Saturday, April 2, 2011
Rather the Invention of Evil
I watched today this movie "the Invention of Lying". It is not a great movie but the idea behind it is sharp although the movie fails to take it to the extreme. The movie takes you to a make believe setting where saying the truth is the only way of life and where you basically cannot say or think or imagine what is not true, where fiction does not exist, and where you don't know what isn't. The word "lie" has no place in this world, it simply does not exist, because it cannot be, or as the movie puts it "to say something that wasn't". The movie poses as a comedy although it hardly makes you laugh but it gets you thinking: in a world where truth is absolute, where the lack, or in this case, the absence of truth does not exist, what you lose is more than emotional and creative thinking, and more than the pursuit for happiness, and much more than the philosophical quest for some meaning, what you lose is freedom. It is evil not righteousness that sets you free after all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The world of the absolute is the world we left behind; the world governed by God his unquestionable rod. People were quieter then, inwardly more peaceful. They were much more brutal and infinitely less tolerant with outsiders and "germs," true. All things come at a price I guess. Science erupted on the scene, and now I will have to spend my entire life studying or researching in order to come at anything that remotely resembles a truth and all the peace and comfort it brings to the spirit. With science all has become relative and uncertain, our faith in life has withered to unprecedented levels, and angst and turmoil have never dwelled and moved within us as they do now. We tremble down to our very core; and this has preoccupied so many of the thinkers and philosophers of these last two centuries. We now live in a world from which truth has been once and for all banished, a world governed by lie, error, and deception. We now have to work our minds very hard in order to get a glimpse of how it was that truth was once possible. Time is fleeting; nothing is eternal; we have to bite this apple before it is too late; we have to bite deep and hard enough; bite again and again and derive all the pleasure that it can possibly offer. Only it is not enough; the apple is tasteless and our minds and spirits restlessly flip from one side to the other...
ReplyDeleteTo quote Nietzsche: "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seems to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions—they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins."
I've ranted a little; sorry for that. Perhaps I speak and represent none but myself; still, I cannot but wonder as to why humanity is collectively taking out its own life and that of the planet. I guess Camus' first and foremost philosophical question, that of suicide, is being answered as we speak...only few are the ones who dare record the answer. And if they record it, they record for whom.