because their father refused to believe that Jimmy would steal from him. Not long after Chuck discovered the thefts, their father died and, according to Chuck, no one cried harder at the funeral than Jimmy.

Chuck sees in Jimmy’s unpunished thefts a fundamental failure to hold Jimmy accountable for his actions that has resulted in Jimmy living a life of deceit and manipulation, abiding by a corrupt code of ethics based on an “end justifies the means” sort of analysis. As Chuck points out to Kim in “Rebecca,” Jimmy “is not a bad person. He has a good heart. It’s just—he can’t help himself. And everyone’s left picking up the pieces.” It is important to point out that Chuck is having this conversation with Kim after Jimmy blunders a job opportunity with a prestigious law firm on the strength of Kim’s recom- mendation. Forced into a situation that made both her and her law firm look bad before the legal community, Kim is being punished by doing the dreaded task of “doc review”— the grunt work of litigation—as opposed to being a front-line member of the law firm who directly handles legal matters for clients. Chuck, then, having seen the damage that Jimmy has done to Kim, is trying to provide Kim with some background so that she can better understand why Jimmy cannot be trusted.

Since Jimmy has never been held accountable, then, what better way for Chuck to teach Jimmy a lesson than to put him in a situation that will require him to think of others before himself? Enter Chuck’s hypochondria, which will enable him to retreat into a fictitious world of denial—a cave of his own making—in an attempt to keep Jimmy accountable directly to him. This retreat into a cave of his own making accomplishes two things for Chuck: first, it keeps Jimmy close to Chuck, so Chuck can hold Jimmy accountable for caring for him, and second, it enables Chuck to pursue vengeance against Jimmy for all of the harm that Jimmy did to their father and their family; again, harm for which Jimmy has not been held accountable.

Plato’s motivation in the cave allegory is to support his theories of reality and knowledge; he wants to show that we must move from the darkness of the cave to the enlightenment of truth. In contrast, Chuck must build and remain in a cave in order to bring Jimmy “to the light” of his wrongdoing. And it is Chuck’s imagination-driven vengeance toward Jimmy to punish him for past wrongs that, rather than lead Chuck out of the cave, drives him deeper into it. Although Chuck’s imagination helps him construct a cave to imprison Jimmy, Chuck also imprisons himself using his imagination—what Aristotle called phantasia—in ways that cause him to be a good lawyer with high levels of rational discernment, but a bad brother with low levels of love and respect for Jimmy.

Good Lawyer, Bad Brother

Aristotle wrote extensively about the nature of the human soul and about what makes us virtuous. Philosophers call the former “psychology” and the latter “ethics.” The root word for psychology is the Greek word psuche, which means “soul.” The sort of psychology that interested Aristotle is unlike what we know psychology to be today, which is a rigorous, scientific discipline concerned with the study of human behavior.

For Aristotle, psychology was that subfield in philosophy committed to presenting a rational account of the human soul, which explained its composition and its relationship to the physical body as well as its relationship to the rest of the natural world. When I reference “Aristotle’s psychology,” then, I am referring to Aristotle’s attempt to present a rational account of the human soul in relation to the body and the rest of nature (plants and animals). Aristotle’s psychology is connected to his ethics, which, again, is about the sorts of things that one must do to be virtuous; that is, to be considered “courageous,” “kind,” and the like.

Aristotle explains his psychology in his work titled De Anima. There, he points out that the human soul has three faculties: nutrition, perception, and reason. This three-fold division of the soul is also compared with other parts of nature such as plants, which Aristotle argues only have the faculty of nutrition. That is, vegetation is able to assimilate nutrients into its biological structures to grow and develop according to its various kinds. Perception is not present in vegetation. Animals, however, have both nutrition and perception. Animals not only eat, but, in the case of predatory animal species, they use sensory organs such as the eyes and the olfactory system to capture their prey.

Lastly, humans, Aristotle argues, have both perception (our five senses) and nutrition (humans need food), but they also have reason, a faculty that enables an intelligence which Aristotle believes is not present in any other living thing in nature. Reason is what Aristotle refers to as idios—the Greek term for “peculiar”—to human beings. And it is this insight about peculiarity that connects Aristotle’s psychology to his ethics, because Aristotle points out, in his famous “function argument” that we evaluate the quality of a thing by how well that thing performs its essential function. The essential function of a thing is that which is peculiar or idios that thing. For example, we call a knife or other cutting instrument a “good” knife or cutting instrument if it cuts crisply and sharply, because cutting is peculiar to cutting instruments, and we call a clock a “good” clock if it keeps the correct time, because keeping the correct time is peculiar to instruments that are designed to measure time.

Applying this same reasoning to human beings, Aristotle, arguing from his psychology in De Anima, concludes in his ethics that since reason is unique to human beings, we measure the quality of a human being by how well that human being performs the essential function of reasoning. And we perform the essential function of reasoning in our moral life by choosing a virtuous course of conduct that lies at a mid-point between two extremes, which are vices. So, the virtue of courage, for example, is found at a mid-point between the deficiency of cowardice and the excess of foolhardiness, and the virtue of kindness is found at a mid-point between the extreme vices of meanness and self-sacrifice. Philosophers often refer to this as Aristotle’s “Golden Mean.”

Understanding Chuck’s relationship with Jimmy in these Aristotelian terms is insightful. First, consider the relationship between Aristotle’s psychology and his ethics, and then apply that to how Chuck treats Jimmy. Consider that in Aristotle’s psychology, there is an intermediate place between perception and reason that Aristotle calls phantasia, or imagination. Although it too is peculiar to human beings, imagination falls below reason, making one who is overly imaginative irrational, sort of like Don Quixote, who believes that windmills are enemies and charges at them as though he is in battle, or sort of like Chuck, whose hypochondria—a form of imagination or phantasia—has him convinced that he has “electromagnetic hypersensitivity.”

On the one hand, then, Chuck is functioning at a subrational level because of his imagination, but on the other hand, Chuck is able to function at a rational level to serve his clients as a lawyer, exhibiting ethical conduct toward his clients like Mesa Verde. Chuck’s imagination thus has him behaving irrationally toward Jimmy because he wants vengeance on Jimmy for his past wrongs by making him completely responsible to “care” for him because of his “illness,” but Chuck does not allow his imagination to compromise the rationality that he needs to fulfill his lawyerly obligations to his clients.

We can argue that imagination—that mid-point between- perception and reason in Chuck’s soul—is well below the rational mid-point necessary for Chuck to be a virtuous brother toward Jimmy. In other words, Aristotle’s psychological, imaginative mid-point that Chuck embraces to exact vengeance on Jimmy, morally speaking, represents the deficient vice of meanness toward Jimmy that is well below the virtue of kindness that Chuck needs to be a good brother. Here, Chuck’s hypochondriacal irrationality of perception results in a moral irrationality—a vice-driven disposition of meanness—toward Jimmy. But not only does Chuck’s psychologically deficient use of imagination manifest itself as the moral vice of meanness that falls below the moral virtue of kindness, it also manifests itself as the moral vice of cowardice that falls below the moral virtue of courage, for if Chuck was committed to moving forward in right relationship with Jimmy, he would have the courage to do so without resorting to a cave of his own making because of his preoccupation with Jimmy’s prio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• It’s Showtime, Folks!
• I: Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun
• II: You can be on one side of the law or the other
• III: Put on your big boy pants and face reality
• IV: Confidence is good—facts on your side, better
• V: See, that’s your problem—thinking the ends justify the means
• VI: Never make the same mistake twice
• Bibliography
• The Hostile Witnesses
• Index
• Back Cover