Schopenhauer's Mask: Nothingness, Sympathy, Transcendence
——The secular world and consolation of "Transcendence"
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Although both boasting and slander can be unfounded and fictitious, people in the world accept boasting more and hate slander. It seems that boasting induces a positive and optimistic attitude, while slander induces a negative and pessimistic attitude. Arthur Schopenhauer — who, like most philosophers, was both a boaster and a slanderer — was called a pessimist, probably because he brought more slander to life than bragging. He immersed life in its grim essence, hovering between pain and boredom. This attitude of slandering life is also slandered by enthusiasts of life.
Detachment should be seen as an example of Schopenhauer's philosophy. This is a film that slanders life. If it is not out of a literary attitude to pick up literary boasting, it may make life optimists feel that life is being slandered. It shows the wandering between pain and boredom, the emptiness and confusion of the self, the alienation and indifference of the other, the suffering and consolation on the edge. If you think of "Transcendence" only as telling the story of education and the educated, then it is just an attitude that stays in its broken appearance. The situation of educating and being educated, the marginalization and dilapidation of the campus is just a place to show the wandering between pain and boredom. At the end of the film, when referring to "The Fall of the House of Usher", it said that the House of Usher is not just an ancient and decaying residence, but also a state of being. The same is true for the campus in "Separation", which shows the existence of alienation and indifference. The ego is confused and entangled between nothingness, empathy and detachment.
1. Nothingness: Demonstrating the vanity of oneself
The film "Transcendence" tells the story from the perspective of a substitute Chinese teacher. The hero is a Schopenhauer-esque pessimist. He grew up in self-isolation when he was a child, like Schopenhauer, who has long watched the world fluctuate between pain and boredom. He has a marginal personality who reverses enthusiasm and indifference, responding to society's indifference with indifference and responding to social indifference with enthusiasm. This is the true meaning of transcendence. When he said: I'm insignificant, I'm not here, all you see is a hollow shell. He described himself as seen by others as appearances. His noumenon is his will, or the will to which his appearance is subordinate is transcending. This is a kind of indifference of ideas, and through indifference to appearances, the transcendence of will is achieved. And such indifference or detachment is only an escape for the sophistication, and escape is only for the comfort of oneself. However, is it not just for their own comfort that people learn the world with enthusiasm? Of course, the escape from pessimism is not the same as getting away from the world, leaving life completely, but gaining a sense of belonging in the self-consciousness of the will.
I wouldn't look at the movie "Detachment" as a story about education, because it really has nothing to do with real education other than showing a state of injustice and marginality. When the male protagonist's teacher status gets attention, it's just his usefulness in society that gets attention, and his own life, his mentality is left aside. And those that are left aside are not about how education is, but about who you are as a person. As a substitute Chinese teacher, it is the way for the male protagonist to appear and be actualized in the society. Just like the words of Albert Camus at the beginning: when I am so detached from myself, I am so sure to appear in the world. (At one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.) Realization makes people indifferent to the inner self, measured by the personal instrumental value, while the personal inner value turns into nothingness. Your childhood education also seems to imply that what kind of profession you will become in the future, what kind of person you will become: lawyer, teacher, doctor... These labels are like broilers, laying hens, breeders, etc., indicating the identity of the individual and the value. - This is of course a slanderous and unrealistic analogy, but it is used here to show the conflict between pessimism and sophistication.
In fact, although there is a big gap with the so-called modern philosophy that emphasizes the value of human subjectivity, it is already a relatively positive part of the ideology that modern philosophy strives to create, if it can really be realized. . After the illusion of the philosophy of the subject, the society has relaxed the restriction of origin on the individual, and people can break the barrier in the value of the tool, which is already a great achievement of "liberalism". Otherwise, people can't even choose their own instrumental value (occupation), what a gratifying social progress. However, the explicit constraints are not as strong, but are still surreptitiously perpetuated. One example is the constraints on basic education. In the movie "Transcendence", the reason why the school the male protagonist came to is so messy is because it is a marginalized school, and even such a school faces the end of being dissolved, because the "society" that loves capital despise this school. The value of the school, don't want to waste the economy on this school. Interestingly, a "society" that uses capital as its standard can always think of ways to restrict some people and relax others. Of course, this simply shows the difference between ideal and reality, and is not blaming "society," which has its reasons, after all.
The lovely thing about the teachers represented by the male protagonists in the movie "Transcendence" is that they even want the marginalized students to resist the plight of being marginalized. Those students have unknowingly been ideologically manipulated by modernist capital. Capital society strives to promote the subjective consciousness of fake and inferior through advertisements, entertainment programs, and film and television works. These means shape the appearance and behavior of the stars, telling the audience: Doing this, doing that, is the pursuit of self! The word star corresponds to fans in the dark, just as the word savior corresponds to believers in suffering. So in "Transcendence", you can see that those students are wearing strange and revealing clothes, but they think they are showing themselves. But this is not a "self", but a distorted representation of the externalized self-consciousness, a representation of the self-consciousness constructed and submerged by the external world. The male protagonist borrows the word "Double-think" from "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (meaning simultaneously acknowledging that contradictory views are correct), so that students can find self-judgment and not be confused by the appearance of contradictions.
The term "double-think" was originally used in Nineteen Eighty-Four to satirize the Soviet totalitarian system. For example, the goal of the dictatorship of the Soviet-style system is to eliminate the authoritarian state, which is considered to be a double thought, because it contains self-contradiction or cognitive conflict. However, this so-called contradiction is at least not a contradiction between simultaneous realities, and thus does not quite fit the definition of doublethink. However, the real and deep dualism is actually contained in the capitalist system in a more subtle way, in the so-called modernist ideology, in the slogan of "pursuit of self", in the so-called "subject" in concept.
[Ignore this paragraph if you are not interested in pseudo-philosophical reviews] "Modern philosophy is self-subject philosophy." This is an often-proclaimed, but hypocritical judgment. It is impossible for modern philosophy to prove that the self is the subject, and those views that are somewhat capable of making the argument that the self is the subject have been vilified as "solipsism." Such "solipsism" is, in the lightest, self-imagination, and in the most serious, the manifestation of neurosis. Sophisticated people know that judgments such as "I think, therefore I am" and "to exist is to be perceived" are absurd without even thinking. Those "solipsistic" or "subjective idealist" thinkers must have gone mad in their delusions of God. In fact, it is quite absurd to think that any of the prominent philosophers in modern philosophy is preaching solipsism. Philosophers with a theological background in particular - such as theological thinkers like George Berkeley - are even less likely to preach solipsism. Rene Descartes, in order to avoid the world thinking that he would believe in "sovereignism", claimed that he was very much in agreement with the social regulations of the time. At least there is still a place for God in Cartesian philosophy, so Cartesian philosophy is not solipsism, but is regarded as a "dualism" similar to split personality. Dualism is no less repugnant than solipsism. When Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that the world is a representation of the will; when Ernst Mach claimed that things are a composite of sensations... These claims are easily labelled as "solipsism" and are ridiculed and disgusted by people . However, this attitude of disgust towards "solipsism" just shows that everyone in the world knows that the self cannot be the subject at all. The only idea of "self-subject" is taken seriously as a manifestation of psychosis or cognitive impairment, and philosophers treat "sovereignism" as if it were a disease. And in literature, characters who are obsessed with themselves—Don Quixote, Robinson, Byronic heroes—are either ridiculous or pathetic or both. Ultimately, Hegelian philosophy cures this pathetic and ridiculous "solemnism" disease of the modern fantasy drama of the subject - the species essence of man in various social relations; the self is not the subject, the subject is the nation, the state, or the society . According to the discourse of Schopenhauer's philosophy, the world is never the representation of the self-will, but the representation of the subject's will—the representation of the national will or the representation of the national will. The subject is the sea, and the ego is the droplet within, and the droplet is always swayed by other droplets and the sea. [If you are not interested in pseudo-philosophical reviews, you can ignore this paragraph]
"Maintaining oneself" is the manifestation of the subject's personality disorder in the by-product of modern philosophy. In the capitalist propaganda media, however, the myth of the "self-seeking" pseudo-subject continues, incorporating much of the self into ludicrous and pathetic actions. Of course, the generation of the myth of the shoddy subject, or the process in which the idol is fictionalized is not the wishful thinking of a certain power, but is based on the fantasies of some of the masses who affirm themselves. Ironically, many self-affirming fantasies need to be fulfilled by pursuing other-idols. A recent typical example is the famous non-mainstream painter Vincent van Gogh, an idol created by fiction. Now even if the fiction can be disbanded, Vincent van Gogh, a pseudo-subject idol, has retained his identity. . Vincent van Gogh is like Robinson in the field of art. He was originally just a character who was involuntarily abandoned, but in the fictional atmosphere of idols, he was shaped to drift away from the mainstream society, in the ideal of self. A character struggling in a lonely island. In the face of his inexplicable paintings, many people completely ignore the ridiculousness of him as a Don Quixote-like character. No, he wasn't funny, how could it be funny to be yourself. He's an icon, an extension of self-affirmation, and he's lovable. Vincent van Gogh, with his unique graffiti and brushstrokes, has become a model for expressing himself, and behind him, through the power of the media, he has become an idol crisper for many people to put the illusion of "affirming themselves". In fact, without the operation of the propaganda media - especially the support and operation of Vincent van Gogh's brother Theo van Gogh - it is difficult to imagine maintaining such a Vincent image in the mass media . This is the luck of the world! Let them know an island-like self-idol many times more lovable than Robinson or Don Quixote.
However, if the "pursuit of the self" is clearly only regarded as a fantasy drama, as a placebo for the treatment of the subject's personality disorder, it may be a transcendental action - this is probably the only "self-subject" that can have field of legal rights. In the movie "Transcendence", the male protagonist's plan for the students belongs to this kind - through reading literary works, to reflect on oneself and the environment, reflect on desires and repression, so that people in the world can withdraw from the turbulent complexity and reality out, temporarily alienated from the bitter sea of life. The zigzag spread of literary-art works compensates for the crowding of the one-way street of the social system. Literary works engage the reader in the sympathy of the protagonist, experiencing mainstream or alternative feelings—usually always “alternative”—of course, readers are not really conscious of their own subjective rationality when reading. It also tends to become paranoid—not to reflect on reality, but to exaggerate some kind of fictional hallucination.
2. Sympathy: the cry of the protagonist
All benevolence is essentially sympathy - Arthur Schopenhauer
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3. Transcendence: Healing in Fantasy
The world doesn't understand you, it's a joke, the only possible thing is that you don't understand the world.
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