Ferdosi Publications presents:
All These Unwell Ones Four Schopenhauerian Characters in Cinema
Authors: Mohammad Ruhollahi, Hamid Mohajer
At a time when my hope for the very existence of morality was tethered to Kant’s ethics, I encountered Schopenhauer’s critique: that Kantian pure reason—supposedly cleansed of all desire—was nothing more than calculating reason, and that the God whom Kant expected morality to lead us toward had never been anything but a guarantor for human contracts. I first imagined that Schopenhauer, in his ethics, was like Kant, speaking of a transcendent reason—that same reason detached from desire, though now directed not toward ordering life, but toward rehearsing death. Yet with a certain relentlessness, Schopenhauer shattered for me the figure of Kant. I longed, in an act of revenge, to turn his artillery back upon himself in the book I was writing. But my book became nothing more than a luminous witness to my own incapacity.
For in the realm of ethics, Schopenhauer stood on a ground that Kant lacked: experience. An experience that, apart from the interminable debates of reason, could smell, taste, hear, see, and touch—and that showed how human life exceeds both calculating reason and the arithmetic of theology. Experience dwells in a space beyond reason and theology, and while calling both into silence, it raises a finger and points directly at the human being, saying with disarming simplicity: this is morality.