Abstract
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, like his film Inception, contains philosophical depth. While the core of the story is about a man on a world-saving mission, the film’s narrative raises many philosophical and thought-provoking questions. What is the nature of time? Is it possible to reverse an object’s entropy and the flow of time? Can causal loops exist? Can the grandfather paradox be solved? One of the most striking and cerebral aspects of Tenet, though, is that it makes an argument for metaphysical fatalism, the idea that every event in the world is fated, and could not have been otherwise. “What’s happened, happened.” But it also argues that even if we live in a fatalistic world, our actions still matter. The fatalist view isn’t an excuse to do nothing. But are Tenet’s arguments philosophically defensible? In this chapter, an examination of the film itself, as well as a discussion of the issues that surround fatalism, will reveal that the film’s conclusion is on solid ground.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Einstein, Albert. 1955 Letter by Einstein to the son and sister of Michele Besso. Correspondence 1903–1955. Paris: Hermann, 1972.
Feynman, Richard. 1965. The development of the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics. Nobel Lecture. December 11.
Frankfurt, Harry. 1971. Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of Philosophy 68: 5–20.
Hanley, Richard. 2004. No end in sight: Causal loops in philosophy, physics and fiction. Synthese 141: 123–152.
Johnson, David Kyle. 2009. God, fatalism, and temporal ontology. https://philpapers.org/rec/JOHGFA
Lewis, David. 1976. The paradoxes of time travel. American Philosophical Quarterly 13: 145–152.
van Inwagen, Peter. 2000. Free will remains a mystery. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2676119
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Belluomini, L. (2021). Tenet as Philosophy: Fatalism Isn’t an Excuse to Do Nothing. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_99-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_99-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97134-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97134-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities