Could you guys explain dialectics to me, I have a haphazard understanding of it. I posted this elsewhere but I’m conflicted as to whether or not I am right (Regarding dialectics in Apocalypse Now):
I thought it was interesting how it touched on dialiectics towards the end. Colonial Kurtz was absolutely nuts with dialectic I think, that is, his thought patterns were black, white. And in being black and white, “love or Hate” and no middle ground, he symbolizes the intent of the US, and it’s politics. Those Vietnamese are bad, they aren’t bad but slightly good, they are completely bad, and we must exterminate them. Sounds like propaganda right? Because propaganda operates using dialectics. There is a part in the movie where Colonial Kurtz speaks about the unflinched murdering act of a tribesman he once saw. He says it was the same tribesman who loved his family dearly, yet killed his enemy without contemplation. Kurtz admired this in the tribesman, and said that if he had just a few companies of those types of men then he could finish the war quickly. The tribesman murdered so well because he was running on 100% black and white. Well you see Kurtz is the embodiment of this, a product of years of military service at last warped his mind. I think this has implications in your ITT because the US soldiers in vietnam found the middle ground, the speculation and contemplation of the war, and this lead them to revolt. I guess the lesson would be that the enemy is never one sided, that nothing is ever, ever, one sided, because we live in a three dimensional world.
In Kurtz military sense: “…because it’s judgment that defeats us.”
That is the underlying battlecry of Colonial powers… because the colonial power does the judging, we do the shooting.
Dialectics, if I’ve read correctly, posits contrasts - good against evil, logic versus the irrational - as the core of human thought. If this interpretation is correct, dialectics should be one of the things an aspiring Overman would wish to overcome.
EDIT: A prime example is the opposition between existence and non-existence that existentialists like to ponder on. It is my belief that non-existence, in fact, doesn’t exist: one can conceptualize it, and the idea of non-existence exists. Even death is only a transmutation of basic elements into new forms.
Can we say that Kurtz couldn’t follow dialectics all the way through?
Thesis, then it’s opposite, antithesis. Kurtz got that far. The grunts took it a step further and found the synthesis that is supposed by dialectic logic to necessarily follow. This “synthesis” took the form of “This is fucked - let’s get the hell out of here.” While they were correct, I do not see any particular logic at play - just common sense.
The synthesis is the product of the tension between the thesis and its antithesis. It is a permutation, a kind of combination of the thesis and antithesis. I think it’s crap, but a sometimes useful crap. If that makes sense. It assumes paired opposites, which are not so common as some think.
But in a war, there are paired opposites. This is descriptive of the human decisions that caused the war, but only that. A synthesis is rarely reached - usually, someone just wins the war. In this case, it was the Vietnamese people. I don’t see how it could have been otherwise, and so am not sure what “synthesis” has to do with it. Thesis won. The american soldiers weren’t interested in winning. They were only interested in getting home, which was, again, smart, but not participant in the logic of the war per se.
I say this while not entirely sure of your thesis here. Perhaps I have mistaken it.
Kurtz was driven mad by the war, and I assume he is in the state of thesis and antithesis, which is why he is insane, because he is obsessed over this, and preaches the abolition of the synthesis, so that warriors will be perfect unflinching killing machines. The vietnam soldiers connected thesis and antithesis creating synthesis, which according to Kurtz was their flaw, their weakness. Kurtz is the tool to mock colonialization in that he embodies the absence of synthesis, or in other words, Colonial powers or the collective mindset that is manifest destiny, does not connect thesis and antithesis, for to do so would be to deny the righteousness of the colonial nation, it would be questioned. And of course you can’t question the nation’s intent lol.
Would the Roman Empire, or the Catholic Church be examples of a dialectic at work, in the way they incorporated conquered cultures, rather than destroying them? Is America, as a colonial power, even more arrogant? (Not that I would be shocked - the US represents unimaginable power, unimaginable to either the Romans or the Roman Catholics)
I must say, Spoony, that this is a novel and unexpected use of a dialectical paradigm. I would not have said that there was any interesting use for such a paradigm, until I read this.
Whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, Spoony, in thy shiny black dialectic in the night?
Ya, I think so. They would be dialectic-at-work in that they are colonizers of those countries and cultures. Or maybe they wouldn’t be dialectic-at-work in that sense, but dialectic would grease the hinges of that machine, like propaganda. Because propaganda operates on dialectic to convince the reader/viewer of its cause.
Here is the actual lines from the movie, maybe you can make more sense of it than I:
PHOTOJOURNALIST
“Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics.
It’s very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no
supposes, no fractions – you can’t travel in space, you can’t go out
into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions – what
are you going to land on, one quarter, three-eighths – what are you
going to do when you go from here to Venus or something – that’s
dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there’s only love and hate, you
either love somebody or you hate them.”
Kurtz throws a book angrily at him :
PHOTOJOURNALIST
“This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit
we’re in, man! Not with a bang, with a whimper. And with a whimper,
I’m fucking splitting, jack!”
Photojournalist leaves :
KURTZ
" I’ve seen horrors…horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that…But you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face…And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terrorare your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces…Seems a thousand centuries ago…We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile…A pile of little arms. And I remember…I…I…I cried… I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized…like I was shot…Like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead…And I thought: My God…the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters…These were men…trained cadres…these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love…but they had the strength…the strength…to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral…and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling…without passion…
without judgement…without judgement. Because it’s judgement that
defeats us. "
KURTZ (to Willard)
“I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be.
And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go
to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything
you saw… Because there is nothing I detest more than the stench
of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you’ll do this for me.”
Dennis Hopper. Great peformance. I had forgotten this dialog - I’ve seen the movie a lot. I was even alive when it was made. Really.
Dialectic reasoning is, of course, Marx’s method. And the US was fighting communists. This scene is sort of an homage to the enemy. They were strong and we were weak. Blah, blah, blah. This is, of course, incorrect - the reasons the US lost that war were many, but weakness was not one.
More broadly, however, the movie was anti-ideology - any ideology. The US entre into that war (but not the war intself) was caused by ideology alone, which is a piss-poor reason to fight a war. And so, yes, Kurtz was mad with it, as anyone who takes ideology to the extremes that he has would be. I get your thesis now. I was a little slow on the uptake.
But this applies to communist ideology, as well. Everyone thought that the Vietnamese were, North and South, puppets. They underestimated, of course, the genius of Ho Chi Minh, who was merely a nationalist, and not an ideologue at all. He was the true puppetmaster, masquerading as both an ideologue and a puppet. The one and only great man of the war.
And he was a master propagandist - he cleaned our clocks. It wasn’t a better understanding of dialectics that made him so, it was a better undestanding of geopolitics.
I’ll always remember that phrase and the way he says it!
Wierd because for Nietzsche and Deleuze (well in so far as I can “get” Deleuze on to page 50 of difference and Repitition - its a punishing struggle) it’s the judgement, the valuation, the diferentiation of theings that moves us forwards. But maybe thats a very simplistic interpretation.
I suppose its a new form of judgement too though evaluating things according to their life enhancing qualities as oppossed to imposing moral “judgements” -
Philosophy is all about judgement, and judgements. Again, this scene is a bit of an homage to the “Noble Sauvage” - Big, Bad America represents civilisation and what is wrong with it, and all of that. It’s an artistic expression. The Dennis Hopper character thought that Kurtz was a philosopher. I’m not sure that we are forced into the same conclusion.
Hey faust you’re on the ball much faster than teh American soccer squad - anyway the original book “heart of darkness” is well worth a read as is any thing by Conrad - a dark psychologist and a great story teller
I suggest checking out Aguirre, The Wrath of God, which was the predecesor of Apocalypse Now. It is a more artistic version, and definitely more haunting and desperate.
Maybe we need a “philosophy of film thread” - that’s that German fella isn’t it?
google help me!
Oh yeah Herzog - well good very dour and dark despite being in South America - haunting piece of work.
whose the most “philisophical” director? - I’d go for Bergman me self.
Hey Faust if Philosophy is about judgement - could there be philisophical punishments and rewards - for example could people be forced to eat the collected works of Martin Heidegger and then regurgitate them in an understandable form?!?!?