Murdock’s Cross: The Philosophical Significance of Daredevil
Netflix’s Daredevil intro sequence.
In a world saturated with superheroes, few are as grounded—morally, legally, and existentially—as Matt Murdock. A blind lawyer by day and masked vigilante by night, Netflix’s Daredevil (along with its continuation in Daredevil: Born Again) invites viewers not merely to witness spectacular feats of justice, but to wrestle with the philosophical and psychological tensions embedded in justice itself. Through its brooding protagonist and the broken streets of Hell’s Kitchen, the series stages a meditation on law, violence, identity, faith, and redemption that is as brutal as it is sincere.
At the heart of this meditation lies a paradox: Matt is both an officer of the law and its transgressor. He embodies the iconic Lady Justice—blindfolded and holding the scales—while struggling to balance the abstractions of legal obligation and moral righteousness. Does law serve justice in a city where power shields the corrupt and punishes the weak? Or must justice, in the end, be taken into one’s own hands?
Violence, too, is inescapable. From Wilson Fisk’s orchestrated brutality to Frank Castle’s ruthless vengeance, the show explores violence not just as action but as philosophy—an expression of will, rage, and order. Matt, in turn, stands precariously between righteousness and rage, navigating what it means to fight without killing, and whether such restraint makes him a savior or a hypocrite.
Beneath the mask, however, lies a man torn by guilt, Catholic conviction, and unresolved identity. Through the lenses of Jungian and Lacanian psychology, Matt’s dual life as lawyer and Devil mirrors a deeper fragmentation of the self—one haunted by sin, grace, and the hope of redemption. Can Matt be redeemed through suffering? Is forgiveness possible in a world addicted to vengeance?
This essay will explore Daredevil’s metaphysical core—its longing for justice, fear of chaos, and deep hunger for absolution—by tracing these intertwined themes across law, violence, identity, faith, and salvation.
Lady Justice & Matthew Murdock: Is Blind Justice Truly Impartial?
In Daredevil, Matt Murdock embodies the paradox of justice—he is both an officer of the law and its transgressor. As a blind lawyer and a masked vigilante, Matt becomes a living symbol of Lady Justice: blindfolded, bearing scales, and navigating the delicate tension between law and morality. This duality reflects the philosophical tension between legal positivism and natural law theory. Legal positivism, championed by thinkers like H.L.A. Hart, insists that the validity of law is rooted in its social sources and procedural legitimacy, not its moral content. In contrast, natural law theory, from Aquinas to modern proponents like John Finnis, asserts that true law must align with moral order. Matt’s vigilante identity emerges from the failure of legal positivism to ensure justice in Hell’s Kitchen—where the law is upheld procedurally but fails morally.
In a city where legal systems serve the powerful and overlook the vulnerable, Daredevil critiques the hollowness of law severed from justice. Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, manipulates the structures of law to appear legitimate. His operations are sanitized by lawyers, contracts, and plausible deniability. This reflects the danger of a positivist system that prizes legality over morality: Fisk becomes lawful, but not just. As Rousseau argues in The Social Contract, the legitimacy of governance rests on a general will oriented toward the common good. When law becomes a tool of oppression rather than protection, it breaks the contract between the people and the state. In this vacuum, Matt steps in—not to destroy law, but to fulfill what it has abandoned: justice.
Matt reading his case work in brail.
Yet this vigilante justice is fraught. Matt’s actions suggest an intuitive allegiance to natural law: that there exists a moral order transcending civil legislation. But his blindness—literal and metaphorical—raises the question: Can justice be truly impartial? The show complicates the idea of objective morality by showing Matt's personal biases, emotions, and traumas shaping his judgment. He believes he sees more clearly than others, yet he is not without prejudice or pride. As Nietzsche might note in Beyond Good and Evil, morality often disguises a will to power. Matt’s sense of justice may risk becoming an expression of his own need for control or redemption.
Moreover, the show presents a systemic critique: when institutions fail, individuals take up the mantle of justice. But this decentralization risks legitimizing violence and undermining collective order. It also reveals a gap between legality and legitimacy. Matt’s actions highlight how laws can be weaponized by the elite while moral justice remains inaccessible to the oppressed. The tension in Daredevil is not whether the law exists, but whether it functions as it ought. In bridging law and justice, Matt confronts the perennial question posed by Socrates in The Republic: Is justice merely the interest of the stronger, or is it something higher—binding even the powerful?
Primal Violence: Kingpin, Daredevil, & the Punisher with Violence
Violence in Daredevil is not merely an act—it is a language through which power, trauma, and morality are contested. “Maybe it isn’t only about justice, Matt. Maybe it’s about you having an excuse to hit someone” — words said by Matt’s best friend, Foggy Nelson. Each character—Kingpin, Punisher, Daredevil, and Poindexter—employs violence as a means to a perceived good, yet each represents a distinct philosophy of violence. What sets Matt Murdock apart is not the absence of violence in his actions, but the existential struggle over its legitimacy. Unlike Frank Castle, who sees killing as justice incarnate, or Wilson Fisk, who uses force to assert control and construct “order,” Daredevil struggles with violence, tempted to kill yet is bound by an inner moral law. This inner tension reflects the Nietzschean tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian—reason and chaos—and the Will to Power that undergirds them all.
Nietzsche’s Will to Power speaks to the instinctual drive in humans to impose their will upon the world. Kingpin’s rhetoric about “primal screams” and the “devil in the Murdocks” aligns with this view: violence is not an aberration but an eruption of repressed will. Fisk uses violence to silence the chaos of his childhood and mold the city in his image. In this way, he becomes a godlike figure, crafting order through domination. Poindexter (Bullseye) becomes his most tragic creation—not inherently evil, but disoriented and weaponized. Fisk nurtures Poindexter’s instability, manipulating his trauma and instinctual rage into a lethal tool. The series suggests that violence, when untethered from morality and shaped by another’s will, mutates into monstrosity.
Frank Castle (the Punisher), by contrast, embraces violence as retributive justice. He believes the system is broken beyond repair and that death is the only honest form of judgment. “You hit them and they get back up. I hit them, and they stay down!”, Frank Castle exclaims to Matt in their rooftop dialogue scene. Matt rejects this absolutism, but the line between them is razor-thin. Daredevil, while refusing to kill, still acts as judge, jury, and executioner in his own right. This raises a critical philosophical dilemma: who authorizes Matt’s morality? By what authority does he declare his violence righteous? Here, we might look to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which insists that moral action must be guided by duty and universality, not personal inclination. Matt tries to follow this categorical imperative but continually slips into subjective vengeance masked as justice.
The series also flirts with Freudian and Jungian interpretations of the self. The “devil in the Murdocks” may be read as the shadow—the repressed violence that, when denied, erupts unconsciously. Matt’s struggle with his violent impulses mirrors Jung’s belief that individuation requires integrating the shadow rather than denying it. In contrast, Poindexter never gains that integration; he becomes a mirror of Matt’s failure to fully reconcile who he is. The mask protects society from the man—and the man from himself.
Ultimately, what makes Daredevil different is not that he avoids violence, but that he wrestles with it. He acknowledges its danger, its seduction, and its cost. His refusal to kill is less about a clear moral superiority and more about a desperate attempt to maintain a boundary between justice and chaos. Unlike Kingpin or the Punisher, who accept violence as natural and necessary, Matt sees it as a failure—a sign that the world is broken and that he, too, might be beyond saving. His violent resistance is not an assertion of will, but a cry for redemption.
The Man in the Mask: Justice and Vigilantism
In Daredevil: Born Again, Matt Murdock is forced to confront not only the collapse of his external life—his reputation, relationships, and role as Daredevil—but also the fragmentation of his inner self. Stripped of his titles, his home, and his purpose, Matt’s journey becomes one of psychological and philosophical reconstitution. At the heart of this struggle is the tension between his masked identity and his human vulnerability. In the language of Carl Jung, Born Again dramatizes the process of individuation: the integration of disparate elements of the psyche—ego, shadow, and persona—into a coherent self.
Matt as “the man in the mask” vigilante.
Jung argues that each person wears a persona, the social mask presented to the world, and conceals a shadow, the repressed and unconscious aspects of the self. Matt’s persona is multifaceted: he is the lawyer, the Catholic, and the superhero. Yet his shadow emerges most clearly in his violent urges, guilt, and doubt—traits often projected onto the "Daredevil" persona. When he loses everything, the masks fall away, forcing him to confront the raw material of his being. When the system isn’t working for it’s intended purpose, it breeds resentment, and that how is a “persona” like Daredevil is born. This disintegration mirrors Jung’s notion that one must pass through the abyss—through suffering, contradiction, and loss—to become whole. Matt’s rebirth is not just a return to vigilante action; it is a psychological reintegration of self, a wrestling match with his inner demons.
Jacques Lacan provides a different, but complementary, lens. For Lacan, the self is not a stable, unified entity, but is constructed through language and the “mirror stage”—the moment an infant first perceives itself as an image, a fiction of unity. Matt’s identity as Daredevil functions as such a mirror: it reflects a heroic, idealized version of himself that hides the fragmented and traumatized subject beneath. When this image is shattered in Born Again, Matt enters what Lacan might call a traversal of the fantasy. He must come to grips with the fact that Daredevil was never the true self, but a symbolic fiction used to mask loss and lack.
The process of being “born again” (while an obvious nod to his Catholicism) thus becomes a psychoanalytic as well as spiritual crisis. Matt must relinquish the illusion that Daredevil makes him whole and accept that no singular identity can fully stabilize the self. As Lacan would insist, “the subject is split”—and so is Matt. But it is in the embrace of this fragmentation, the acceptance of brokenness, that Matt finds a new strength. He does not recover Daredevil as he once was, but reclaims him with new awareness—no longer as a mask to hide behind, but as a facet of a larger, wounded self striving toward coherence.
In the end, Born Again portrays not a triumph of vigilantism, but the messy, painful work of re-encountering one’s humanity beneath the mask. Matt Murdock’s rebirth is not a return to form—it is a dialectical synthesis of the man and the myth, the sinner and the saint, the shadow and the light. Through Jungian integration and Lacanian fracture, Daredevil becomes something closer to whole.
The Devil’s Cross: Matthew Murdock’s Catholocism
Matt Murdock’s Catholicism in Daredevil is not a mere character detail—it serves as the theological and existential framework through which he interprets his suffering, guilt, and dual identity as both a lawyer and a vigilante. Though he does not display consistent religious observance—rarely attending Mass and often wrestling bitterly with God—his recurring visits to the confessional, his reverence for the sacraments, and his persistent concern with justice reveal the imprint of a deeply formed Catholic conscience.
At the heart of Matt’s inner turmoil lies a modern engagement with the classic problem of evil: how can a good and omnipotent God allow a world so steeped in violence and corruption? This dilemma, long debated from Epicurus to Augustine, becomes a lived question for Matt in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Augustine famously argued that evil is not a substance but a privation of good—a distortion of the will away from its proper ends. While Matt is clearly shaped by such theological currents, he frequently doubts whether any divine order governs the chaos he witnesses. In this sense, his spiritual anguish resembles that of Job: he challenges God’s justice not from atheism, but from a place of wounded faith—clinging to the hope that his pain might still have meaning.
This paradox is especially vivid in Born Again, where Matt prays not with piety but desperation. His suffering—marked by blindness, isolation, betrayal, and relentless violence—suggests a Christological weight. He suffers not only for himself but on behalf of others, taking the pain of the city upon himself. “I thought God let me hear the prayers”, Matt utters to his priest in season three. The red suit, in this light, functions like a hairshirt—an ascetic symbol of penitential suffering and substitution. In bearing the sins of his city, Matt begins to see himself less as a man and more as a vessel of atonement. Yet unlike Christ, whose suffering culminates in resurrection and redemption, Matt’s pain seems cyclical and unresolved.
This tension is reflected in Matt’s shifting self-perception. At times, he envisions himself as a redemptive figure, chosen—or cursed—to bear a divine burden. “I gave my sweat and blood, without complaint, because I too believed that I was God’s soldier”, Matt says in season three, initially talking about Job. This evokes Søren Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” who walks a lonely and paradoxical path, trusting in a purpose he cannot fully understand. Yet in other moments, Matt appears closer to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last man”: weary, disillusioned, and teetering on the edge of nihilism. He operates not out of hope, but out of obligation and compulsion—products of trauma and the need to impose moral order in a disordered world. His greatest tragedy is perhaps this: he believes in a forgiving God, but not in the possibility of his own forgiveness. He enacts the form of the crucified Christ but resists the healing of resurrection.
When asked about Matt’s violence in a an interview/Q&A panel with BUILD, actor Charlie Cox (who portrays the Man Without Fear) had this to say: “I think the truth is, it’s complicated. I’m talking about whether he enjoys it or whether he doesn’t. And the truth is, I think he does and he doesn’t. And figuring out what that line is, is both an incredibly scary prospect for him, and…he probably has never quite asked himself that question entirely because he’s afraid of what the answer might be.” One of the most revealing lines in the series occurs in the confessional: “I’m not seeking penance for what I’ve done, Father. I’m asking forgiveness for what I’m about to do.” This statement subverts the traditional logic of Catholic repentance, where penance follows sin and is rooted in contrition. Matt anticipates his own failure and seeks absolution before the act, signaling not just guilt but a distorted view of justice and salvation. He knows he will sin, yet feels compelled to do so—as though divine justice depends not on God, but on his own sacrifice. Grace, for Matt, becomes something earned through pain, not received through trust. This mindset borders on a Pelagian impulse: an implicit belief that redemption must be secured by one’s own efforts.
His relationship with Father Lantom offers a quiet counterpoint to this struggle. Lantom does not condone Matt’s violence, but neither does he dismiss his turmoil. Instead, he listens, encourages, and reminds Matt to place his hope in divine justice—even when it is not visible. Yet Matt struggles to relinquish control. He acts as though God’s intervention cannot be relied upon, and thus assumes the burden himself. His vigilantism becomes not a rejection of faith, but a substitute for it—a kind of counterfeit salvation based on works rather than grace. In this light, the confessional becomes less a place of transformation and more a stage for unresolved guilt—a ritual acknowledgment of sin without healing.
Ultimately, Matt’s Catholicism renders him a paradoxical figure: both redeemer and transgressor, Christ-like and Cain-like. The confessional functions as a courtroom where divine law, human conscience, and existential despair collide. In Daredevil, Matt Murdock is not simply a masked hero; he is a man haunted by his own morality, caught between justice and mercy, faith and fury. He knows the language of grace but struggles to accept its reality. His salvation is cruciform, but not yet Christian—marked by sacrifice without surrender, justice without joy, and a God who listens but, in Matt’s view, rarely answers.
A Daring Crossroads: Redemption & Forgiveness, or Damnation & Vengeance
In Daredevil, redemption is not a destination but a battlefield—where suffering, vengeance, and power all compete for moral supremacy. At the center of this struggle is Matt Murdock, a man torn between his Catholic faith and his violent calling. Redemption for Matt is not primarily about absolution from others but about making sense of his suffering. He treats pain as moral currency, hoping to earn peace through punishment. Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of despair—where the self refuses to rest in the grace of God and instead defines itself through guilt—is a fitting parallel. Matt becomes a cruciform figure: embracing the blood and agony of the Cross, but rarely its healing. His acts of penance substitute for actual transformation, and his self-conception hinges not on being forgiven but on being worthy of suffering. Interestingly enough, Matt also says “I’d rather die as the devil than live as Matt Murdock.”
By contrast, Wilson Fisk—Kingpin—offers a starkly different vision of redemption, one not through suffering but through control. Fisk seeks not atonement but reinvention. His so-called redemption is a project of power and order, a carefully curated image rehabilitated for public consumption. He believes that his violence is justified if it leads to peace—a logic that closely mirrors Nietzsche’s “will to power,” where morality is shaped by those strong enough to impose it. Whereas Matt fights from within guilt, Fisk operates from ruthless certainty. He does not seek forgiveness but dominance. In his world, redemption is not a matter of conscience but of conquest—a managerial task of building a better world, no matter how many bodies lie beneath its foundation.
Between these two extremes stands Frank Castle, the Punisher, who dismisses redemption altogether. For Frank, forgiveness is a fantasy in a world too far gone. Justice, in his mind, is not restorative but retributive: swift, violent, and final. Frank’s earlier quote—“You hit them and they get back up. I hit them and they stay down”—epitomizes his belief that evil must be eradicated, not reasoned with. In this, Frank reflects a Hobbesian vision of justice where the social contract has collapsed, and only the strong survive. Yet even Frank is haunted—by the loss of his family, by memories that no amount of vengeance can silence. His violence is compulsive, not curative. He cannot forgive the world for taking his loved ones, nor himself for failing to protect them. Thus, his justice is not just terminal; it is tragic.
Amid these competing visions, Daredevil elevates forgiveness as the most radical and destabilizing force in a world of vengeance. When Matt chooses not to kill Fisk, he steps outside the logic of violence and into something closer to grace. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, argues that forgiveness is essential because "acts are irreversible"; only through forgiveness can we break the chain of retaliation and start anew. Yet for Matt, forgiveness remains largely theoretical. Though he refuses to kill, this is not always born of mercy—it is often an extension of his guilt, a way of sanctifying his pain. He speaks the language of grace but acts like a man who must atone alone, trapped in a theology of suffering without healing.
This tension crystallizes in Matt’s inability to forgive himself. Though he believes in a God who offers mercy, he cannot receive it. Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of despair again proves apt: Matt is a self who refuses to be itself under God, choosing instead to be defined by sin rather than saved by grace. His confessions are sincere but cyclical—rituals of guilt rather than catalysts for renewal. He acts as if justice depends on his continued suffering, not on divine mercy, and so he remains locked in a pattern of violence and remorse. Meanwhile, figures like Frank and Fisk continue to draw the line between justice and revenge according to their own visions. Yet in Christian theology, justice is not merely punitive but restorative—a return to right relationships. Matt’s world, tragically, offers few opportunities for such restoration.
Matt, after defeating the Kingpin — Wilson Fisk.
Ultimately, Daredevil does not resolve the question of redemption—it dramatizes its complexity. Matt, Fisk, and Frank each claim to pursue justice, but their paths diverge sharply: one through pain, another through power, and the last through punishment. Each vision is flawed, yet all are driven by deep wounds. In the end, the line between justice and revenge is not drawn in law or violence but in the conscience of those who wield them. Forgiveness, in this context, is not weakness but defiance—the only act strong enough to disrupt the cycles of guilt, control, and destruction. Redemption in Daredevil is not clean or guaranteed. It is bruised, bloodied, and always at risk of being lost—but it remains, flickering, as the only hope in a world that knows how to punish but forgets how to heal.
Conclusion:
Daredevil presents a layered exploration of justice, violence, identity, faith, and redemption set against the fractured landscape of Hell’s Kitchen. Matt Murdock, as a blind lawyer and vigilante, embodies the tension between law and justice—mirroring the blindfolded Lady Justice who holds the scales but struggles to balance them in a system rife with corruption and inequality. Legal positivism’s strict adherence to law contrasts with natural law’s appeal to inherent morality, yet Hell’s Kitchen’s broken social contract, manipulated by Kingpin’s cunning use of legal structures, reveals how law can become a tool of oppression rather than justice. This corruption forces Matt to wrestle with the limits of the legal system and the morality of taking justice into his own hands, raising profound questions about who is authorized to decide what justice truly means.
Violence permeates the series as both a symptom and instrument of power and survival. Daredevil, Kingpin, and Punisher all use violence, but their motives and methods diverge sharply. While Kingpin wields violence to impose control and legitimize his power, and Punisher pursues unyielding retribution, Matt’s violence is circumscribed by an ethical struggle—he battles not only external enemies but the violent impulses within himself, reflecting Nietzsche’s “will to power” and the primal instincts that the show acknowledges as part of human nature. The presence of characters like Bullseye, whose descent into chaos is catalyzed by Kingpin’s machinations, underscores the dangers of unleashing unchecked violence. Psychologically, Matt’s double life reveals the fractured self, as seen through Jungian and Lacanian lenses, with the mask both protecting and isolating him as he navigates his conflicting roles.
Central to Matt’s journey is his Catholic faith, which grounds his grappling with suffering, evil, and redemption. His faith is neither perfect nor simplistic; instead, it is a well of tension between hope and despair, grace and guilt. Matt embodies a Christ-like figure burdened with pain, not as a triumphant redeemer but as one caught between divine calling and personal curse. Redemption in Daredevil is therefore ambiguous—Matt’s pursuit is as much about enduring and making meaning of suffering as it is about achieving forgiveness, whether from others or himself. This contrasts sharply with Kingpin’s claim that redemption comes through power and order. Forgiveness emerges as the radical act that challenges the cycles of vengeance that define their world, yet it remains elusive for Matt, who must confront the fragile boundary between justice and revenge—a line drawn not by law, but by conscience. Ultimately, Daredevil invites us to consider that true justice and redemption demand courage to forgive and to accept mercy, even amid a world that seems irrevocably broken.
