Past Lives: 인연 as philosophy

The best movie that came out in 2023, in my humble opinion (and insofar it makes any sense at all to compare and rank movies like that), is Past Lives, directed by Celine Song. In short, the movie concerns two ‘childhood sweethearts’, Nora and Hae Sung, that lived in Korea. They were very close, and at some point they even went on a ‘date’. Nora also later mentions briefly to have had a major crush on him. However, at some point Nora’s parents decide to immigrate to Canada. Hae Sung stays behind in Korea and their contact comes to an end. The story continues 12 years later in time. Nora, later, ends up living by herself in New York. At some point she searches for Hae Sung on Facebook and finds that he commented on her dad’s Facebook page asking for Nora. She decides to send him a message. From there on they start video calling regularly and some type of relationship is formed. Yet, because of the difficulties of a long distance relationship, it ends, and contact is lost once again. Then, quickly after, Nora meets someone (Arthur) at a residence for writers. Again 12 years go by and Nora and Arthur are married and live together in New York. Hae Sung goes to visit New York. ‘For vacation’, he says. However, later in the movie he admits that he specifically went to see Nora. Obviously, they meet at some point, have a good time together, talk about their lives, and also end up going to a bar with Arthur joining them. In the bar Nora and Hae Sung have a very open and intimate conversation. At the end of the night, Hae Sung takes a cab and the two say goodbye. The last scene consists of Nora walking back to her place, where Arthur is waiting for her outside. Nora starts crying and Arthur holds her with compassion. Throughout the whole of the encounter between Hae Sung and Nora one feels the potential of romance lurking in the background, but it never actualizes. The movie, it seems to me, is essentially about how these three characters deal with this history and the potential it brings.  

This is, very roughly, what happens in the movie. There are so many different layers about this movie that make it great and that I could talk about; the body-language, the coming-together of past, present, and future, cultural differences, or the endless beauty of coincidence and randomness. But, I will try to focus on one specific aspect that struck me most. It concerns the attitude one can take towards one’s own ‘facticity’ and love.

Facticity is a concept used in different ways by different authors. Most notable are Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and the Beauvoir, and in more recent times Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Byung-Chul Han. There are plenty of academic discussions covering how each of these thinkers uses the term and how their uses differ. To keep it simple I won’t dive into these discussions, and simply use the term in the way I deem fit (which, obviously, is not very far from the uses of some of these authors). So, with facticity I mean the world and all its particular facts as it is given to a particular person. One has one’s own facticity, which includes, for example, the family you are born in, the length of your body, your eye-color, your particular preferences for whatever, all your dispositions, the person you have met this morning in the supermarket by accident, etcetera. In other words, your facticity is simply your particular world, the almost endless totality of facts that concern it. Some of these facts cannot be changed, like where you are born, or what eye-color you have, and some of these facts are changeable, like where you are currently living. However, all of them are there right now. Facticity, as I use it, is always someone’s facticity, it is not the world as such, the objective world of science, and neither is it the subjective experience of one’s world.

Back to the movie. What I loved about it most is how the movie portrays the particular way the characters relate to and talk about the existential tension between potentiality and facticity, between the possibility to (radically) change one’s life and the need to embrace it as it already is. Today, this tension also oppressively traverses the public and popular realm of ideas and discussions, specifically those that circulate on social media. On the one side there is the message of possibility and improvement that expresses itself by phrases like ‘you can do anything you want!’, ‘go! what are you waiting for?’, ‘it is never too late to change your life’, ‘be better than you were yesterday’, ‘just do it’, and on the other side there is the message of contentment and acceptance, manifesting itself in ideas like ‘love yourself exactly the way your are’ and ‘living a simple life’. Neither of these two have any wisdom to offer, and it is exactly their simultaneous, and therefore inherently disorienting proliferation that helps to make social media and contemporary popular discourse such a strong, depression-generating force.

I have thought many times about this tension. Not necessarily in itself, in a philosophical way, but in an existential way that concerns my own life. This could be about my life in general or smaller issues concerning it. As time is passing I am slowly developing the intuition that this tension between taking up the potential to make life ‘better’ and developing an internal satisfaction with the exact way life is right now, is not just an existential question, but it is the existential question. More even, it is not a question at all, it rather concerns the realm of human life itself. Our actual lives take place between these two poles.

I felt that the characters in this movie, particularly Nora, dealt with this tension – and the love that finds its place in it – in a way that resonated with me strongly, and that it contains some type of approach that just makes sense. But as I tried to extract from this story a philosophical idea, a clear guiding principle, I am starting to become aware of its impossibility (and my naivety for trying). Or, to draw from this movie some clue of what love is, to offer some type of definition of it. However, the realm of human life, where love takes place, has no spot for clear ideas and principles. Human life takes place exactly beyond those, and so does love. Hence the oppressiveness of the existential discourse that finds its place on social media: with increasing intensity it tries to do something it simply cannot do.

I can, however, try to describe what I felt and feel looking at this movie and thinking about its portrayal of love and facticity in a way that is straightforward, that doesn’t try to get any-thing from it (that is, a principle or definition).

In the movie there are two conversations that struck me most. The first is between Arthur and Nora, and the second is between Hae Sung and Nora. In both these conversations, Nora’s interlocutor is asking her a couple of ‘what if’ questions. In each conversation, Nora is presented one or several images of how life could have played out. ‘What if you met someone else at the residency?’ ‘What if you would have never left Korea?’ One of the most admirable and beautiful things about this movie is Nora’s strong and decisive character. Her answer to these what-if’s is a resolute embrace of her facticity. To Arthur she responds: “This is my life, and I am living it with you”. But the way she says it, in this story, is not a blind acceptance or embrace of the actually changeable elements of her facticity, of her life as it currently is but which could be otherwise. It is not a careless denial of her existential freedom, nor does it completely coincide with the popular narrative of self-love and a paralyzing, radical acceptance of your condition. Her answer is a denial not of her potentiality, but of a fabricated, abstract potential.

When Nora meets Arthur for the first time, she tells him about a Korean concept which later comes back a couple of times throughout the movie:

“There is a word in Korean - 인연 [in-yun] – it means providence, or fate. But it’s specifically about relationships between people. I think it comes from Buddhism and reincarnation. It’s an in-yun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush. Because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8000 layers of in-yun, over 8000 lifetimes.”

I think that this concept of in-yun ends up helping the characters to deal with the tension between possibility and acceptance, without turning into a solid, clear, guiding principle (it is, in this sense, truly philosophical). I believe the concept of in-yun, and the ways the characters use it, offers a place for the abstract potential of the what-if’s that are directed to the past. It offers a way to deal with them. These thoughts, these what-if questions, despite being fabricated, are still something real, those thoughts still exist, and these characters, and anyone for that matter, needs to deal with them in some way. It still is something we do with our minds. The concept of in-yun, as something they can talk about together, helps them deal with life in a poetic and philosophical way. Any slight change in the past that concerns you, also implies a change in your facticity. Any what-if that is directed to the past, the unchangeable past, is not a question of potential, of what is possible: it is an image of another world, of another facticity. And, as I already said, Nora’s admirable response to them was an embrace of her actual facticity, that is, her actual potentiality.

By framing the what-if questions within the idea of in-yun, these images of an abstract potential are given a place in a narrative; they are turned into previous or future lives, already lived or yet to live. Furthermore, and even more magical, it also keeps intact their real force on the present, on the actual, since these lives are understood to influence one another. Yet, by turning these what-if images into in-yun lives, the what-if images are brought back to their original mystery: we can only fantasize about these lives, about these images, and so it goes for these what-if questions about the past; they are fantasies.

What I am trying to express is not a certain ‘right’ way of dealing with the tension between the potential to change your life and the need to be happy with the way it already is. Any such attempt would cease to be philosophical, and any result of such an act would not concern human life. Do you live far apart from that person you have met? Are you considering quitting your job? Should you move to Spain? Should you reunite with this childhood sweetheart that you have just met for the first time in 20 years? The decision, what to do with it, is up to you, not up to this rule or imperative you might have found on instagram. All I wanted to share is that, in this movie, I believe one witnesses a gentle portrayal of the way in which, I believe, philosophy, poetry, or whatever you want to call it, can assist us without turning into a decree that limits our actual potential, our actual facticity. And these portrayals are very, very rare.