Nietzsche and iPhone
HELLO Zarathustra
How Steve Jobs insisted on a black rectangle, and from the history, biography of Jobs, we know that he was a big fan of Stanley Kubrick’s film, “A Space Odyssey ”. The space-black monolith is a very important detail in the entire film directed by Stanley Kubrick. The last part of this film lasts 15 minutes, in fact, this is the entire film, and the rest is a harbinger of the black monolith — this final part of the film is called “the other side of infinity”, since 1968 Hippies have loved to watch it, believing that it is a visual embodiment of the expanded consciousness — what David Lynch will later tell about everything.
Black Monalith — appears in the prehistoric era, when the planet is inhabited by monkeys, he turns the monkey into a human. A still from the film where a monkey touches a black monolith is a metaphor, and a reference to Michelangelo and his frescoes (paintings), “the creation of the world.” Cinema is always a visual art, a relationship with some picture that is already encrypted in our consciousness, our experience. Then in the film the “black monolith” appears when people go into space. Then a black monolith appears hovering above an international ship that is flying to the planet Jupiter. And in the last part of “The Other Side of Infinity”, the main character of the film finds himself inside himself, and not in space — the idea is that “the inside of the Self is space.” The hero of the film, already an old man, again sees the “black monolith”, and looking at this “black monolith”, the hero turns into an embryo that floats in space, and for whom the whole Planet Earth is a Toy. This is the last shot that blew the minds of many contemporaries.
The Black Monolith is the embodiment of the very essence of Nietzsche’s Superman and the Divine Heresy of Nietzsche himself, because the film itself is a “space odyssey”, shot according to all the patterns of Nietzschean philosophy. The film begins as in Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”
Can any of you turn off the Internet and live without the Internet — I think not. After 24 hours you will already have real withdrawal symptoms. The Internet on the phone has already changed us. Whether it’s better or worse is not for me to decide, but for you…
And so Steve Jobs, a man of the modern era, inspired by this film, decided to make the iPhone in the form of a black monolith, believing that this black monolith would blow up the Internet space and change our thinking. Well, that’s what happened. Great publicity stunt! Steve Jobs declared that this is the “black monolith” from Kubrick’s film “A Space Odysseus,” which was filmed according to the philosophy of Nietzsche, because in the film the viewer is shown stages 1. “just as a monkey is funny in front of a man, so a man is funny in front of a superman.” . 2. at the end of the film we see how a superman is born under a black monolith for whom the whole planet earth is a toy.
Can any of you turn off the Internet and live without the Internet — I think not. After 24 hours you will already have real withdrawal symptoms. The Internet on the phone has already changed us. Whether it’s better or worse is not for me to decide, but for you…
At first glance, Nietzsche’s philosophy is naive and very idealistic, far from our modern reality, but in fact there is nothing far, because Kubrick in his film essentially foresaw the entire aesthetics of modern high-tech (design).
Kubrick creates A Space Odyssey, a film that was shot before digital technology in 1968.
What is the meaning of Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey? Who are we? What place do we occupy in the Universe? These are the questions facing the characters in the film. The crew of the spaceship S.S. Discovery — captains Dave Bowman, Frank Poole and their on-board computer HEL-9000 — must explore the region of the galaxy and understand why aliens are watching the Earth. — Nonsense! In “A Space Odysseus” both meanings converge — the birth of a baby in the vague distances of space and the death of Dave, who became his “father” and at the same time the “father” of himself. At the same time, the palace where Dave ended up can also be understood as his own home — the home of Odysseus, who finally found peace after long wanderings. — Nonsense! This is Nietzsche’s philosophy and his concept, “eternal recurrence.”
The idea of Eternal Return meant for Nietzsche at this moment the possibility of repetition of any phenomenon; After an infinite, unlimited, unforeseen number of years, a person who is in every way like Nietzsche, also sitting in the shadow of a rock, will find the same thought, which will appear to him countless times.
What is the theory of eternal return? The theory of eternal recurrence, in a nutshell, states that any life and any phenomenon will be repeated identically indefinitely. This is a theory without God and without higher powers; Nietzsche himself was a convinced atheist. This theory rethinks the previously familiar concept of time to humanity. In his essay “Ecce Homo” Nietzsche will talk about it this way: “at the beginning of August 1881 in Sils Maria, 6,500 feet above sea level and far above everything human (6,000 feet beyond man and time).”
The monolith in 2001 does not represent a “movie screen.” Kubrick chose the monolith’s shape in order to connect Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, itself derived from Platonic ideas about great cycles of planetary alignment, with the Renaissance discovery of linear perspective.
The theory of eternal recurrence and superman.
Agree, sometimes it’s scary to imagine that all our moments in life, especially the most disgusting, tragic, worthy of shame and disgrace, will be repeated an infinite number of times. This idea lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s teachings and is closely connected with another basic judgment of Nietzschean philosophy, with the idea of the superman. Only a superman who acts mainly nobly and beautifully (Nietzsche liked to use more aesthetic terms), although Nietzsche’s concept of nobility may differ from the usual idea, this theory only encourages Übermensch, feeds with the power “forces” him to think differently and look at the world.
“Let everything continually return. This is the highest degree of rapprochement between the future and the existing world, in this eternal return is the highest point of thinking!” Nietzsche.
Following Kubrick, Steve Jobs could have thought “let me put this black monolith in the pocket of the average person, and the average person will now participate in the high-tech aesthetics that was inspired by Kubrick” — well, Kubrick himself, in turn, was inspired by the philosophy of Nietzsche.
In the early part of the book, Zarathustra describes the three transformations that the human spirit must undergo: from the camel (burdened by external values and morality), to the lion (rejecting and rebelling against these values), and finally to the child (innocent and creative, capable of creating new values). Through Zarathustra Nietzsche explores the concept of the “will to power,” asserting that the driving force behind human actions is a desire for power and self-mastery. This concept reflects his critique of traditional moral systems that suppress and negate the fundamental drive of humans to exert their power. As a nonconformist prophet Zarathustra announces the death of God and criticizes traditional religious and moral systems as inhibiting human potential. He encourages individuals to embrace a more individualistic and self-directed approach to morality. The free spirited Nietzsche is critical of what he calls “herd morality,” which he associates with conformity, mediocrity, and a suppression of individual excellence. He advocates for a ethos in line with the Übermensch, who dismisses the mediocre values of the society and creates his/her own values.
Recursion in — A Space Odyssey.
Recursion is a definition, description, image of an object or process within this object or process itself, that is, a situation when an object is part of itself. Recursion is the behavior of a function in which it calls itself. Such functions are called recursive. Unlike a cycle, they do not simply repeat several times, but work “inside” each other.
The hero of the film does not just walk, he walks through eternity-infinity — towards himself.
Nietzsche | Eternal Return
Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character. Joan Didion captured this with searing lucidity in defining character as “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life” and locating in that willingness the root of self-respect.
A century before Didion, Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900) composed the score for harmonizing our choices and our contentment with the life they garner us. Nietzsche, who greatly admired Emerson’s ethos of nonconformity and self-reliant individualism, wrote fervently, almost frenetically, about how to find yourself and what it means to be a free spirit. He saw the process of becoming oneself as governed by the willingness to own one’s choices and their consequences — a difficult willingness, yet one that promises the antidote to existential hopelessness, complacency, and anguish. The legacy of that deceptively simple yet profound proposition is what philosopher John J. Kaag explores in Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (public library) — part masterwork of poetic scholarship, part contemplative memoir concerned with the most fundamental question of human life: What gives our existence meaning?
The answer, Kaag suggests in drawing on Nietzsche’s most timeless ideas, challenges our ordinary understanding of selfhood and its cascading implications for happiness, fulfillment, and the building blocks of existential contentment. He writes:
The self is not a hermetically sealed, unitary actor (Nietzsche knew this well), but its flourishing depends on two things: first, that it can choose its own way to the greatest extent possible, and then, when it fails, that it can embrace the fate that befalls it.
At the center of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea of eternal return — the ultimate embrace of responsibility that comes from accepting the consequences, good or bad, of one’s willful action. Embedded in it is an urgent exhortation to calibrate our actions in such a way as to make their consequences bearable, livable with, in a hypothetical perpetuity. Nietzsche illustrates the concept with a simple, stirring thought experiment in his final book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is: What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself…”
Like the demon in Kepler’s visionary short story The Dream — the first work of genuine science fiction, which occupies the opening chapter of Figuring and which the great astronomer used as an allegorical tool for awakening the superstition-lulled medieval mind to the then-radical reality of the Copernican model of the universe — Nietzsche’s demon is not a metaphysical extravagance but a psychological gauntlet, an alarm for awakening to the most radical existential reality. At the heart of the thought experiment is the disquieting question of whether our lives, as we are living them, are worth living. Kaag writes:
Nietzsche’s demon… is a challenge — or, better, a question — that is to be answered not in words but in the course of life: “The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” Are we, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “content to live it all again”? Being content in this sense is not being distracted from, or lulled to sleep by, or resigning oneself to a fate that cannot be avoided. It is to live to your heart’s content with the knowledge that you will do this, and everything, again, forever. We made our last turn into the Waldhaus driveway and came to rest beneath its canopied entryway. Nietzsche suggests that the affirmation of the eternal return is possible only if one is willing and able to become well-adjusted to life and to oneself. To be well-adjusted, for Nietzsche, is to choose, wholeheartedly, what we think and where we find and create meaning. The specter of infinite monotony was for Nietzsche the abiding impetus to assume absolute responsibility: if one’s choices are to be replayed endlessly, they’d better be the “right” ones.
There is a beautiful meta-layer to the book — Kaag is writing after returning to Piz Corvatsch, where he had first hiked as a tortured nineteen-year-old on the brink of suicide, hoping to find sanity and salvation in the footsteps of his brilliant, half-demented hero. Revisiting “Nietzsche’s mountain” as an adult cusping on middle age, with his beloved — also a philosopher, though of the warring Kantian camp — and their young daughter, Kaag is performing a real-life enactment of the eternal return. He is thrust into the deepest, most disquieting, yet ultimately buoyant evaluation of the choices he has made in the decades since and their combinatorial consequence in the life he is now living — a life, in the end, well worth living.
He considers the power of Nietzsche’s thought experiment as a tool for calibrating our lives for true contentment:
It might be tempting to think that the “rightness” of a decision could be affixed by some external moral or religious standard, but Nietzsche wants his readers to resist this temptation. Nietzsche’s demon, after all, comes to us when we are all alone, his question can be heard only in one’s “loneliest loneliness,” and therefore the answer cannot be given by consensus or on behalf of some impersonal institutions. It is, indeed, the most personal of answers — the one that always determines an individual choice. Of course you can choose anything you want, to raise children or get married, but don’t pretend to do it because these things have some sort of intrinsic value — they don’t. Do it solely because you chose them and are willing to own up to them. In the story of our lives, these choices are ours and ours alone, and this is what gives things, all things, value. Only when one realizes this is he or she prepared to face the eternal recurrence, the entire cycle, without the risk of being crushed. Only then is one able to say with Yeats, “[A]nd yet again,” and truly mean it.
“The thinking of the most difficult thought [Eternal return] is a believing. It holds firm in the true. Truth for Nietzsche always means the true, and the true signifies in Nietzsche’s view being — that which is fixated as permanent.
With an eye to Hermann Hesse’s wisdom on the difficult art of taking responsibility, Kaag adds:
Perhaps the hardest part of the eternal return is to own up to the tortures that we create for ourselves and those we create for others. Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.
Does the black monolith iPhone make the modern man super-human? to some extent yes. Kubrick’s film at one time greatly promoted Nietzsche’s philosophy and popularized it, because at first the film did not receive any enthusiasm from the mass audience, and therefore the film received an Oscar and became the film of a whole generation of viewers. Kubrick’s film “A Space Odyssey” became a fetish for many other young directors.
Does technology and the “black monolith” itself change human nature? Yes. Diagnosis — Couch Autism. This is when people communicate without looking each other in the eyes. 2. Internet addiction. The conflict of Nietzsche’s philosophy is a conflict between people 1. those who understand that their brain, their inner self is a whole cosmos. who prevents them from realizing their infinity. 2. And monkeys of God. Nietzsche was in conflict with the society around him. Nietzsche was not a rebel as his philosophy suggests. He was very shy, tytic (and syphilis). Nietzsche believed that marriage kills a person and sets him up for a vulgar worldly feeling, Nietzsche blew up all the values of the 19th century — and he died in a mental hospital.
Even in his youth in college, Nietzsche wrote his term paper “the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music.” As soon as Nietzsche graduated from college, he was immediately offered the Department. Undoubtedly Nietzsche was a genius! A genius that no one could understand. It is quite possible that we still don’t understand it.
Greek Myth of Odysseus
The myth of Odysseus, I think, is very important for us. There is something of Odysseus in each of us when we search for ourselves. Our Modern World is like the myth of Odysseus. Each person is like Odysseus who sails to the island of the Sirens and asks his crew to fill their ears with a cart so as not to hear the ringing of the Sirens. (Sirens attract ships to destruction), And Odysseus himself forgives being tied to the mast and he wants to hear all these sweet voices of the Sirens. Here in the myth Odysseus-Nietzsche concludes that modern man hears not one voice, not one concept of the world, but a cross-section of EVERYTHING.
Who were the sirens in Ancient Greece? Sirens are mixomorphic creatures with the head of a woman and the body of a bird; in the classical period they were often depicted with arms and a female torso. According to Greek mythology, sirens are the daughters of the river deity Achelous and one of the muses (Melpomene or Terpsichore), from whom they inherited a beautiful voice. The sirens personified the charming but treacherous surface of the sea, under which sharp cliffs and shoals are hidden. They inherited wild spontaneity from their father, and a divine voice from their mother-muse. Mycenaean texts have the word se-re-mo-ka-ra-a-pi, which may mean “decorated with the heads of the Sirens”
Our World is so diverse, unstructured and so complex that everything sends us some kind of singing and modern man is open to all sounds, all worlds, and not just one concept, even if it is a Christian concept — after all, even how diverse the picture of “God” is different peoples.
We must learn to be open to all worlds…
….a little conspiracy theory
Why exactly a bitten Apple? Some say that this is the apple that fell on Newton’s head. The scientist was sitting under an old apple tree that grew next to his house, and one of the apples fell on his head. Newton immediately realized that there was a force that pulled the fetus down. He immediately went further and began to think about the force that extends to the Moon and probably influences its orbit. But no. Newton did not eat the apple. Steve Jobs is not an idiot, I love apples, will I create a logo for my company, or better yet, a melon? Of course not!!! The bitten apple is a biblical metaphor. The apple is not mentioned in the Bible, but Christian artists have always depicted the Forbidden Fruit as the Apple that Adam and Eve ate.
What is the meaning of the Fall of Adam and Eve? 2:17). The sinless Adam and Eve created by God, tempted by the devil, committed the Fall — they ate the forbidden fruit of their own free will. The consequences of violating the ban were damage to human nature, expulsion from paradise, loss of access to the tree of life and death.
What sin did Eve commit? In the formal understanding, sin consists of disobeying God’s will, violating the prohibition “you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:17). The sinless Adam and Eve created by God, tempted by the devil, committed the Fall — they ate the forbidden fruit of their own free will.
What did God say to Eve after the Fall? To Eve: “I will multiply your sorrow in your pregnancy; in illness you will give birth to children; and your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
What did the serpent say to Eve? And the serpent said to the woman: Did God really say: You shall not eat from any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent: We can eat from all the trees, but from the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, God said, do not eat from it or touch it, lest you die (Gen. 3:1–3).
Genesis 6:6–13. “he regretted that he had created people on earth, and His heart became sad. And the Lord said: “I will destroy all the people whom I created on earth; I will destroy all people and all animals, and everything that crawls on the earth, and all the birds in the sky, because I regret that I did all this.”
expulsion from paradise — after which we people will forever seek our subjective paradise on earth
Will technology serve man to make him better and more knowledgeable, or will technology destroy us and make us idiots, disabled people, autists who hide in their subjective worlds? I leave the answer to you…
Quote from the book “Thus Spake Zarathustra” “Man is a rope stretched between an animal and a superman — a rope over an abyss. Passing is dangerous, being on the road is dangerous, looking back is dangerous, fear and stopping are dangerous.” F. Nietzsche
....Excerpt from Nietzsche's book. On the genealogy of morality.....
- Everything that humanity has seriously thought about so far is not even reality, but mere imaginations or, in more precise language, lies arising from unsavory instincts and sick and ultimately harmful natures, I mean all concepts such as "God", It is "spirit", "virtue", "sin", "hereafter", "truth", "eternal life".
- The truth is painful, but not by itself, but because it destroys faith.
- There are no facts, only interpretations.
- Do you want the truth?
So doubt everything.
- And when you wake up, you will wake up forever
stayed
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche. On the genealogy of morality.
