When I was a child, I heard cursing people, saying that you had a spinal cord, did you? This absurd, Kaufmanian and Europeanized American comedy asks, have you drawn your soul today?
If the film is to question the soul, does it have to be concrete, or, in philosophical language, to be materialized? Although Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle's ideas in the "Theological Encyclopedia", it is quite certain that the soul is a form, and the soul has no material. But in "21 Grams" starring Sean Penn, the director calculated the weight of the soul in Archimedes's way. After he was declared dead, he lost 21 grams of weight.
Twelve years ago, there was a night full of sulfur, and many evil feelings and desires changed in my heart. I picked up a pen and wrote a poem desperately, "Tonight there is a fire and plunder." I said, "I am the ronin, prince, robber and monk of the night/ I committed sin in my imagination/ and will be forever lost because of this." At that time, I had a guess, if a man flashed his lustful thoughts and then weighed, would he gain a gram of weight? If so, my body shape reveals the secret of my sins.
But people will quibble, saying that those thoughts are only in the memory, not on the hard disk. It's like an elevator overloaded. Someone asked who brought the computer. Please delete two Gs first. The amount of information is overwhelming. But the soul cannot bear the lightness, like the fleeting fragrance of wheat outside a pizza restaurant. It is better to throw money in the water and fireworks to burn in the night sky.
In the opening, the director quoted Descartes's 1649 "On the Passion of the Soul", "The soul is located in a tiny gland in the middle of the brain"-but I have not found the true source of this statement.
Actor Paul Giamatti, playing himself. In the film, Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" is being rehearsed. The role of the intellectual who lost his ideals in the play also dragged down Giamatti. He is not in the state, and his heart is dry and tired. One day I looked at "The New Yorker" and saw a report from "Soul Storage Company" saying that they had invented a technique for extracting souls.
The boss used a metaphor to impress Giamatti. He said that the elephants of the circus had been tied to wooden piers since they were young. When he grew up, he thought he was chained as soon as he got on the wooden pier, so he honestly cooperated with the performance. "The soul is the invisible rope that binds us", the boss said, you can take it out and store it here. In order to avoid tax, it can also be shipped to a warehouse in Maryland.
Giamatti drew 95% of his soul and looked like a chickpea. He still has thoughts, memories, and consciousness. But what is being lost day by day is a feeling that is real and alive, deep into the bone marrow and joints. Years ago, an old friend suffered a cerebral thrombosis and was paralyzed. He was in fear and sadness in the ward, and heard the call in the dark. Just like Pascal’s "Night of Fire", Teacher Yang fumbled on a postcard and wrote a letter of acknowledgment. He said that what is most grateful is the will, thinking and language. These three most precious "three pieces" have been preserved intact. At that time, my five organs were shaking, thinking that what Teacher Yang said was pointing to the soul. However, after watching this movie, Giamatti still possesses these "three big pieces" after extracting his soul, but it seems like a fake. It can be seen that the true meaning of the soul is more hidden behind the will, thinking and language.
According to Taoism, man is a fusion of "form, qi, and god". The example of Giamati can be called an aura without a "god." In "Baopuzi", Ge Hong extended the way of self-cultivation to the way of governing the country. He said, "God is still a king, and blood is still a minister." Giamati loses his soul, like a country without a king. "If the people disperse, the country will die, and if exhausted, the body will die." His life and his performances have since been weakened, like a concubine.
The cornerstone of Buddhism is "NO SOUL." Although the term "bardo" is usually regarded as a soul, the concept of "soul immortality" is actually a specialty of Greek metaphysics. The bardo does not exist forever. , Not to mention the absolute spirit that transcends the body and guides and controls the behavior of the physical life. Therefore, in the "Orthodox Buddhism", Master Shengyan declared that "Buddhism does not believe in an eternal soul. If you believe Without the existence of the soul, one is not a true Buddhist."
Quite simply, the substance and permanence of the soul are incompatible with the cosmology of "dependent origination" and "impermanence". If the soul is a reality, the transcendental Nirvana is impossible. Buddhism is actually a godless religion. Since the human body does not have an immortal soul that can guide and direct its activities; then the entire universe has no creator who can create it, lead it, love it, and judge it. Therefore, apart from personal self-cultivation, it is impossible to have a person (Savior) who will redeem the souls of all people. According to Master Shengyan, everything is impermanent, including the physical realm as well as the spiritual realm.
The cosmology of Dependent Origination is actually very similar to the theory of evolution that "everything is blindly and occasionally looking for agents of species mutations". This is a belief that is far away from Giamati's pain. There is no soul that can be extracted, and there is no emptiness that can be filled. If Chekov thought the same way, he would not have written "Uncle Vanya."
In fact, five years before writing this play, Chekov had a bleak tone in a letter to a friend, even worse than my night with fire and looting. He said,
“We have neither close nor distant ends. Our souls are the hollow of the lion’s mouth. We don’t believe in revolution, and we don’t have God. We are not afraid of ghosts. Personally, I am not even afraid of death. And blindness. A person who has no desire, hope, and fear cannot be an artist. It must be admitted that there is nothing in our situation that can be envied."
This is the best interpretation of Giamatti’s role. . In the play, the company smuggled the soul from Russia, and the soul of Giamatti was stolen to a Russian actress. He also rented the soul of a Russian poet. In the end, it was a fake from the soul of a poor Russian female worker. Giamati was at the beach, feeling the strength of his heart. He said that this is a beautiful soul, and she shouldn't donate it. When he came to Russia, the female worker had committed suicide.
Plato's view of the soul has two main points, one is the immortality of the soul, and the other is the duality of the soul and the body, which is like a tenant in a house or a sailor paddling on a boat. Or like Etruscan robbers, the corpses of the survivors and the dead are tightly bound together face to face. Aristotle used this metaphor to describe how immortal souls are imprisoned in mortal bodies. But his later book "On the Soul" changed his view, thinking that the soul is the form of the body. He said, "The soul is the first reality of a natural object with potential life." This view affected Augustine and Aquinas. Augustine said, "Man is a rational reality composed of soul and body." Man is not only the soul, nor the body, but has both at the same time. Aquinas further explained that “the soul is the kind of thing that makes the flesh a human flesh”. Just like salt has both chlorine and sodium components, but as long as the salt exists, neither chlorine nor sodium can be seen; as long as the chlorine and sodium exist separately, there is no salt.
A few years ago, Mr. Shao Yanxiang wrote a confession book called "Finding the Soul". Augustine said, "How the spirit and the body are combined into a living body is extremely mysterious and incomprehensible; however, this is life." At the end of the film, the soul is capitalized and placed in a glass bottle, optimistic about the huge investment prospects.
This is a scene of deja vu. Recently, Mr. Zhao Qizheng declared at a press conference that “there have always been species that adapt to the environment, and no environment adapts to the species”. But he forgot to explain, is he referring to the species before the soul is extracted, or after the soul is extracted?
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