Freewill and Determinism
in Minority Report and Oedipus, the King
The movie, Minority report frames human life as a manipulative phenomenon
which is diverged along with the choices humans make in their life. While, on
the contrary, the play, “Oedipus, the King” projects human life as
predetermined incidents experienced by humans, which in not any circumstance
can be changed or modified. Taking in reference, the article, “Freewill and
Determinism”, the movie “Minority Report” shows soft determinism, while, the
play, “Oedipus, the King” shows hard determinism.
In the movie, precogs undoubtedly predict the future about murders and the
culprits. The predictions made by them however does not always hold true, that
is, there always exists “alternate possibilities and alternate future” for
everybody. The prediction that John Anderton would murder Crow, the prediction
that John Anderton would be shot dead by Lamar
Burgess and the existence of minority report, proves that even though there is
a high probability of a person to have a predicted future, he or she always
will be open to many other options to change it by practicing “self control”
(as referred by the article). Agatha, in
the movie constantly told Anderton that he still had choice, eventhough he did
not have minority report. She predicted the future of Anderton’s son, if he had
not died. Moreover, when the precrime was after Anderton, she modified future
by making Anderton hide behind balloons and under umbrella. Thus, the movie
aptly portrays an example of “soft determinism”, written in the article, which
explains that there exist multiple futures to a human depending on the course
of action he chooses to perform.
However, the case is quite a contrast to the play, “Oedipus, the King”,
which displays the idea of hard determinism (as explained by the article). King Lauis tried to escape his predetermined
destiny of being killed by his son by making his servant throw his son in
river. However, destiny chose to keep his son, Oedipus alive. After years, when
Oedipus confronted his destiny of killing his own father and marrying his own
mother, he madea choice of leaving his kingdom and living in a far away land,
away from the king and queen of Corinth, who he thought were his parents. Despite making their choices to move away from
destiny, Oedipus and King Lauis could not move away from what was predicted. Oedipus
did kill his father and marry his own mother, though he was not aware of it for
a long time. Thus, this shows the lack
of freewill of humans to make any decision for an alternative option. This
clearly portrays the incidence of hard determinism in human life. Similarly, in the play, it is also predicted
that the person who killed King Lauis would be poor, blind and miserable in the
near future, which exactly happened. Thus, this incident of prediction can also
prove how disable a human life is in front of its destiny. As explained in the
article about hard determinism, that
humans are slaves to their predetermined future which cannot be manipulated in
any case no matter how hard one tries has been clearly conceptualized and
illustrated in the play.
Thus, the text and the movie are two completely different examples of two
intellectually varied philosophies of life, illustrated in the article, which
are hard determinism and soft determinism.
