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BATMAN’S IDENTITY CRISIS AND WITTGENSTEIN’S FAMILY RESEMBLANCE
Jason Southworth
What does it mean for somebody to be Batman? Is there something that is required for us to identify someone as Batman? Is there a quality or attribute such that if an individual has it, then that individual must be Batman? In this chapter we’ll tackle these questions. Along the way, we’ll see that a useful way to capture the meaning and identification of Batman, or anything for that matter, is through the idea of “family resemblance.”
Comics, Conditions, and Counterexamples
Philosophers have terms for the types of conditions that let us identify something as being essentially what it is, or defining it as part of a group of things. If an attribute or quality is required for being part of a group, we say that it is a necessary condition. Think of an apple: if something is an apple, then it is necessary that it be a fruit, or being a fruit is a necessary condition for being an apple. Notice that this does not mean that being a fruit is enough for being an apple. Apples also have to be apple-shaped, have stems, and not be oranges, to name some other necessary conditions of “applehood.” All this means is that something can’t be an apple without being a fruit; all apples are fruit, but not all fruits are apples.
On the other hand, if meeting a particular requirement is enough to be included in the group, then that requirement is a sufficient condition. Consider the case of animals. The fact that something is a cat is enough—it is sufficient—for that thing to be an animal. Notice that there can be many different sufficient conditions for being an animal. It is also sufficient for something to be an animal that it be a bird, or a salamander, or a human; all cats are animals, but not all animals are cats.
So can we identify necessary and sufficient conditions for Batman? Thanks to widely read stories such as Batman: Year One (1987) and The Dark Knight Returns (1986), along with the various animated series and live-action movies, many possibilities immediately come to mind. Batman is a man, Bruce Wayne, who dresses up in a costume that represents a bat, and fights crime. Batman acts in this way to avenge the death of his parents, who were killed when he was a child. Since his parents were murdered with a gun, Batman doesn’t use a gun, and he also never kills. This is a fairly traditional and uncontroversial picture of Batman’s attributes. But riddle me this: are these necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, both, or neither?
The simple answer is . . . no. No part of this conception of Batman qualifies as a necessary or sufficient condition for a person to be Batman. To see this we’ll use a method of argument that philosophers call counterexample. We’ll first consider a candidate for a necessary or a sufficient condition, and then we’ll give an example or two that shows why this candidate fails. A counterexample for a necessary condition will be an example of Batman that lacks the feature, which shows that the condition is not essential to Batman. A counterexample for a sufficient condition will be an example of the feature being present in something that is not Batman, which again shows that the feature is not exclusive to Batman.
Let’s start with the claims that Batman doesn’t kill and that he doesn’t use guns. A counterexample to the proposition that these are necessary conditions can be found in Batman’s fifth appearance. Detective Comics #32 (October 1939)—just look for it, I’m sure you have one—contains the second part of a story where Batman fights a vampire named the Monk. In this story, the Monk and an accomplice have hypnotized Batman’s girlfriend (Julie Madison) and are holding her hostage. Batman solves this problem by shooting them both with silver bullets and killing them while they are sleeping, showing that someone that is Batman has used a gun.1 Neither of these conditions is sufficient for being Batman either, which is even easier to show. There are obviously many things that do not kill or use guns and who are not Batman, ranging from other comic book characters, like Detective Chimp, to people, like Gandhi, to inanimate objects, like my stapler.
It’s often suggested by casual Batman fans that being Bruce Wayne is both necessary and sufficient for someone to be Batman. Readers of Batman comics in the early 1990s, however, know better. During the Knightfall story arc (1993-1994), Bruce Wayne gives up the mantle of Batman after his back is broken by the villain Bane. To the shock and horror of fans everywhere, Bruce chose Jean-Paul Valley (the hero Azrael) to replace him, and in the subsequent Prodigal arc (1994-1995), he chose Dick Grayson (Nightwing, and the first Robin, whom fans were much happier with). So, for over two years, someone who was not Bruce Wayne was Batman, on authority of Bruce Wayne himself. Furthermore, during that period, Bruce Wayne was not Batman, showing that being Bruce Wayne is neither necessary nor sufficient for being Batman.2
Perhaps the next most likely candidate for a necessary condition of Batman is that his parents have been murdered. Those who have read the Elseworlds story Batman: Castle of the Bat (1994), however, know that this is not the case. This story begins like the traditional Batman origin with the death of the parents of Bruce Wayne. In this story, a twist on the classic Frankenstein tale, Bruce Wayne grows up to become a great scientist and devotes the bulk of his research to the reanimation of dead tissue. Ultimately, Bruce manages to resurrect his father with the help of biomaterials that came from—you guessed it—a bat. Bruce then sends his bat man, whom he calls (no surprise) “Batman,” to avenge his dead parents. The murdered father of Bruce Wayne is the Batman in this story, so “Batman’s” parents were not murdered in this version. And once again, the case for sufficiency is even harder to make: murdered parents are common in superhero comics. Just to name one example, Helena Bertinelli’s parents were murdered, but this caused her to become the Huntress, not Batman.
It’s often said of Batman that he is a loner, choosing to work alone and teaming with others only when absolutely necessary. Upon reflection, there are a number of counterexamples to this claim. Very early in Batman’s history he started working with others. In Detective Comics #38 (April 1940), Robin the Boy Wonder was introduced as Batman’s sidekick, and the number of allies have exploded since then. In Batman comics today, you will occasionally read a reference to “team Batman” or “the Batman family,” the large group of people on whom Batman has come to rely (including Robin, Nightwing, Oracle, and others). And it should be obvious that being a loner is not sufficient for being Batman (consider Saint Anthony and Ted Kaczynski [the Unabomber], for example).
Since one of the nicknames for Batman is the Dark Knight, some might suggest that it is necessary for Batman to be dark and brooding. But consider the Silver Age Batman stories.3 During this period, thanks to the Comic Code Authority, superhero comics were cute and campy, and the stories usually turned on a gag or a gimmick. An example of one such story is Batman #108, where the Silver Age Batwoman (Kathy Kane) makes her first appearance. This is the beginning of a series of stories featuring the courtship of Batman and Batwoman, with typical romantic comedy tropes: Batman struggles to protect his bachelorhood while Batwoman agitates for marriage. Silly? Yes. Dark? No.
What about the “fact” that Batman necessarily fights crime? As you might have guessed, there are counterexamples for this as well. My favorite example of a Batman who commits crime rather than fighting it is a two-part story from Justice League of America #37-38 (August and September 1965). In this story, we are introduced to Earth-A, an earth where new versions of Silver Age DC superheroes form the Lawless League. In this story, the Justice Society (from Earth-2, for those keeping track at home) fights the Lawless League in classic DC world-jumping form. (An amusing visual choice in this story is that the Batman of Earth-A looks exactly like Silver Age Batman except that he has a five o’clock shadow.) So clearly being a crime fighter is not a necessary condition for being Batman. Again, the claim for sufficiency is obviously false, because all superheroes—even Booster Gold—fight crime.
Wittgenstein and Language Games
Without any necessary and sufficient conditions, you might wonder how we can successfully identify instances of Batman. One answer is found in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) Philosophical Investigations.4 Wittgenstein admits that in attempting to identify things as “language,” he’s in a situation like the one we’re in with Batman: “Instead of producing something common to all that we call ‘language,’ I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, but they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all ‘language.’”5
The relationship he is writing about is one of similarity. What makes all the different things called “language” language is that they are similar to each other. This similarity is called family resemblance by Wittgenstein, because you see this type of similarity in families. Consider your own family—if you are biologically related, you will resemble your parents and siblings to some extent. If we had to find ways in which you all were similar, however, we would fail. For instance, you and one of your sisters might have red hair like your dad, but the rest of your family does not. You, your sisters, and your mother might have brown eyes, but your dad does not. You might have a nose that doesn’t look like either parent or sibling. This same point can be made if you consider body and face shape, complexion, and ear size.
Wittgenstein uses the case of games to make this point. There are many different types of games. What is common to these things? If you start with board games, you might think that all board games have pieces that move around boards. Adding card games into the mix, you will notice that neither of these things is necessary. Video games and solitaire show that there doesn’t have to be more than one player. You might think all games are fun, but what about the game adults try to make children play—“Let’s see who can be quiet the longest”? Some games involve skill to play well, like tennis, while others, like roulette, do not. What about Russian roulette? This is an example of a game that is very dangerous, unlike most games (although there are still definite winners and losers). Some games, however, don’t even have winners and losers, like ring-around-the-roses. So, it seems that there is nothing common to all games—all we have are sets of similarities that are a part of different sets of games.
Wait a minute—some people may say that some of the examples of games I have given are not games at all, especially ones like Russian roulette and ring-around-the-rosy. There seems to be good reason to count Russian roulette as a game, though. After all, casino-style roulette is a game. If betting with money that a random spin of a wheel will stop where you want it to is a game, why would betting with your life instead of money stop it from being a game? Ring-around-the-rosy also seems a plausible candidate for a game. It has many of the elements other, less controversial games have: it is physical, fun to play, and has a set of rules. The reason for wanting to reject ring-around-the-rosy is that there is no winner, but by this criterion, single-player Tetris is not a game. None of this is meant to prevent you from drawing a line and saying something is not a game; it is just meant to show that there is nothing about games that points to a line to draw. The difference is that you might say, “Ring-around-the-rosy is not a game,” but that will just be a feature of how you choose to use the term, not a feature of the actual concept.
Games and Gotham
We can make a similar response to the objection that we should not count Elseworlds stories as instances of Batman. When you draw a line and say that Batman can be understood as a set of necessary claims about the Batman from mainstream continuity, or the general public’s conception of Batman, you are choosing to fix a description on the concept of Batman. This, however, is different from the concept’s actually having that concrete description.
Some readers might object that without a firm boundary for what is and is not a game, the term would not be useful at all. This doesn’t seem to be the case, however. We all use the word “game,” and as we have seen, no such boundaries can be given. This is also the case with Batman. Earlier we saw that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for being Batman. Since this is the case, we can’t give a concrete definition of Batman in the same way that we can’t give such a definition for “game.” Still, we use the word “Batman” easily, and we understand others who do so. So, it seems the term is perfectly useful without firm boundaries.
But how should we explain to someone what a game is? Wittgenstein says that we describe different particular games to the individual, and then add “and things similar to this are ‘games.’”6 This seems to be a plausible account of not only how we would explain a game on Wittgenstein’s account, but also of how we actually explain what a game is. If a child asks us what a game is, we point to examples the child knows, saying, “Monopoly, Candyland, and baseball are games, and other things are games if they are like these things.”
Let’s now consider this in terms of Batman. If someone asked us what/who Batman was, we would give a brief origin story for Batman in much the same way I did at the start of this chapter. We might then go on to describe some interesting stories we have read. This person would then be able to see what is common between these instances of Batman. She might then run into some of the strange cases of Batman that I have mentioned, and she will have to consider “is this an instance of Batman?” The person will be able to see what is common between these new instances of Batman and his previous conception, just like a child who stops to consider if catch or Marco Polo are games.
Robin? Who’s That?
You might balk at the idea that every term of our language is understood in terms of a family resemblance, but Wittgenstein has two more arguments meant to convince you. First, consider someone saying, “There is no Robin.” This might mean any number of things. Maybe it means that Batman has no sidekick, but it might also mean that Dick Grayson is no longer his sidekick. Some philosophers think that the name “Robin” can be fixed by a series of descriptions. Some such examples might be “the boy whose parents were killed when their trapeze act was sabotaged” and “the boy whose sexual advances were rebuffed by Barbara Gordon.” Switching between these definitions with the claim “There is no Robin,” however, changes the claim.7
Wittgenstein goes on to make this point another way. If the definition of “Robin” is fixed by these descriptions, and then it is shown that one part of the description is false, it means that there was never a Robin. So, if Robin’s history were “retconned” so that his sexual advances were accepted by Barbara Gordon (as is the case in post-Zero Hour continuity), and we stuck to our previous claim that they were not, then it would mean that there was never a Robin! This isn’t what happens when we find conflicting information, however. What happens is that we no longer hold that the disconfirmed claim is true of Robin. The point of this argument is that language is used all the time without a fixed meaning. Before reading this chapter, some of you probably thought it was a necessary condition of Batman that he didn’t kill. After being shown that this is false, you didn’t deny that the character was Batman; instead, you modified your picture of Batman.
Wittgenstein relies on one more example to make his point. Imagine someone says, “There is a Batarang,” and then as the person gets closer to it, it disappears. We might say that the Batarang was never there and that it was an illusion. But imagine further that the Batarang reappears, and we are now able to touch it. We might now say that the Batarang was real and that the disappearance was an illusion. What if the Batarang disappeared again, only to return intermittently? Is this thing a Batarang or isn’t it? If you don’t know how to respond to this question, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t have an answer ready to this question. This, however, is enough to make Wittgenstein’s point. The fact that we don’t know how to rule on this case shows that we can use the word “Batarang” without having the rules of use fixed. If that’s true, we use language without having the meaning of the words fixed, and the only plausible reason for this is that we understand all things in terms of a family resemblance.8
Batman and superheroes generally provide actual cases of the example of the disappearing Batarang. New stories are constantly being written, and many of these purposely change the status quo. Consider the case of The Dark Knight Returns. Before this story was written, people most likely thought that Batman and Superman were friends and that they were both good guys. This story, however, puts the characters at odds, with both of them defending opposing positions to which they are morally committed. They can’t both be good, given this situation. So what did we do when we read it? We let our conception of the characters change with the new information provided in the story.
Keeping It in the Family?
In closing, let’s consider what the family resemblance account means for other areas of philosophy. For starters, if Wittgenstein is right, then it will serve as an objection to moral theories that attempt to use fictional characters as moral exemplars (as in the chapter by David Kyle Johnson and Ryan Rhodes in this volume). If there is no fixed description that can be given of a character, then you can’t make reference to specific traits of that character, or to how that character would behave in a given situation. In other words, saying, “You should behave like Batman” doesn’t help us decide how to act, because “Batman” may act in different ways in the same situation in different versions or time periods. You can always stipulate what you mean by Batman by referring to specific character traits, or to how he would act in specific situations. But if you do, then there is no reason to refer to Batman as a moral exemplar—you can just refer to the character traits. Great philosophical ideas are rarely limited to one area of philosophy, and often a question in moral philosophy, for example, can lead to a metaphysical or epistemological mystery. In that sense, all philosophers are detectives, but not all detectives are . . . well, you get the idea.9
NOTES
1 However, you might argue that he hasn’t really killed, because they are vampires, and therefore already dead. Fine—but in The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001), Batman actually kills Dick Grayson (who has become a killer himself, murdering aged superheroes) by dropping him into a pit of lava.
2 My favorite counterexample actually shows that both the claim of necessity and the claim of sufficiency are false. In World’s Finest #167 (June 1967), we are shown a world where Clark Kent is Batman and Bruce Wayne is Superman!
3 The Silver Age of comics is the second major period of comics (the Golden Age was the first), which ran from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.
4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell: Oxford, 1953). All citations in the chapter will refer to this work.
5 Ibid., Remark 65.
6 Ibid., Remark 69.
7 Ibid., Remark 80.
8 Ibid.
9 For their helpful comments I would like to thank Ruth Tallman and Clarice Ferguson.