Herzog's Cartesian Theater: Skepticism, Self, and Stories in Theater of Thought

Introduction

In Theater of Thought, Werner Herzog supplies the viewer with a marvelous overview of contemporary neurotechnology development, covering a wide array of emerging technologies that includes wearable brain scanners, quantum computing, optogenetics, deep brain stimulation, augmented and virtual reality, brain-machine interfaces, mental state decoding, next-generation fiberoptics, and nanotechnology. Along the way, viewers are introduced to the neuroscience of embodied self-awareness, fear, olfaction, inner speech, and much else.

Of even greater significance than its pedagogical function are the various ways in which Herzog organizes the film and reacts to his subject matter during his own appearances within it. These elements give the film a genuinely philosophical character well worth exploring. I do not claim in the following to capture with any significant degree of reliability Herzog's actual intentions. Rather, I will simply state what seems to me a reasonable and cohesive interpretation of some key elements of the film while drawing out lessons that, intentionally conveyed or not, can be of use in considering the ethical, legal, social, and existential implications of the neurotechnologies and basic science that Herzog displays on screen.¹

For Herzog, one of the most important aspects of neurotechnology is that it raises anew certain classic philosophical problems. Looming largest is the epistemological question of how to explain and justify both our self-knowledge and our knowledge of the world outside our own minds. This provides a throughline that connects several of Herzog's other major themes, which include the relationship between brain, self, and narrative self-understanding, how to interpret the idea of technological progress, and wonder at the profound mystery of consciousness. In what follows, I will consider each of these in their turn. First, however, I must say a word about Herzog's methodological approach.

Herzog's Methodology

Herzog has been known as a groundbreaking filmmaker for some time. One factor is surely his bold choice of subject matter, which in his documentary work alone includes topics as far-flung as Kuwaiti oil fields, volcanoes, capital punishment, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Internet, cave paintings, and a man who lived (and died) among grizzly bears. A second factor is the suffusion of Herzog's films with his own existential sensibilities. Both factors are on full display in Theater of Thought—the former in the sophistication of the neurotechnologies countenanced and the rather exotic nature of some of their applications, the latter through Herzog's own dialogue and directorial choices.²

Indeed, in many segments Herzog affects a posture that I can only liken to the Socratic ignorance professed by its namesake in many of Plato's earlier dialogues.³ As with Socrates, Herzog professes a lack of knowledge on fundamental human questions (here, the workings of the brain and mind) and seeks answers from those who do profess to know. This apparent naivete belies an intellectual depth from which proceeds sharply provocative questions and statements intended to probe what the experts really do know. Among the most interesting are:

Herzog is forthright about not knowing quite what to make of the technologies to which his interviewees introduce him. Of computer scientist and electrical engineer Darío Gil's explanations of quantum computing, for instance, he says, "I admit that I literally understand nothing of this." Things have not improved much in this regard even by the end of the film, when he remarks that "my voyage into our mind ultimately leaves me more mystified." These professions notwithstanding, Herzog clearly has an incisive grasp of neurotechnology's potential applications and the consequences of these for human life. He is thus able to offer viewers an impressive array of critically important questions to ponder, even if he largely holds off on furnishing answers.

Herzog's explicit statements are coupled with a number of similarly provocative directorial choices, such as interviewing neuroscientist Jack Gallant in the dingy projector room of the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. There are also (judging by their reactions) several shots in which the camera lingers on interviewees for an uncomfortably long period of time after they have finished speaking, as well as an extended sequence in which materials scientist Polina Anikeeva walks through a series of corridors while eerie music plays. (There will be more to say about the potential significance of these elements later.) The overall effect is a scientific and philosophical tour de force. But what exactly might Herzog be communicating through all of this?

Body, Mind, and Self

Unsurprisingly, a core theme of the film is the relationship between the brain, the mind, and the self. One increasingly influential way of characterizing this relationship has come to be called neuroessentialism: the claim that "our brains define who we are" such that "in investigating the brain, we investigate the self" (Roskies 2002). Rodriguez (2006) argues that the rise of neuroscience has led to the displacement of traditional folk psychological categories by reductive explanations of behavior and mental states in terms of the brain and its processes. According to this perspective, our understanding of the mind and the self must be understood in the terms of neuroscience, which has special status as a privileged level of explanation.

We encounter several instances of this broadly neuroessentialist thought-style in the film. Early on, neuroscientist Christof Koch gives a neurobiological definition of the concept of humanity: "What makes humans human" is the cortex. He then goes on to say:

We also hear from neurobiologist Richard Axel, a great lover of music whose scientific work has focused on the neurobiology of olfaction. In response to Herzog's question about whether feelings are irreducible to something more fundamental, he says:

There is at least a hint of lockstep causal determinism here, as if the content of the present mind is inescapably decided by the past regardless of its activity now. Most outspoken on this matter is Jack Gallant:

It appears that, for Gallant, much of our conscious experience is post hoc rationalization of behavior. Rather than guiding or accompanying behavior, conscious experience is here claimed to come in only after the fact, too late to the party to be hosting it. This, Gallant thinks, calls into question the accuracy of our conscious experiences and even the very application to them of the concept of truth. "The human brain really never contains any truth. It's always shades and nuances that are all reflections of the prior history of the person who experienced them," he continues. According to this outlook, which I will term neuroscientific postmodernism, our ordinary conception of ourselves as unified conscious subjects who think, feel, plan, and act is overturned by neuroscientific findings, and with this the applicability of the concept of truth itself to our conscious experience is called into question.⁵

Lyotard (1979, xxiv) (in)famously defines the postmodern as "incredulity toward metanarratives."⁶ In the time since Lyotard wrote, it has become a platitude of postmodernity that each of us is henceforth free to author our own story rather than being forced to subsume ourselves under one or another grand legitimating metanarrative. Many would simultaneously regard postmodernity as synonymous with the "post-Truth" era (at least when truth is given its traditional capital "T"). We see in Gallant's remarks above that this idea possesses not only general cultural currency, but also a significant amount of scientific purchase. Neuroscientific postmodernism challenges what we might think of as the most fundamental metanarrative of all: the existence of an active, causally efficacious, conscious subject of experience.

Neuroscientific postmodernism thus has an overtly skeptical character toward the categories of everyday experience, making explicit that the "construction" of our own individual narratives entails their fictionality.⁷ Earlier in the film, Herzog asks, "Do we invent our own stories? Do we make up our lives?" Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux replies in the affirmative:

The idea that we invent our own stories and change them in each telling carries the connotation that they are works of fiction, as Gallant similarly intimates. Neuroscientific postmodernism thus puts something of a damper on the liberatory outcome that was supposed to have been ushered in by good old-fashioned postmodernism. The neuroessentialist outlook with which we began the discussion now turns out to lead us down a road at the end of which lies its own subversion. Instead of our brains defining who we are, they instead come to define who we are not, since the self so defined is ultimately illusory.

This is at least one way of taking the various statements of Koch, Axel, Gallant, and LeDoux included in the film.⁸ Does the film offer some alternative to this picture? Herzog speaks freely of the soul throughout it, suggesting that he believes the demise of the traditional notion of the self has been greatly exaggerated. While he does not explicitly formulate an alternative thesis, he at least gestures toward one. Reacting to Gallant's impressive neural decoding work, Herzog remarks, "Where our numbers and names and concepts are located can be mapped [in the brain]. But there is no map of our thoughts." Later, he asks neuroscientist Uri Hasson, "Could you in the future read my mind and read my new movie before I even film it?"⁹ Herzog is apparently wondering whether there may come a day when there is no need for him to engage in the creative activity of filmmaking. In this imagined future, rather than exercising his own unpredictable spontaneity, the film he would have made can simply be decoded directly from his brain. Impressive as this hypothetical achievement might be, Herzog's implication seems to be that this gain in efficiency would be purchased at the loss of human agency and its accompanying significance.

If so, he is in good company. Arendt (1958) views spontaneity, understood as the ability to initiate something new, as a (perhaps even the) most fundamental element of our humanity. For Arendt, acting—in her special sense of the term which defines it in terms of initiating something new—and speaking in the public realm are the basis of a characteristically human life:

For Arendt, it is speech and action (in her special sense) that disclose not merely what a person is (i.e., traits, abilities, and biographical and other information), but who (Ibid., 179). It is the latter in which our true individuality consists, but this cannot be captured propositionally in a collection of statements about us, no matter how detailed. It is instead "implicit in everything somebody says and does" (Ibid.). And it is just this public disclosure of the (strictly speaking) unutterable "who" in our words and deeds in which the self consists.

This self-disclosure is not the same as authoring our own life stories. On Arendt's view, our authoritative life story is the narrative that will (if we are lucky) be preserved in the public realm after we are gone.¹¹ While this narrative must have its basis in our actual words and deeds, how exactly we are remembered is not under our control. As she puts it, "Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and 'makes' the story" (Ibid., 192). Importantly, this provides an intersubjective bulwark against the skeptical implications of neuroscientific postmodernism. Instead of an individually constructed fiction, the story of each of our lives is the collective memory of our individual spontaneity.

In this connection, one wonders (very tentatively) whether Herzog has something like Arendtian spontaneity in mind when he leaves the camera running to obtain uncomfortably long shots of certain interviewees (LeDoux, Shepard, and Goering) after they have finished speaking. This is a particularly poignant device in LeDoux's case, as he has just finished discussing the concept of fear. On one interpretation, Herzog might here be cajoling his interviewees into acting spontaneously after they have voiced their (presumably to some degree prepared) remarks. The results are quite interesting, and I will make no attempt to interpret the countenances of the various subjects with whom Herzog tries this tactic. Instead, I will simply register my suspicion that these attempts to capture candid moments are an implied pushback by Herzog on the neuroscientific postmodernism we hear voiced at certain points in the film. By inviting some of his subjects to go off-script in spontaneous Arendtian fashion, Herzog is inviting the disclosure of the personal who as opposed to the lockstep-determined what of the neuroscientific postmodern outlook.

This is a good start in articulating a reasonable alternative to neuroscientific postmodernism. Something like an Arendtian intersubjective public realm is also relevant to the most prominent of Herzog's themes—philosophical skepticism—to which we can now turn.

Knowledge and Illusion

After encountering some of the expressions of neuroessentialism and neuroscientific postmodernism catalogued above (though not yet Gallant's), Herzog becomes noticeably preoccupied with the venerable epistemological questions of what we know and how we know it. After hearing about bioengineer Karl Dessiroth's work to control the mental states and behavior of mice using optogenetics—a powerful example of just how much sway targeted neuromodulation can possess over the mind—Herzog asks, "Could it be that we live in some kind of invented reality?" He asks a similar question of Anikeeva: "Could it be that in our thoughts, in our self, we are in some sort of theater of thought, in an imaginary world that's only existing in our brain?"

This provocative reference to the title of the film leads to an extended dialogue in which Herzog issues a skeptical challenge for Anikeeva to answer. "Is the building behind you real?" he asks. She responds:

For Anikeeva, the evidence of her senses provides a literal ground truth, as it were. Perhaps anticipating familiar philosophical worries about the reliability of the senses, however, she continues:

Here we are offered an appeal to intersubjectivity: it is not just Anikeeva's senses, but also the senses of others, that testify to the reality of the world. There is perhaps an echo of Kant's critical philosophy here, to which we will return later.

Epistemological questions of this kind have gained a good deal of cultural traction in recent decades thanks to films like Dark City and The Matrix tetralogy, as well as philosophical treatments of their themes such as Bostrom (2003)'s simulation hypothesis (according to which it follows from certain plausible assumptions that we likely live in a digital computer simulation). The countenancing of these kinds of skeptical possibilities will of course forever be associated with René Descartes. Indeed, Descartes receives an explicit nod from philosopher and bioethicist Sara Goering late in Herzog's film. And the very idea of a "theater of thought" immediately calls to mind a favored metaphor of some of Descartes' most important critics (namely, Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett).

Recall then Descartes' method of hyperbolic doubt in the Meditations, according to which he (temporarily) rejects any of his beliefs that he can find grounds for doubting. When Descartes applies this method systematically, his belief in the reliability of his senses, of the sciences, and of mathematics, as well as the existence of his own body and of any external world whatsoever, each fall in their turn. But Descartes claims to find an Archimedean point, rock-solid and certain, that he can use as a foundation for a rational reconstruction of human knowledge. This certainty is the famous cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). From there, Descartes argues for the existence of God and God's non-deceptive nature, on the basis of which he claims to win back reliable contact with the world beyond his mind.

It is difficult, however, to dispute Arendt (1958, ch. 6)'s contention that Descartes' formulation of the problem of philosophical skepticism has been far more influential than his proposed solution. Many contemporary philosophers will of course grant the wisdom of the profound first step of the Cartesian solution (the indubitable cogito). But far fewer endorse as sound the arguments for the existence of God that follow and on the basis of which Descartes claims to overcome skepticism. If the first step succeeds but not these latter ones, Descartes gives us back the conscious thinking subject but not a world outside it. Experience gives us the appearance of such a world—a "theater of thought" as we might say following Herzog. But the correspondence of those appearances with a reality beyond them will, if Descartes' arguments about God are not accepted, need to be secured on some other grounds if it is to be secured at all.

Not all contemporary philosophers are sold on even Descartes' basic presuppositions about the mind, however—especially when he is interpreted as claiming that we possess infallible or at least indubitable access to our own stream of consciousness.¹² They would thus deny that he has secured for us the existence of a unified, conscious subject of experience, let alone a world beyond. Some go so far as to deny that there even is such a thing as a unified stream of consciousness. Dennett (1991) famously voices his doubts as follows:

On Dennett's view, a single stream of consciousness would require the existence of a "Cartesian Theater": an internal space where conscious experiences are presented, as though on a movie screen, to an internal "viewer."¹³ But there is no such space in the brain, Dennett claims, and thus there cannot be one in the mind—unless we embrace Cartesian dualism about the mind-body relation, an option which is on Dennett's telling so beyond the bounds of philosophical respectability as to be no option at all.

On Dennett's alternative account, "multiple drafts" of a narrative or interpretation of stimuli from the environment compete to determine mental and behavioral response. We humans "are almost constantly engaged in presenting ourselves to others, and to ourselves, and hence representing ourselves — in language and gesture, external and internal" (Ibid., 417). In this regard we are unlike most other animals. "Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others — and ourselves — about who we are," says Dennett (Ibid., 418). But the process of generating these stories is messy and fragmentary, with multiple stories competing within the brain to be the one told. The self turns out to be what Dennett calls a center of narrative gravity: the lead character in the stories that win out.

All of this, however, happens largely beyond our conscious control: "Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don't spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source" (Ibid.). Moreover, centers of narrative gravity are, like the centers of gravity employed by physicists, theoretical fictions. The self is not real, or at least not "really real" (Ibid., 429). Dennett is on this basis plausibly construed as an adherent of neuroscientific postmodernism, and indeed, one of its foremost proponents.¹⁴ On his picture, the fact of consciousness itself will be only a narrative that we tell ourselves, and ultimately an illusion. So much then for a "theater of thought," that is, for consciousness understood in anything like the usual way.

Unless, that is, we flip the script on Dennett's story by noticing that any attempt to tell it puts consciousness right back into the story. Consciousness as standardly understood is for Dennett an illusion. But even the illusion of consciousness would itself have to be an instance of consciousness, the very phenomenon being claimed illusory (Strawson 2018). Illusions are real to the extent that they are real appearances to an experiencing subject, even if what appears in them does not exist. But there is in consciousness no appearance-reality gap. To use one of Strawson's examples, seeming to be in pain is to be in pain. The intimacy with which we encounter our own consciousness brings, as Descartes saw, a special form of epistemic security (even if not infallibility). As Chalmers (1996, xii) says, "we are surer of the existence of consciousness than we are of anything else in the world." And to paraphrase how a friend once put it to me, "Of course we live in a Cartesian Theater. The really interesting question is what's going on in here."¹⁵

And just what exactly is going on in here? The Cartesian Theater, we can notice, is a theater of a very strange kind, containing no seats, stairs, walls, fire exits, nor indeed any patrons or even a viewing screen. It is instead radically immersive: the "viewer" coincides, at least to a significant extent, with the experienced presentations being "viewed." While it is an interesting question whether the viewer consists only in the flowing-along sequence of presentations, we need not settle that here to affirm an intimate connection between them, such that Dennett's image of the Cartesian Theater as containing a separate homunculus who serves as the viewer is inapt. We can think instead of consciousness (and hence the viewer) as the film itself, or perhaps the film plus the screen upon which the various appearances are projected.¹⁶

Regardless of the precise metaphors we choose, as Herzog's literal film progresses we see him increasingly gripped by the idea of a theater of thought. It becomes for him the object of a kind of reverence, and this reverential status turns out to warrant some degree of caution in the face of technological change. We can now turn to the basis of this caution, after which we will return to the matter (so far left unsolved) of how the mind can be in reliable contact with the world.

The Meaning of Progress

After listening to Gil's explanation of quantum computing, Herzog asks, "Would it be good that we can still go out and fish a trout?" Gil quickly agrees that this is "existentially important." Herzog repeatedly emphasizes the grounded activities of everyday life (e.g., Koch's boat-rowing, LeDoux's rock band, and Gil's fishing). The choice to interview non-scientist Philippe Petit on the topic of fear is also telling in this regard. Appearing just after LeDoux, a leading expert in the neuroscience of fear, Petit makes for a fascinating foil. What he lacks in scientific credentials Petit more than makes up for in his practical experience overcoming fear, having walked a tightrope between the two main towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, among other feats of daring.

These richly human (and in Petit's case, borderline superhuman) activities serve as a contrast to the neurotechnologically augmented modes of engaging with reality that several of the film's interviewees believe are on the horizon. Wearable neurotechnology is shown early in the film by entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. Johnson's device utilizes functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and is claimed to be capable of sophisticated mental state decoding (with neuroscientist, bioethicist, and chief scientific advisor of the film Rafael Yuste volunteering to demonstrate). Johnson has big plans for his device: "We will make it light enough so that you can wear it all day and low cost enough so that everyone will have one."

Herzog seems ambivalent about such prospects. After speaking with Dessiroth, he laments, "Some adolescents prefer a world of pure [digital] fantasy to the world just outside their doorstep." A similar prospect is raised later in the film by computer scientist Rajesh Rao's discussion of creating an augmented or fully virtual world, including artificial sensations, by stimulating the brainstem.¹⁷ Following this segment, Herzog reminisces about Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 film Earth, which depicts a dying man who intends to report, following his departure, on whether he has reached Heaven or Hell. Applied to our present context, the allegory might well be this: only once we have ushered in a neurotechnologically-driven future of the kind envisioned by Johnson or Rao will we truly be in a position to judge whether such a scenario is heavenly or hellish. This would seem to be quite the gamble when we could instead (unlike Dovzhenko's dying man) simply forego finding out altogether.

After this digression, Herzog's drive to the next filming location prompts some further reflections. The dull built environment surrounding a freeway overpass leads him to muse as follows:

This suggests a subtlety worth noting: if by progress we mean acknowledgement of the past even while claiming to improve upon it, 21^st century technocracy may not offer this progress to us. What we are increasingly offered might instead be construed as Herzog construes the New Jersey Turnpike: a radical, technologically-mediated break with the past.

Nowhere is this tendency embodied more clearly than in the ongoing rise of transhumanism and concomitant movements' aim to not merely improve the human condition, but to transcend it altogether by modifying human nature in ways that will usher in a posthuman future (Bostrom 2005). Like the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, the stated end goal of this movement is to produce beings who are "more human than human." While transhumanism receives no explicit acknowledgment in Herzog's film, it stands to reason that his pessimistic outlook on the various technologies we do see extends to the more radical approach that transhumanists envision. As he says of Gil's quantum computer, "I'm asking myself: have the creators of it lost themselves in a world of pure science fiction?"¹⁹

Perhaps so. True to Socratic form, at the end of the film Herzog remains unconvinced by the many knowledge claims of his interlocutors. "Of all the scientists we met, there was not a single one who could explain to us what a thought is, or what consciousness is," he remarks—while noting that they were sensitive to the ethical considerations raised by their work, which the final segments of the film consider.²⁰ Seen in this light, a previous portion of the film (and by far its most striking) takes on added significance.

Consciousness as a Mystery

This portion begins as Herzog interviews computer scientist Tom Gruber. After a lively exchange about whether the iPhone's Siri voice recognition can distinguish between "night" and "knight" (as Herzog correctly predicts, it cannot) Gruber explains the complexity of fish schools' swimming behavior. Behind them plays video footage of a school of fish which, we are told, was shot by Gruber during a dive. The striking scene distracts Herzog from their conversation, and we the viewer leave Gruber behind as the film drifts off into an extended reverie narrated by Herzog (complete with matching visual imagery):

If we take this as a metaphor for the brain, we arrive at something like the following thought. We can observe the brain, and indeed, see it alight with activity (on, e.g., an fMRI). But the details of its processes and how they give rise to consciousness (the "dance" of the mind) are beyond our ken, at least for now. The appropriate reaction is astonishment at a mystery we do not fully comprehend and a corresponding posture of intellectual humility.²¹

Herzog here seems to be gesturing toward what Niikawa & Kriegel (2025) call "the sublime of consciousness."²² This is the idea that, much as it is fitting to feel awe in response to viewing certain works of art and striking natural phenomena, so too can consciousness itself be the proper object of awe (and thus sublime). They highlight in particular the ungraspability of consciousness: how it can be that a world ostensibly composed purely of physical objects and processes also contains conscious subjects of experience (i.e., Chalmers (1996)'s hard problem). The recalcitrance of the hard problem of consciousness, together with a few other conditions,²³ leads Niikawa and Kriegel to affirm that we should indeed regard consciousness as a sublime object to be grouped with other, more traditional members of that category.

Awe, astonishment, reverence—this is the family of attitudes that Herzog seems to be suggesting we should take toward the mind and its embodied activity in everyday life. This represents a clear counternarrative to neuroscientific postmodernism. As Herzog says after viewing a brain surgery performed by Edward Chang, "For me, most astonishing was to see the brain pulsing with a heartbeat." What better image could one imagine of the entanglement of the brain (and mind) with the rest of the body? This entanglement has a fascinating dual nature: there is the profound mystery raised by mind-body union, yet also the fact that, however philosophically perplexing it may be, it is for each of us an undeniable lived reality.

No Illusions?

It is perhaps most appropriate to conclude by finishing the discussion of our knowledge of that lived reality, which was previously cut short by our Dennettian digression. We can now return to Herzog's dialogue with Anikeeva and its emphasis on direct contact with the world around us, most notably the ground beneath our feet. There is a clear echo here of Samuel Johnson's so-called "appeal to the stone," which is considerably more succinct. Johnson, perturbed during a discussion of Berkeley's metaphysical idealism, is said to have exclaimed "I refute it thus" as he forcefully kicked a large stone (Boswell 1791, 143). Through this gesture, Johnson asserted the primacy of common sense and direct experience over what he viewed as metaphysical extravagance.²⁴

There is here also something of a parallel with Moore (1939, 166)'s response to the skeptical hypothesis that he might lack a body. According to Moore, he both knows that he has a body and can prove it by holding up his hands while uttering, "Here is one hand... and here is another." And we can compare also Wittgenstein (1969, §151), commenting on Moore's proposal: "I should like to say: Moore does not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him, as also for me; regarding it as absolutely solid is part of our method of doubt and enquiry." While the various proposals here all differ in their philosophical details, each shares with Herzog an emphasis on the importance of remaining (quite literally) grounded in the world of sense-experience unmeditated, at least to some extent, by technology.

A more direct response to the specifically Cartesian version of the skeptical problem, and one with added relevance to Anikeeva's outlook, is offered by Bouwsma (1949). On Bouwsma's view, the world could be an illusion of the sort countenanced by Descartes only if there were some possible experience that would reveal this fact. Illusion presupposes the potential, at least in principle, of discovering the illusion. If there is no observation we could possibly make that would falsify the world, then the world is real in the only legitimate meaning we can afford the word real.

As Anikeeva puts it above, "I haven't had a chance to perceive an alternate reality, so for me this is the only one that exists." Bouwsma adds that we could never have such a chance. There is no possible world-falsifying observation, no stepping entirely outside of both our individual and collective subjectivity to compare the theater of thought with a fully mind-independent reality (the point on which Kant insisted most emphatically as the cornerstone of his critical philosophy). The world, like consciousness itself, could not be a mere illusion, albeit for different reasons.

It is of course debatable whether this line of argument really solves the problem, and also whether Herzog himself thinks it does. The enigma of Herzog's intentions serve as a fitting counterpart to the philosophical enigmas with which he engages, and this is nowhere more manifest than the closing image of the film. Having just heard from human rights lawyer Jared Genser about the burgeoning neurorights movement, we see soldiers marching in footwear that clacks loudly against the stone surfaces on which they walk. This is clearly a callback to the discussion with Anikeeva and eerie sequence that followed. But what exactly is it intended to convey? Is it a nod to the Bouwsma-style solution to skepticism? Given the air of mystery Herzog creates around Anikeeva's habitual walk, is this instead a way of emphasizing the skeptical problem's intractability? Is it an artistic way of capturing the Arendtian insight of the fundamental ambiguity of our post-Cartesian plight? I can only follow Herzog's own lead in leaving this as an exercise to the viewer.

Acknowledgements

I thank the Neurorights Foundation for providing me with access to Herzog's film for the purpose of writing this essay. I thank Nyssa Juneau for her helpful comments and suggestions, as well as for originally introducing me to Herzog's filmmaking.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.