Philosophy of Mind and Body in

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris

Vladimir Tumanov, Western University
(vtumanov@uwo.ca)

Abstract:
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972) is studied through the lens of philosophy of
mind. The question of memory and personhood, as developed by John Locke and
then expanded by Derek Parfit, is applied to the status of Hari – the copy of the
protagonist’s deceased wife. The key question addressed by this paper is on what
basis Hari can (or should?) be considered human. Hari’s personhood is further
analyzed in the context of Cartesian dualism, the response to Descartes by
reductionism and the rebuttal of reductionism by the functionalist theories of
Hilary Putnam. Descartes’ thoughts on animal suffering and the bête-machine are
pitted against Hari’s experience in Solaris. The key question is whether Hari can be
reduced to her alien structure or should be considered in terms of her behavior.
The moral implications of these questions are extended to human sociality, human
emotional response and the role of the body in the human condition.

Keywords: Solaris; Andrei Tarkovsky; Philosophy of Mind; Personhood;

Reductionism; Functionalism.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) is as much an artistic achievement – an

undisputable classic of Russian and world cinema – as it is an exploration
of questions that are central to the philosophy of mind. These questions
pertain to personhood and suffering, spanning at the very least the period
from René Descartes to modern philosophers, such as Derek Parfit and
Hilary Putnam. Philosophy of mind is frequently helped by seemingly

Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 357–375

DOI: 10.3366/film.2016.0020
f Vladimir Tumanov. The online version of this article is published as Open Access
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence
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strange-sounding thought experiments reminiscent of science fiction,

which is why Solaris appears as such an apt vehicle for exploring
philosophical challenges. One such science fiction scenario – known as
the Teletransporter Thought Experiment and originated by Derek Parfit –
relates almost directly to Tarkovsky’s film because it involves the
replication of the individual. Parfit asks us to imagine a teletransporter
that will take a given person to Mars. The traveller is disassembled on
Earth and then reassembled on Mars. But one day, the teletransporter
malfunctions and the original person is preserved even as his or her copy
appears on Mars. Furthermore, a technician has some bad news for the
original space traveller on Earth:

I am afraid we’re having problems with the new scanner. It records your
blueprint just as accurately, as you will see when you talk to yourself on
Mars. But it seems to be damaging the cardiac system which it scans.
Judging from the results so far, though you will be quite healthy on Mars,
here on Earth you must expect cardiac failure within the next few days.
(Parfit, 1984, p. 200)1

Parfit uses this scenario to consider the philosophical requirements for

personhood. His concern is whether or not the replica on Mars constitutes
genuine continuity with the original person about to die on Earth.
Let us compare this philosophical science fiction to ‘real’ science
fiction: Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The hero Kelvin arrives on a station in orbit
over a planet called Solaris. The planet appears to be some kind of a
thinking, god-like entity. It probes Kelvin’s mind and puts the astronaut
face to face with a humanoid being: a replica of his deceased wife Hari.
This version of Hari looks just like the original and knows who Kelvin is –
she even loves him as her husband – but she appears to lack certain
human qualities, which casts Kelvin into great turmoil. Thus, just as Parfit
considers the status of a human replica in connection with a deceased

1. This has also been used by philosophers of mind in connection to the famous
teletransporter in Star Trek, but with an interesting twist which creates further
problems pertaining to human identity and personhood: ‘ Suppose, however, the
teletransporter malfunctioned. Instead of erasing the captain Kirk on board the ship, it
did not erase him but also recreated him on the planet’s surface. Which one of these two
identical Kirks would be the real one? If psychological continuity is all that personal
identity consists in, are they both Kirk? ’ (Naghdeali, Z. S. et al., 2014, p. 386). This
thought experiment is relevant to Solaris where there are in fact two simultaneously
existing replicas of Hari: one is jettisoned by Kelvin into space in a capsule while the
other one lives on board the space station.

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original, so too most of the story in Tarkovsky’s film is about attempts by

Kelvin, as well as his two colleagues Snaut and Sartorius, to deal with
Hari’s seeming humanness. Is she to be discounted as a mere mirage? Or is
Hari to be respected, pitied, loved, and most importantly – listened to?
Stanisław Lem’s eponymous novel on which Tarkovsky’s film is based
features the same conflict, but Lem’s emphasis is on trying to understand
and make contact with the planet Solaris itself. Hari in the novel is
an emanation of the planet and thus more a vehicle for human-alien
contact than a being worthy of consideration on her own. Tarkovsky shifts
the focus of the story by making Solaris secondary and Hari – the true
heroine. Her emotional development and suffering, her epistemological
journey toward self-knowledge, and especially her intense relationship
with Kelvin are what makes the film an autonomous and highly
philosophical work of art. As Roumiana Deltcheva and Eduard Vlasov
(1997) put it:

The major deviation Tarkovsky undertakes in his film consists of a principal

shift in the overall intention of the narrative prompted by the firm belief
that love and human emotion have a primary meaning in the universe.
(p. 533)

Personhood and Autobiographic Memory

Parfit’s teletransporter thought experiment takes its roots in the work of
John Locke who imagined what would happen if the mind of a prince
were transported into a cobbler’s body and replaced the cobbler’s mind.
Although everyone would see this new individual as the cobbler, the
feeling from the ‘inside’ would be princely, i.e., the new individual would
experience himself as the prince:

For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the
prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted
by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the
prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions. (Locke, 1996, p. 142)

The key here is ‘the prince’s past life’ because, for Locke, the cobbler
would be the prince only on the condition that all of the prince’s past
experiences, i.e., his autobiographic memory, would be preserved during
the mind transfer.

As far as [a] consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or

thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now as
it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects
on it, that that action was done. (Locke, 1996, p. xxi)

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Thus, Locke sees autobiographic memory as the most important aspect of

personhood, which is very relevant to the assessment of Hari’s status in
Solaris.
When Hari first appears on board the space station, she appears to
possess no autobiographic memory, i.e., she fails the Lockean personhood
test. Hari makes this more than clear to Kelvin when she sums up her
seemingly empty mind as follows: ‘ You know, I have the feeling as if I’ve
forgotten something.’ This is confirmed by her inability to connect a photo
of the original Hari with herself. Kelvin’s reaction is fully in line with
Locke’s philosophy of mind where personhood is identical with memory:
this Hari-like being cannot be a human person and must be dispensed
with as if it were a disruptive object, which is what Kelvin does. He lures
Hari into a space capsule and launches her into the void. If the story in
Solaris were to stop at this point, we would be stuck in Locke’s 17th
century with a rather rudimentary view of humanness and not benefit
from subsequent developments in philosophy of mind. Fortunately, the
story does continue as Kelvin is given a chance to reassess Hari when her
second iteration arrives on the space station shortly thereafter. And from
this point on, Tarkovsky’s exploration of personhood begins to gain
increasing philosophical momentum.
It is true that Hari does not possess the memory that would have been in
the mind of Kelvin’s dead wife. But this is mitigated by two considerations:
a) as soon as Hari’s second iteration is given the chance to exist for a
certain amount of time on the space station, she begins to accumulate the
very autobiographic memory that Locke requires for personhood and b)
Hari is in a way fused with Kelvin since she is an emanation of his mind.
Consideration b takes us beyond Locke because, unlike the new Hari,
Kelvin does have a memory of his dead wife. Admittedly, this is not the
memory from the mind of the original Hari, but it is still a connection with
her. This ‘ outsourced memory’ paradigm can be developed on the basis
of Derek Parfit’s (1984) attempt to expand the Lockean concept of
personhood:

There are several ways to extend the experience-memory criterion so as to

cover such cases. I shall appeal to the concept of an overlapping chain of
experience-memories. Let us say that, between X today and Y twenty years
ago, there are direct memory connections if X can now remember having
some of the experiences that Y had twenty years ago. On Locke’s view, only
this makes X and Y one and the same person. But even if there are no such
direct memory connections, there may be continuity of memory between X
now and Y twenty years ago. This would be so if between X now and Y at
that time there has been an overlapping chain of direct memories. In the
case of most adults, there would be such a chain. In each day within the last

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twenty years, most of these people remembered some of their experiences

on the previous day. On the revised version of Locke’s view, some present
person X is the same as some past person Y if there is between them
continuity of memory. (p. 205)

Thus, we have an overlapping memory chain in Hari’s case because she

remembers Kelvin – is in fact fervently attached to him emotionally as if
she has always known him – and his autobiographic memory includes his
wife:

Although admittedly not a perfect fit, Parfit’s overlapping memory chain

theory largely validates Hari’s claim to personhood despite the initial
impression of absent memory that she makes. Parfit (1984) even provides
a scenario that bears a strong resemblance to Hari’s ‘borrowed ’ memory in
Solaris:

Jane has agreed to have copied in her brain some of Paul’s memory-traces.
[…] Jane seems to remember seeing something extraordinary: a flash of
lightning coming from the dark cloud. […] Jane’s apparent memories may
be, in one respect, mistaken. It may be claimed: ‘ Since Jane seems to
remember seeing the lightning, she seems to remember herself seeing the
lightning. Her apparent memory may tell her accurately what Paul’s
experience was like, but it tells her, falsely, that it was she who had this
experience. (p. 220)

The counterpart of this philosophical thought experiment in Solaris is

Hari’s ability to recall a conflict with Kelvin’s mother, which is a snippet of
Kelvin’s own memory: ‘I remember how we were having tea, and then she
threw me out. I got up and left. And then what happened?’ To be sure, the
last question indicates that Hari’s borrowed autobiographic memory is
incomplete, but even this small detail adds ammunition to the claim of
personhood already bolstered by Parfit’s overlapping memory chain
argument.
The above suggests that the concept of overlapping memory chains
is very much a part of our personhood in a mnemonically social context,
i.e., in terms of how we reconstruct our own past as part of our
relationships with others. Hari’s indirect memory of her earthly life and
Parfit’s hypothetical scenario where Jane borrows Paul’s memory-traces
correspond to various instances in our lives where we appropriate other
people’s memories – knowingly or unknowingly. For example, the famous
‘Lost in the Mall’ experiment by Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell

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illustrates the ease with which an individual’s sense of personal experience

can piggyback on other people’s real or fabricated memories. Relatives
provided test subjects with a false narrative according to which the
test subjects were lost in a shopping mall at age five. Here is the account
of how a subject called Chris processed and appropriated this false
memory:

Over the first 5 days, Chris remembered more and more about getting lost.
He remembered that the man who rescued him was ‘ really cool. ’ He
remembered being scared that he would never see his family again.
He remembered his mother scolding him. […] When asked to describe his
memory of getting lost, Chris provided rich details about the toy store
where got lost and his thoughts at the time. (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995,
p. 721)

The point here is that borrowed memories and an overlapping memory

chain constitute a potential extension and expansion of any individual’s
personhood – in contrast to Locke’s narrow view of the mind which
is challenged philosophically by Parfit and Tarkovsky in Solaris. All
of our memories, no matter what the source, are part of our valid
identity.
However, beyond the reassessment of autobiographic memory in the
creation of personhood, there is an argument which shifts focus away from
the notion of one’s past and zeroes in on the present. Oliver Sacks, in his
classic The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), writes of a man
who suffered from such severe anterograde amnesia that he could not
recall anything beyond a few minutes before the present moment. His life
was a series of constant awakenings which resulted in great confusion and
distress. And yet, Sacks does not deny personhood or selfhood to this
patient, arguing that

a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities,
moral being— matters of which neuropsychology cannot speak. […]
Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral
attention and action could hold him completely. (pp. 34–38)

We must pay particular attention to the question of moral attention and

action emphasised by Sacks in this assessment of the amnesiac patient.
This emphasis on the moral domain in identity formation is echoed in a
study by Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols. They found that the
relatives of people suffering from personality deterioration brought about
by various forms of brain damage (Alzheimer’s, FTD, ALS) considered the
alteration of a person’s moral fibre – rather than the decay of memory – as

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the most salient feature of identity loss (2013, p. 161). The authors call
this the ‘moral self hypothesis ’ and propose it as a model of how people
perceive the nucleus of selfhood in others.
Applying this to Hari in Solaris, we can argue that her ‘moral self’
is a striking constant that outweighs any possible variables capable of
detracting from a true understanding of Solaris’ gentle creature. In this
respect, there can be no doubt that Hari is a person. Her devotion to
Kelvin, her meek and compassionate nature, her repeatedly manifested
despair at being unable to live up to human expectations and her heroic
self-sacrifice at the end of the story – all point to the existence of
unmistakable moral individuality. Ultimately, Parfit (1984) sums up
selfhood as a complex phenomenon consisting of elements that can
all inform our perception of Hari in Solaris: ‘According to the Complex
View, the fact of personal identity over time just consists […] in various
kinds of psychological continuity, of memory, character, intention, and
the like’ (p. 227). Thus, however alien Hari may be, she is complexly
continuous.
Following an intuition evocative of Parfit’s complex view of
personhood, as well as Strohminger’s and Nichols’ above-cited study,
Kelvin arrives at a reassessment of Hari by interacting with her over
time – however short. Kelvin discovers that Hari is not an empty replica,
but someone whose moral and emotional qualities can be the envy of
most ‘authentic ’ human beings. Thus, when Hari stresses her own
incompleteness from a Lockean perspective, saying ‘you do understand
that I have no idea where I come from,’ Kelvin does not accept her narrow
self-assessment based on the reduction of personhood to memory alone.
He has moved beyond his initial reaction to Hari from the beginning of the
story – as is clear from the way their conversation develops. In response
to her question as to why the original Hari killed herself, Kelvin says:
‘She probably did it because she sensed that I didn’t really love her.
But I do love you.’
The foregoing may suggest on first glance that in Kelvin’s mind, Hari’s
replica is a completely new person. In fact, she says so herself: ‘ I am not
Hari. That Hari is dead.’ But Kelvin’s reaction to her is psychologically and
philosophically more nuanced than simply starting a relationship from
scratch. Whatever Kelvin may say about his lack of feeling for the original
Hari, the speed with which he falls in love with the new Hari indicates that
his emotion is at first based on something pre-existing the Solaris
experience. At the same time, what we learn about Kelvin’s neglect of the
earthly Hari (and her consequent suicide) indicates that ultimately it is the
psychological continuity of the new Hari that captivates him and
convinces him of her personhood. Thus, the complexity of Kelvin’s

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feelings for the woman who is Solaris’ creation (against the background of
his memory of the original Hari) mirrors the complexity of Hari’s
personhood.
Still, despite my previous arguments, there is no denying that Locke was
on to something when he attributed such importance to autobiographic
memory in the creation of personhood. This is why Parfit does not reject
but merely develops Locke’s ideas. And in this respect, all we have to do is
adjust the time scale in order to make Hari a Lockean person even without
the help of Parfit’s theory. As I have argued earlier, over the course of her
stay on the space station, Hari manages to accumulate a small but
emotionally significant amount of memory. She experiences so much
mental and physical anguish that Hari in a way ends up living a condensed
lifetime and earning the right to an autobiography of her own – an
ontological independence of sorts. When she attempts to commit suicide
by drinking liquid oxygen and then comes back to life in horrible pain,
Kelvin holds her battered body in his arms and declares: ‘You used to
resemble Hari. But now you – and not her – are the real Hari.’ At this
point, Parfit’s concept of the overlapping memory chain – which,
as pointed out above, works through Hari’s connection to Kelvin’s
memory – is no longer strictly necessary. Hari’s personhood can be
established just on the basis of her own autobiographic memory and the
psychological continuity of her character. As the oxygen poisoning
episode illustrates and as will be demonstrated below, the role of suffering
in the process of establishing Hari’s personhood is paramount. These are
the ingredients that go into Kelvin’s genuine feelings for the new Hari – an
emotion which is going to be tested by the other two humans interacting
with Kelvin in orbit around the philosophical planet Solaris: Snaut and
Sartorius.

The Duck Test

When Kelvin introduces Hari to his cynical colleague Sartorius, the latter
points out that all of Solaris’ creations are made of neutrinos. In Sartorius’
mind, the non-biological, non-human structure of the ‘guests’ disqualifies
them from personhood, which is all the more compelling because of
what neutrinos are like in comparison to other particles. Snaut – who
is less cynical than Sartorius but still seemingly far more sober than
Kelvin – adds that neutrino systems are unstable. This idea of stability has
undeniable symbolic significance in this context. Stability of character
is what enables human bonding and personhood. We can establish
emotional and other relationships with fellow humans only on the basis
of certain behavioural predictability. Otherwise perceiving someone as
a person becomes problematic, as might be the case with certain

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manifestations of schizophrenia. If our counterparts are kind to us one

moment and turn against us a minute later, our relationship is likely to
collapse. We need stability for planning cooperation and avoiding the
stress of dealing with constantly changing social interaction. Essentially,
this stability is what we mean by personality, which echoes Parfit’s concept
of psychological continuity. What is a given person like? That question is
answered by us every day, and on the basis of the answer, we shape our
own behaviour and expectations. What is Hari like? Kelvin comes up with
a clear answer to that question, but his other two colleagues are different.
Snaut’s statement about the instability of neutrino systems is tantamount
to denying Hari personhood. The implication is that not only can one
dispense with experiencing compassion toward Hari’s emotional
experience but her very existence has no value: Hari can be destroyed
as an object – an unstable object. This much will, in fact, be suggested to
Kelvin by his two colleagues.
And yet, there is something intuitively wrong or fake in Hari’s
objectification by Sartorius. He does not sound very self-assured and
scientific when he refers to Hari as ‘a splendid specimen’ and a few
minutes later says that he is jealous of Kelvin. Kelvin may even look
ridiculous on first glance when he responds to the ‘specimen’ comment by
saying: ‘ This is my wife.’ But it turns out that Sartorius’ cold-blooded
bravado may be a bluff while Kelvin’s naiveté is far closer to an intuitive
truth. The idea can be demonstrated by the famous duck test of inductive
reasoning: ‘If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like
a duck, then it probably is a duck.’2 The duck test can be applied to the
way human minds respond to cues of humanness. We, as a species, appear
to have evolved neural faculties for reacting to human faces. Thus,
newborns already show a preference for human faces over other visual
stimuli (cf. Batki et al., 2000 and Turati et al., 2007). In general, we
have a whole series of natural behaviours and reactions when dealing
with the human shape. Human eyes, for example, trigger behaviour at
an unconscious level. Various experiments have shown that even a
schematic picture of human eyes influences the behaviour of test subjects
in honesty tests. Thus, in one study, people contributed three times more
money than control to a drink fund in a coffee room when a picture of
eyes was present on the wall above the collection box (Bateson et al.,
2006).

2. Although attributed by some to the poet James Whitcomb Riley, the origin of this
aphorism is disputed.

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This reasoning matters in Hari’s case because she looks unmistakably

human, making Sartorius’ ‘specimen’ concept counterintuitive and his
remarks about neutrinos – emotionally irrelevant. Kelvin cannot help but
experience normal emotional reactions to Hari as part of his human
nature. These reactions would probably be different if Hari did not
look the way she does, and this includes her resemblance to the original
Hari – Kelvin’s wife. We can infer this for two reasons. First, during
Kelvin’s initial encounter with Sartorius, a dwarf dashes out of the latter’s
room. This misshapen creature is meant to suggest that Sartorius’ guest is
less likely to cue the mental faculties that evolved for responding to other
humans. Although the decision to use a dwarf as the embodiment of
dehumanised monstrosity may be viewed as questionable in contemporary
terms, Tarkovsky’s point is clear: Sartorius’ guest fails the duck test of
humanness. Hari, on the other hand, should pass it with flying colours,
but Sartorius has become so jaded from his experience with Solaris’ mind
games that he has managed to turn off his natural emotions.
In a sense, the dwarf may constitute a way of somewhat mitigating
Sartorius’ failure in the duck test with Hari. He is not as lucky as Kelvin,
which is an idea suggested to the latter by Snaut: ‘Consider yourself lucky.
After all, she is a woman – just your past. And what if you had something
[“hejto takoe” in Russian] that you never knew but merely thought
about and imagined? ’ Particularly ‘ hejto takoe’ or ‘something’ (rather
than ‘someone’) can be interpreted as a potential monster guest for
Kelvin – essentially Sartorius’ experience. Of course, it could be argued
that the very fact of Hari’s presence reflects Kelvin’s moral superiority to
Sartorius to begin with. But on the other hand, common sense tells us that
everyone has monsters in the closet of their subconscious mind.3 By this
logic, Snaut’s inability to fully adopt Kelvin’s attitude toward Hari’s
personhood (see below) is also partially excusable. If we are to judge by
the constant physical injuries that Snaut’s visitors appear to inflict upon
him (although we never see them), he too has presumably been interacting
with guests that would not pass the duck test of humanness. Finally,
the fact that Hari does pass the duck test of humanness in Kelvin’s eyes
is mirrored by the viewer’s inevitable reaction to the actress Natalia
Bondarchuk – a real woman, capable of convincingly displaying suffering,
love, insight and noble behaviour. No amount of scientific babble could
persuade us that Bondarchuk is just a bunch of ‘unstable neutrinos’ or

3. In fact, as Christopher Murray (2010) writes: ‘ The visitor that Kelvin sees is a mirror,
reflecting his shame at having caused the death of his wife by apathy and neglect ’
(p. 100).

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a ‘specimen. ’ Our brains simply will not let us. To discount Hari’s
humanness, theories are required – the scientific and philosophical
underpinnings of Sartorius’ stance. Only such theories can suppress
natural emotional response to humanity. One such theory is reductionism.

Refusal of Reductionism
Reductionism is part of a movement in philosophy of mind that runs
counter Cartesian dualism. René Descartes (1991) argues that human
beings possess a soul (or mind in modern terms) quite separate and
qualitatively different from the body:

From the very fact that we conceive vividly and clearly the natures of the
body and the soul as different, we know that in reality they are different, and
consequently that the soul can think without the body. (p. 99)

The reductionist argument, on the other hand, is based on the assumption

that the soul/mind can be reduced to the body, i.e., the brain produces the
mind and therefore the soul cannot ‘think without the body.’
Reductionism views the natural sciences in these terms, e.g., biology
can be reduced to chemistry in that chemical reactions are behind life and
its various manifestations. And chemistry can be reduced to physics in that
physical elements are the constituents of the molecules that interact in
chemical reactions. This reasoning would imply that mental states can be
reduced to brain states, i.e., the physical or neurological processes and
structures of the brain.
The rebuttal of reductionism in philosophy of mind is made by
functionalists – the most prominent of which is Hilary Putnam – who
attempt to salvage elements of Cartesian dualism in the context of modern
materialism (cf. Putnam, 1975, p. 436). This is a compromise not unlike
Parfit’s attempt to expand on the Lockean concept of personhood.
Essentially, functionalism seeks to retain the materialist basis of
reductionism without accepting the latter’s claim of a one-to-one
correspondence between the physical and the mental. Putnam turns
specifically to the question of pain in order to challenge the idea that
mental states can be reduced to brain states. He rejects the reductionist
position that pain and suffering are inseparable from the brain states that
instantiate them:

We identify organisms as in pain […] on the basis of their behavior. But it is

a truism that similarities in the behavior of two systems are at least a reason
to suspect similarities in the functional organization of the two systems, and
a much weaker reason to suspect similarities in the actual physical details.
(1975, p. 436)

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If we turn to Solaris, we see that it is the ‘physical details, ’ such as Hari’s

neutrino-based structure – rather than the behaviour from Putnam’s
anti-reductionist argument – that Sartorius pays attention to in his
assessment of Hari. This reductionism is the theoretical stance that
makes it possible for Sartorius to overrule his natural emotional response
to Hari. Both in Solaris and in Putnam’s reasoning, the subtext is about
compassion in the face of suffering. Putnam’s position is known as
multiple realizability – the idea that no matter how pain is realized, no
matter what physical structures or processes instantiate suffering, the
experience of pain (in terms of functional organization) by any subject is
valid: ‘Thus it is at least possible that parallel evolution, all over the
universe, might always lead to one and the same physical “correlate” of
pain’ (Putnam, 1975, p. 436).4 In the confrontation between Kelvin and
Sartorius over Hari’s pain, we have the dramatisation of the debate
between reductionism and functionalism with ethical underpinnings.
Sartorius’ use of reductionist reasoning in his attempt to dismiss Hari’s
mental states is exemplified by his reaction to Kelvin’s claim that Hari is
the latter’s wife. Sartorius suggests a blood test. The implication is that
even if Kelvin cannot see Hari’s neutrinos immediately, she can still be
easily reduced to her material substance and structure on a readily
available empirical basis. And indeed, when Kelvin conducts the blood
test, he discovers that Hari is immune to any kind of destructive action.
When burned by acid, the blood regenerates itself. And even stronger
evidence is provided by an earlier incident when Hari, attempting to
follow Kelvin out of his room into the hallway of the space station, breaks
through a metal door and injures herself. This is a heart-wrenching scene
where we see Hari falling to Kelvin’s feet – covered in blood and in a state
of utter terror. But a few minutes later, to Kevin’s astonishment, all the
blood dries up and the injuries are gone. Thus, it appears to make sense
when Sartorius proposes to perform a vivisection on Hari. But Kelvin’s
response to all this reductionist thinking is functionalist in philosophical
terms. He turns to Hari and asks: ‘Did you feel pain when you injured
yourself against the door? ’ Her affirmative reply and most importantly the
behavioural indicators of suffering on Hari’s part echo Putnam’s position
and are meant to invite compassion.

4. Cf. N. Block & J. Fodor (1972) on the same topic: ‘ We have no particular reason to
suppose that the physiology of pain in man must have much in common with the
physiology of pain in phylogenetically remote species. But if there are organisms whose
psychology is homologous to our own but whose physiology is quite different, such
organisms provide counterexamples to the psychophysical correlations physicalism
requires ’ (p. 161; also cf. E. Funkhouser, 2007).

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At this point, it is important to emphasise the meaning of the actual

term ‘functionalism ’ in Putnam’s refutation of reductionism. Putnam
emphasises the function or role of mental states, such as suffering, rather
than the physical substrate or instantiation of such experience. In Kelvin’s
mind (and this is what Sartorius seeks to deny), the function of suffering
is the same for Hari as it is for any human being – even though Hari is
an alien with an entirely alien physical structure. Although Putnam does
refer to possible extraterrestrial instantiations of suffering, he seeks to
bring functionalism closer to home and make it more relevant by
considering an earthly species:

Thus if we can find even one psychological predicate which can clearly be
applied to both a mammal and an octopus (say ‘ hungry ’), but whose
physical-chemical ‘ correlate ’ is different in the two cases, the brain-state
theory has collapsed. (Putnam, 1975, pp. 436–437)

The role of hunger or pain in an octopus is the same as the role of such
experiences in a human. Hari is Putnam’s octopus, but let us recall the
duck test: an octopus does not look or act anything like a human being. So
in fact dismissing an octopus’ suffering should be much easier than
dismissing Hari’s, which makes Sartorius’ position all the more untenable.
The indifference to the pain of structurally different beings, such
as octopi or aliens, brings us back to Descartes and the origin of the
debate between functionalism and reductionism. The great French
philosopher considered animals to lack souls and therefore the ability to
really experience pain or suffering. He saw them as automata and even
performed vivisections – of the type that Sartorius suggests Kelvin perform
on Hari (cf. Descartes, 1991, p. 81). This is known as Descartes’ doctrine
of bête-machine:

I do not explain the feeling of pain without reference to the soul. For in my
view pain exists only in the understanding. What I do explain is all the
external movements which accompany this feeling in us; in animals it is
these movements which occur, and not pain in the strict sense’ (1991,
p. 148)

This, ironically, brings the reductionists close to the very philosophical

concept that they set out to reject: Cartesian dualism. Descartes was a
dualist only with respect to humans. He was perfectly happy with
reducing animals to their structure. Sartorius merely develops the view of
animals in Cartesian dualism to its unintended reductionist conclusion by
ignoring the very point which pits Putnam against Descartes and the
reductionists: behaviour. In contrast to Descartes who once operated on

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the heart of a live rabbit, thereby choosing to ignore the ‘external

movements ’ which accompany pain in nonhuman beings, Putnam builds
the crux of his theory around these ‘external movements. ’ And Tarkovsky
uses Hari’s ‘external movements ’ as the key to her personhood.
I have already mentioned the harrowing episode where Hari breaks
through a metal door and injures herself before Kelvin’s eyes. It is
noteworthy that when asked by Kelvin if she felt pain at that moment, Hari
does not merely say ‘yes’ but rather – ‘of course.’ It is the self-evident
validity of behavior as an indicator of suffering that the choice of wording
implies in this case. However, perhaps less self-evident than physical
pain and therefore seemingly more amenable to reductionist dismissal is
Hari’s mental anguish at being denied personhood. A key role here is
played by the humiliation to which Hari is subjected – mainly by
Sartorius. As Hari offers her hand to Sartorius upon their first meeting,
he looks right through her, addressing only Kelvin and ignoring the hand.
This is reinforced by the reference to Hari as a ‘specimen,’ the comment
about her neutrino-based structure, the vivisection suggestion and the
dehumanizing blood test. In this episode, perhaps the most humiliating
action on Sartorius’ part is his refusal to share in Hari’s delight at
seeing three images of a baby behind a curtain next to Sartorius. Hari
exclaims: ‘How lovely! Are these yours?’ The disarming spontaneity of
the way Natalia Bondarchuk delivers this line is meant to underscore the
idea that we are dealing with genuine human emotion – a warmth of
feeling that characterizes the social nature of our species. She is offering
to experience an emotion with Sartorius in a way that would presumably
melt the hearts of the most hardened Cartesian vivisectionists or
modern reductionists. But Sartorius, remaining completely immune to
Hari’s emotional radiance, merely treats her gesture as a nuisance, hastily
closing the curtain over the baby pictures and looking only at Kelvin. That
Hari’s emotional reaction specifically to children fails to establish her
personhood in Sartorius’ eyes is particularly striking. Of all emotions,
those associated with parenting are the hallmark of our species which
bears helpless young and must bond with them more powerfully than with
anyone else.
Although it may seem at first that Hari fails to notice these humiliations,
the stress of such experiences builds up in her neutrino-based mind and
explodes in the library episode. The three humans and Hari gather in the
library of the space station to celebrate Snaut’s birthday – seemingly as a
break from the conflicts and challenges of the previous scenes.
The library is different from the rest of the station because it looks like
an ordinary room in an earthly house. Instead of the white, sterile-looking
barren surfaces of the rooms and hallways where most of the action is set,

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the library contains books, a bust of Socrates, wooden furniture, candles,

a globe, paintings and rich colors, including green – reminiscent of
biological life on earth and in contrast to the cold darkness of lifeless
space. This strikingly human-friendly setting is very appropriate for Hari’s
affirmation of her human personhood. After witnessing the tension and
hostility that pervades the atmosphere among the three men in the library,
after hearing Sartorius accuse Kelvin of neglecting science in favour of
staying in bed with Hari, she delivers what is perhaps the central speech of
the film:

HARI: It seems to me that Kris Kelvin is more consistent than you. His
behaviour is human in inhuman conditions while you act as if none of this
had anything to do with you and consider your… guests… I think that’s
how you call us… something external, disruptive. […] I hate all of you!
Sartorius: What do you mean by that?! Please refrain from…
HARI: Please… don’t interrupt me. After all, I am a woman!
SARTORIUS: You are not a woman, neither are you human – can’t you
understand that… if you are even capable of understanding anything at
all. Hari does not exist. She is dead. And you… are just her iteration.
A mechanical iteration. A copy. A matrix.
HARI [moving her hand across her tear-soaked face, breathing heavily]: Yes.
Perhaps. But I am… becoming human. I feel no less than you do. Please
believe me… I can manage without him. I love him. I am human. You… you
are very cruel.

While the humiliation experienced by Hari upon her first meeting with
Sartorius may not manifest any behavioural counterparts (or ‘external
movements ’ as Descartes would call them), there is no doubt regarding
the mental anguish in the library scene. Hari can barely breathe as she
shakes from the anguish she is experiencing. Natalia Bondarchuk’s
performance is riveting, grippingly reminding us of Putnam’s functionalist
arguments regarding the validity of suffering ‘across platforms ’ so to
speak. Even more so than in the broken door episode, Hari passes the
duck test in the library, inviting the viewer to trust their eyes rather than
theories, such as Descartes’ bête-machine. In fact, if there is anyone
machine-like in this episode, it is Sartorius who displays no compassion
toward Hari even though this time, there can be no doubt regarding her
pain. The confrontation with Sartorius is concluded by Hari’s attempt to
drink water out of a glass. However, this fails miserably as water runs
down her chin and down her dress – seemingly validating Sartorius’
reductionist approach. She cannot do something as normally human as
drinking so how can Hari be human? But the drinking failure is
accompanied by the accelerated breathing and trembling indicative of

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Hari’s tremendous emotional pain. At this point Kelvin comes up to her

and kneels before the suffering woman, thereby implying that behaviour
clearly indicative of pain functionally cancels out Hari’s structural
dysfunction.
This opposition between suffering and Hari’s seeming failure to be
structurally human is present in other parts of the story, and one instance
in particular is worth mentioning at this point. I am referring to a brief,
peaceful episode occurring just before the library scene. Hari and
Kelvin are in bed together – precisely in line with the above-mentioned
accusation hurled by Sartorius at Kelvin. Kelvin is not doing science and
seems to be wasting his time. Hari says to Kelvin: ‘Kris, I love you.’
He replies: ‘Get some sleep.’ But she counters: ‘I don’t know how to sleep.’
Just like the above-mentioned failure to drink, Hari’s failure to sleep
underscores her non-human structure. Each of these failures (including
her indestructible blood and miraculously healing wounds) are
temptations to reduce Hari to her material composition and accept
Sartorius’ denial of her personhood. But her declaration of love for
Kelvin – just like her anguish in the library scene – blots out the sleep
failure as something inconsequential. Her capacity for human bonding –
whatever its material or structural instantiation – is functionally just as
valid as any normal human emotion. And this is not just any emotion,
but love – the ultimate social emotion. For a species considered to
be hypersocial in its evolved nature, the presence of love validates
humanness more than anything else. The scene closes with two more
attempts to validate Hari’s personhood. First, Kelvin says that whatever
Hari’s sleep dysfunction may be, she still dreams, i.e., she sleeps in a way.
And then the room is darkened, Hari closes her eyes and Natalya
Bondarchuk displays a very convincing calmness of body and breath – a
serenity indicative of genuine human repose of the mind. To the viewer
this looks very much like sleep and essentially passes the duck test.
In our discussion of the confrontation between Kelvin’s functionalist
and Sartorius’ reductionist reactions to Hari, we have not yet taken a
closer look at the third human on board the space station. Snaut occupies
a position somewhere in-between the two poles in question. His
spontaneous reactions to Hari appear to be based on the duck test.
When she is introduced to Snaut and Sartorius, the former does not ignore
or dismiss her outright. As Hari greets Snaut, he at first glances toward
Sartorius – as if seeking a cue for a proper reductionist reaction – but then
greets her back and even shakes her hand with a friendly facial expression.
This is in stark contrast with Sartorius who ignores Hari altogether.
Somewhat later, however, when Sartorius points out Hari’s neutrino-based
structure, it is Snaut who mentions the instability of neutrinos – as if

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echoing Sartorius’ reductionist position. Snaut seems to be torn between

his theory-based attitude toward Hari (Sartorius’ influence) and a
spontaneous emotional reaction in line with Kelvin’s stance. At times
Snaut condemns and rejects Sartorius – as happens while Kelvin is taking
a sample of Hari’s blood. Sartorius tries to engage Snaut in conversation,
but Snaut walks away, saying: ‘The hell with you all.’ But upon hearing
Kelvin express his love for Hari, Snaut coldly declares: ‘Don’t turn a
scientific problem into a bedchamber tale. ’ It is Snaut who suggests that
Hari can be simply disassembled in Sartorius’s annihilator. And later, as he
describes the annihilation of Hari to Kelvin, Snaut reduces the death of
this neutrino-based being to ‘a flash of light and wind.’ However, in the
library scene, Snaut reverently grips Hari’s hand and plants upon it a
chivalrous kiss. The expression on his face is that of genuine respect and
compassion for a suffering woman rather than a bête-machine.
Snaut’s philosophical vacillation persists throughout the entire film,
demonstrating the dilemma inherent in the human condition. Given our
ability to engage in abstract reasoning, as demonstrated by Descartes
perhaps more than by any other philosopher of modernity, we are torn
between pure emotion and the theories we construct. The temptation to
relinquish all spontaneity in light of philosophy’s conceptual power and
the overwhelming evidence of science weighs heavily upon human
sociality. And here, it ought to be stressed that, although strictly speaking
functionalism and reductionism are both theories from the philosophy
of mind, functionalism appears to be intuitive – a built-in or default
feature of the human mind. We have evolved mental mechanisms for
social life – compassion, reciprocity, the capacity to feel guilt, bonding
emotions, etc. We cannot help but take our emotional cues from
behaviour. However, these adaptations can be overruled or suppressed
through certain forms of reasoning. The demagogical denial of the
humanity of outgroups and the consequent genocides that have occurred
again and again in our history take us back to Putnam’s octopus. And this
is where counter-theories can help. The implications of functionalist
reasoning regarding the universal validity of suffering reach beyond other
species and extraterrestrial life. The reduction of mental life to specific
physical structures or brain states can apply equally well to much smaller
differences, such as those between human groups for example. The
dismissal of Hari’s personhood and suffering by Sartorius models
analogous attitudes toward ‘ the other’ within our own species. And in
this respect, the moral subtext of Tarkovsky’s film transcends the
immediate context of the story in question.
When all is said (and screamed) and done, Solaris offers no easy
answers to the question of what it is like to be human – at least not in

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empirical-scientific terms. In the library episode, Sartorius raises a toast to

science which is made to look like an utterly laughable attempt to salvage
the furniture in the midst of a house fire. The toast is rejected outright by
Snaut as ‘ nonsense,’ but Snaut cannot offer a philosophically satisfying
alternative either. What may provide something like this alternative is a
celebrated feature of Tarkovsky’s film: painting. Allusions to works by
Marc Chagall, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci appear in different
parts of the film – along with direct representations of paintings. The
confrontation in the library is followed by a sustained and detailed visual
exploration of Hunters in the Snow, a 1565 painting by Pieter Brueghel the
Elder. This hauntingly serene picture, which appears as an object of
contemplation by Hari, is explored by the camera in great detail with
accompanying sounds of birds and dogs. The amount of time taken
away from the film’s action to display Breughel’s winter scene suggests
a philosophical break from the strife on board the space station and
most importantly – from science (recall Sartorius’ hapless toast). The
esthetic-artistic experience is all about emotion – specifically the emotion
associated with life on Earth. Hari’s contact with Breughel’s winter scene is
like Parfit’s overlapping memory chain, i.e., a link with a reality that is…
and yet is not her own.
Hari’s body and the human bodies in Breughel’s painting are connected
despite all the ontological obstacles this creation of Solaris has
encountered during her brief existence. To quote Claire Thomson (2007),

Brueghel, then, tells us something of the last decades before Descartes

allegedly rent the mind and body asunder. […] For this painter, it is the
body that is the site of thought and memory (Reiss 1996: 593). For […]
Tarkovsky […], riffing on Brueghel’s painting, the image is the storehouse
of memory that also reminds us of our embodied selves. (pp. 14–15)

The philosophical storm unleashed by attempts to grapple with Cartesian

dualism must, in the end, come back to the body – no matter how much
Descartes discounted our mortal form. Whatever her underlying structure
and despite the fact that she is an emanation of Kelvin’s memory, Hari is
embodied – for Kelvin and for the film’s audience. This cinematic
embodiment (and the associated duck test) takes us beyond the debate
between functionalism and reductionism or the Lockean personhood
question. And it is her body that Hari sacrifices for Kelvin as she willingly
submits to annihilation at the hands of Snaut and Sartorius. That Christ-
like act paradoxically seals Hari’s status as unambiguously human and
resolves the question of her personhood. Tarkovsky’s final answer to the
film’s central question is tragically uplifting.

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FILMOGRAPHY
Tarkovsky, Andrei (1972) Solaris (Colrpuc). USSR.

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