|
I will be giving a glorious prize worth at least $10 to whoever can write the best philosophical treatise, under a set of criteria provided in this OP. The winner will be decided by popular vote. How to play: 1. Pick one of the following three timeless philosophical questions: A. How do you know you are not dreaming right now? [Brain in a vat] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy B. Does free will exist? [free will vs determinism] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will C. How do you know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow [the problem of induction]? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction 2. Pick one of the following five movies: A. The Lion King B. Star Wars: A New Hope C. Superbad D. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan E. Richie Rich 3. Answer the question you chose from 1, but only using references, scenes, and plot details from your choice from 2. Any argument you make must refer to 2- any additional sources or arguments will disqualify your entry. You may use your choice from 2 as an analogy or metaphor. You may argue that the movie itself answers the question directly and intentionally. All that matters is that one way or another, the movie is your only source for answering the question. Good luck goons.
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 04:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 07:07 |
|
|
Do we have free will? Are we determined by fate or the conditions around us? To answer these questions we need to look no further than the story of a lion fighting against fate in the search for freedom, and finding it in the place he started. The Lion King begins with the birth of Simba beginning his journey in the Circle of Life. The song describes our journey through life as a grand circle: “it’s the circle of life, and it moves us all, through despair and hope, through faith and love, till we find our place, on the path unwinding”. This song should certainly make us paws and think: if life is a circle which pushes us until we find our place, where is room for freedom? Can free will exist in a circular life? By examining the life of Simba, we find 2 paradoxical answer to this conundrum of freedom: freedom is possible but only on the conditions that we first use faith and courage to confront and overcome our own finitude, and only in so far as we accept and freely choose to partake in our destiny. In dialectical fashion, freedom is only freedom insofar as it contains within itself its own limitations, it’s own nonfreedom. Mufasa , the reigning sovereign King understands this, and attempts to speak this truth to young Simba. Our reign of being free subjects is sustained on the condition of our non-freedom in the form of non-being. Mufasa tells Simba, “Everything the light touches, is our Kingdom”. This lit kingdom represents our Being, our life, our freedom, our positive existence. It is within this domain that one is sovereign. Simba asks “what about that shadowy place?”. This shadowy place is the shadow within the light, the death which is constitutive to life, the limits which define our freedom. For what is freedom if not contrasted against non-freedom? Does not life carry with it the shadow of it’s own opposite? Mufasa replies with the proper dialectical injunction: “That’s beyond our borders, you must never go there.” We should assume here that the wise Mufasa understands that paradox of this injunction: Simba is to never go there so that he may remain safe and one day become king, but if he is to be king, he will certainly at some point have to go there. Simba is too young and naïve to understand the complexities of these dialectical truths, and instead yearns for the simplicity of naïve totality: “but I thought a king can do whatever he wants”. Mufasa knows that the inherent exceptions to all totalities is above the understanding of young Simba, but tries to explain anyway: “ there’s more to being a king than getting your way all the time”. The exceptional young Simba gives the perfect reply, instead of seeing the limitation as just a limitation, he sees it as an excess: “there’s more??” The King can only laugh at this, freely, one might add. Simba believes the life of a sovereign is having no rules, no limitations. He believes in the totality without its symptom, the rule without its exception. This foolish idea of totality is exemplified when Simba expresses his petulant impatience towards gaining his throne. The young, unwise, immature Simba does not realize what it means to be free, to be King. He dreams of his future reign and freedom, and displays his mistaken attitude to the chagrin of loyal Zazu: “oh I just can’t wait to be king! No one saying do this, no one saying be there, no one saying stop that, no one saying see here! Free to run around all day, free to do it all my way! Oh I just can’t wait to be King!” The path through freedom must cross the bridge of anxiety, where ones Being is forced to confront its own opposite in Non-Being. Simba, the young king to be, embodies the qualities of freedom when he “laughs in the face of danger”. This laughter in the face of danger is the proper response to the anxiety and absurdity of one’s own mortality. It is no coincidence that this encounter occurs in an elephant graveyard. It’s in the very place where Simba was told his kingdom stops that he faces the encounter with death, nonbeing, and the sting of fate clashing with his dreams of unrestrained totality. Simba could laugh at the idea of danger, but when he really sees its face, he cowers and shrinks away, resigned to his own limitations once again. He attempts to use his mighty roar, but only a squeak escapes. It is here that Simba gets his first taste of real freedom. He begins to understand that his father was right, he is encountering the place of his own exception, his own limitation, his own non-being. At this point, we see the seeds of a future king in young Simba. He steps forward to protect Nala (what a king would do) and continues to roar at the hyenas which embody death and absurdity. They laugh at him, but he roars again, and it is here that Simba first discovers the power of faith in overcoming the impossible. He roars once more and it seems that thunder bellows out of the young cub. It is his father who appears at the moment that Simba exercises real faith instead of young folly. Why was Simba’s roar so meek in the elephant graveyard, the place beyond the borders of his future kingdom, while Mufasa’s roar shook the bones of both the living and the dead? We should not be so naïve to assume it is the size of one’s paws or the length of one’s mane. Rather, it is faith in the face of death. Mufasa entered the elephant graveyard with the full acceptance of his limitations, he knew he was approaching death, he knew he was approaching the edge of his authority. Simba foolishly denied his finitude altogether. Simba put his hope in the false concept of a king’s total reign, whereas Mufasa accepted his finitude and entered the valley of the shadow of death in spite of it. In this absurd gesture: using his authority in a place where he accepted full well he had none, it is Faith which embiggens the smallest roar. After being humiliated by the hyenas and rescued by his father, Simba learns a hard lesson in the dialectical nature of freedom and the courage it requires. Simba tells Mufasa, “I was only trying to be brave like you”, to which Mufasa explains, “I’m only brave when I have to be”. Simba says “but you aren’t afraid of anything!”, displaying his naïve perception of his father’s absolute freedom and courage. “I was today” Mufasa states. To the young cub, being courageous means to be free from fear, but to a true King, courage only occurs in the presence of fear. It is during this encounter when Simba must face the mortality of his father, who he previously viewed as absolute. Simba finds himself bound by fate. He understands that his reign as king will only come with the death of his father, and sees that his own death would follow later. It seems now that the path towards sovereignty is a strict one that he cannot avoid. How can one be called a King when his entire life is determined for him by birth? This is not the kingdom Simba had wanted, and when his turn arrives, he is certainly not ready for it. When Mufasa is alive, he represents the particular form of the Ethical to Simba. He is the one who gives and sustains the Law. It is Mufasa who Simba fears, not the Law itself. It’s only when Mufasa dies that his function as the law passes into the universal. At this point, Simba effectively gets what he wants, he is free from the figure of the law, but he learns that getting what one wants can often be the worst thing that can happen, as he no does not feel free but rather feels even more strongly the injunction of the Law in its universal form. After the death of Mufasa, Simba flees from his future kingdom, abandoning his fate, in the naïve attempt to assert his freedom against his destiny. Still believing that freedom and sovereignty means doing whatever you want, he finds friendship with the same sex couple, Timon and Pumba, a pair of degenerate liberal hedonists who live in squalor eating bugs. These noble savages share their “worry free philosophy” with Simba: Hakuna Matata, “I’m tellin ya kid, this is the great life. No rules, no responsibilities”. Simba fled from his fate in search for freedom, but does he find it in the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of duty? Certainly not. In rejecting the his fate, Simba hopes to find respite from the demands of the ethical domain, but only finds himself further enslaved by the demands of his own desires. “hakuna matata” is the life of distraction, mindless hedonism, the pursuit of one’s desires, while rigidly avoiding fate. Because the rule he “chose” to live by is the avoidance of his fate, he is actually more determined (although in the negative sense). Hakuna Matata means he must never be who he really is - he has no freedom here. Living as a slave to his desires, seeking only to please himself, we find irony in Simba’s “alternative lifestyle”: In seeking to avoid his destiny and in search of “anything goes” freedom, Simba finds a dull life of pure repetition where nothing happens. We see him strutting along a log as a young cub searching for bugs, and a moment later we shift to several years into the future where he is strutting along the same path searching for bugs in the same way. In avoiding his fate, and seeking the cyclical and empty path of self-gratification, his life zooms past in a mere moment. It’s as if nothing significant happens to him at all during this time, until his destiny comes back knocking on his door. When Nala implores Simba to take his rightful place on the throne, Simba is distraught. He fled his fate to search for freedom, but Nala reminds him that he is living a lie. When he is running from his fate, he is still determined by it, (it means no worries: he is fleeing from anxiety when in actuality it is this anxiety which beckons him to embrace the truth of who he is. When he accepts his fate, only then is he able to achieve his sovereignty as King. That is, only when he accepts the universality of the Law within himself is he able to embody and overcome it. This gesture is symbolized by Simba recognizing the figure of the Law, his father, within his own reflection. He becomes the King the moment he courageously chooses to be who he was always meant to be. He is no longer bound by a deterministic life circle, and his faith becomes a beacon for others. His first act as sovereign king is to liberate his degenerate friends from their life of hedonistic bondage by giving them service roles in his new kingdom. No longer bound to the throne by succession or rule or law, he assumes his true sovereign authority by freely choosing to return to Pride Rock. He finds his home forsaken of light, freedom, and Being itself under the oppressive claws of his stupidass uncle Scar. At this point King Simba can do whatever the heck he wants so he opens two and a half cans of whoop rear end on his janky rear end tio and bones Nala. Commie NedFlanders fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Nov 18, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 04:55
|
|
|
when's the deadline?
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:00
|
|
|
literally this big posted:when's the deadline? I'll just close it when there's enough entries to warrant a vote
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:02
|
|
|
this seems like a lot of work with very little payoff. I will do it if you give me a gift voucher to popeyes.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:02
|
|
|
Jukeboxblues posted:this seems like a lot of work with very little payoff. I will do it if you give me a gift voucher to popeyes. I've given you the foundations of making a potentially funny post which is the greatest gift you will ever receive, roll with it and be free!
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:03
|
|
|
It could be said that free will is a given in humans. But lions? It's hard to tell. What about lions drawn by humans? Obviously there stems a deeper connection to the human psyche than initially presented in the film Lion King's material. These lions are sentient beyond that of a normal lion in the wild. Though their sentience only comes from those which create such characters. So are these characters defined by the fate of something out of their control? Or does the anthropomorphism of lions only serve as a medium of the free will of the artists who create it? It's clear that if you want to take things literal the lions themselves have no free will. They are bound within the constructs of their frames of animation. Their thoughts and emotions are mere representations of the creative motive of cartoonists at Disney. All the characters in the film are in fact produced by humans. Does the stampede that kills Simba's father happen naturally? No, of course not. It was planned and designed in a room, with story boarding and forethought. It's simply impossible to argue that these theoretical characters have any free will. The artists who produce the cartoons arguably have free will. They could have did anything with the movie but chose through careful decision making what would work best. But is this just fate determined by multiple careers and personalities clashing? Was it inevitable that if you got these people in a room they would produce this piece of cinema. Until we can see into the 4th dimension (time) we will never be quite certain if time is linear, or if time can change and morph to the variables that exist on our plane of existence.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:04
|
|
|
well, OP the reason i know im not dreaming right now is because of a lesson i learned from the classic film "star wars". you see if there was a chance i wasnt dreaming i believe that my friend c3po, who speaks binary, would have let me know by giving me a pinch or "tweak". im sure he would have been prompted from his old compadre "r2d2" the classic male stereotype in this scenario. r2d2 was known to let out a series of shrill shrieks and howls whenever someone was not doing the thing it wanted. much like a small child or cat. in summation i would just like to say that i find you to be the most horrible person in the world for even asking a question like this. i also hope that you will find my thsis on your desk first, thereby winning the contest and allowing you to give me 10 dollars. thank you for your time you dumb rear end in a top hat.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:06
|
|
|
Borat wishes the world to be free of Jews. If he were dreaming, he would have made that world exist.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:16
|
|
|
Kleen_TheRowdyDog posted:Borat wishes the world to be free of Jews. If he were dreaming, he would have made that world come into existence. Not all dreams are lucid.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 05:16
|
|
|
If this was all a dream then I never would have let Mufasa die and make myself cry. Also Scar would not have been so stupid. He could have made his deal with the hyenas, offed Mufasa, and then betrayed the hyenas. What are they gonna do about it? He has the whole lion harem to fight them with. If he does that the Pride Land never runs out of food and there is no reason for Simba to lead a revolt so Scar rules forever. Scar is an incompetent villain and I came with a better plan even watching it when I was young. If this was a dream Scar would have won.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 06:05
|
|
|
The Lion King is an existential horror story about the struggle and failure of two characters to change their predestined futures. Early on, the film establishes the "Circle of Life", a natural order where every living thing has a set and unquestionable place as right and proper. Even though every animal is presented as a thinking, sentient being, they all submit to it willingly, bowing before the society's apex predator and acknowledging him as a sort of God-King. The religious undertones are obvious, and, in fact, are the only way such a society could function. These animals know they will be eaten at the whim of the lions. They expect to be eaten. They bow before it, devoted members of a bizarre cult that has turned the predator/prey relationship from an adversarial contest into something holy. The movie repeats that theme again and again - the natural order. Destiny. The right place for everyone and everything. There's nothing good about the reigning King. He just spouts his 'faith' in their cult and passes that as wisdom. He's done nothing to change things and doesn't believe change of any kind and to any part of it is necessary, which, in human terms, would make him a very poor ruler. Scar is a born politician and a capable leader, whose only flaws are physical weakness and a lack of "birthright". The failure of his reign in the second half has nothing to do with him. None of those hyenas are overweight under him, and they didn't come out of nowhere. Feeding them a bit more than the bare scraps they must've eaten before couldn't possibly turn the land into a desert in just a few years. The land itself is conspiring against Scar: he is not the true King, he is not the destined King, and since he isn't supposed to be King, everything falls apart for flat out supernatural reasons. Simba isn't fit to be King early on, and does not want to be King later. He's managed to find a perfectly happy life completely outside of their Circle-based Death Cult, feeding on creatures that at least seem to be a tier below instead of his intellectual equals in every way. But destiny, the "Circle", as embodied by their high priest ape, track him down and force him into the position. He has no qualifications beyond that birthright and destiny. There's no reason why he should be a good King - except because that same supernatural force said so, and makes everything better the very moment he is in the right position. The movie is wrong, of course. There is no supernatural force that will punish you for trying to exercise your free will and going against what you were meant to be. Free will simply does not exist.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 08:07
|
|
|
Postito ergo sum.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 08:11
|
|
|
Why does Richie Rich's bulletproof suit work at the end of the movie? Even if made of the most advanced materials available the thickness of a suit coat would not stand up to a handgun fired at point blank range. The protection it offered him was an illusion, and the handgun was firing blanks, because the con artists after his family fortune just couldn't imagine being murderers. That's why they were in white collar crime in the first place. Free will is our bulletproof suit. A confidence we surround ourselves with so we can do what we need to to protect our own fortune(our ability to survive and reproduce). Enabled by a universe that fires blanks(pointless philosophical questions that don't actually affect the results of our choices). Now one might ask if the "fortune" brought by this instinctive behavior that actually governs us, why does richie want so badly to escape it to play baseball with friends? Naturally, these "friends" represent our search for meaning, as baseball is the most pointless sport in existence, and consequently represents the empty void that search occurs in. In this context he also dresses himself up in the expensive finery of free will, to show his existential answer of finding meaning by choice. In this case, his false confidence gets him nothing. The "friends" reject his bullshit almost immediately, with his free will being condemned as a false attempt to dress up the search for meaning. Meaning miraculously comes through to help him once he dedicates his "free will" towards protecting this fortune.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 20:20
|
|
|
Blurry gray thing and ikanreed get my votes right now Lol @ the land being a supernatural, omnipotent entity that conspires to maintain the natural order of its beasts
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 21:26
|
|
|
I know I'm not dreaming because I'm in the land of opportunity and rodeos and is very nice, what sort of cruel master would make it all be a dream that a naked man chased a chicken through a office building? Though the Jew and gypsy exist and that makes question happen in mind of it being nightmare instead of dream. Though the gypsy tears protect me from the AIDS the homosexuals have, so maybe still dream. I give you my sister if I win competition very big time, so please give me the 10 US money. She's very nice. HIGH FIVE!
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 21:29
|
|
|
I'm the sound of one hand clapping.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 21:46
|
|
|
Sheep-Goats posted:Postito ergo sum.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 02:09
|
|
|
I think therefore I'm gay
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 02:11
|
|
|
Sheep-Goats posted:Postito ergo sum. Please don't post my pics here. Thanks.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 02:11
|
|
|
The existence of free will is essentially moot - whether free will exists or if it is merely an illusion result in the same practical state. Whether it was predestined that Luke Skywalker would become a Jedi knight and join the rebels to fight against his father and the Empire makes no real difference to his perception of the events. As far as Luke is aware, he is making choices and striving to meet goals. Whether those choices are illusory and were not actual variables does not affect how he sees them. Even if he is a deterministic automaton simply charting a course already set for him he is unaware of it, and thus it has no meaning. Without an ability to objectively determine whether choices are voluntary or predetermined then the individual's perception of them is what matters, and he perceives his actions as resulting from the exercise of his own will. This sums up the central problem with the initial question - as long as Luke believes he has free will then questioning its actual existence is a completely pointless exercise. Whether it is illusory or not, the idea of free will exists and that is enough.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 02:30
|
|
|
1a: op is gay as hell 2a: ops mom puts out 3: op and he mom both take the dilz
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 02:33
|
|
|
I know I'm not dreaming because I would never be able to dream something as stupid as this thread. Han shot first.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 03:33
|
|
|
Sorry, OP. You may have others fooled but I'm not writing your essay assignment for you.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 03:41
|
|
|
lol what if determinism is just deterministically making us believe determinism/free will is logical when it may actually not be and we'd never know. i guess its a useless thing to talk about also "my aname is borat" or whatever the hell he says
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2015 03:55
|
|
|
Macnult posted:Sorry, OP. You may have others fooled but I'm not writing your essay assignment for you. jackyl posted:1a: op is gay as hell You didn't reference one of the movies 
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 03:50
|
|
|
When are prizes awarded?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 08:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 07:07 |
|
|
Oh wow this is going to be worse than the raped porn star thread
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 08:25
|
|