Hi guys whatsup, I just have to get this idea off my chest so I can get back to a boring philosophy assignment. Please feel free to criticize the hell out of this or just tell me what you think of it or make your own variation!
I’d like to make a film that dramatically shows the development of mankind in two contrasting ways. The film starts in the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who can be seen as the founders of the philosophical tradition of the West, and shows their way of thinking and how it is put in practice. After Aristotle the film does not move on to the medieval European scholastic Christian philosophy and culture, but moves on to the Middle East, where philosophers continued in line with the Aristotelian tradition. Eventually the film will move back to Europe around the renaissance, when the new classical Greek texts were rediscovered in Europe thanks in part to the preservation of classical philosophy in the Middle East. Then the film will show the development of enlightenment philosophy, and will continue into the modern age and reach a climax at the chaotic, catastrophic, technological time that is the 20th and 21st century in the West. At the height of this climax, in the midst of the chaos of cellphones, advertisements, terrorist paranoia and hystericism, the film suddenly jumps back to the time of the ancient Greeks, but this time in the place now known as India, amidst the peace and tranquility of the Upanishads.
Here the film will show the philosophical tendencies, very similar to those of Socrates and Plato, which dominated the minds of those who wished to attain liberation, or Moksha, from the endless cycle of birth and rebirth and its sufferings (they developed the idea now known as spiritual enlightenment, or the idea that such a thing could be possible). The film will continue to show the further development of these philosophical attitudes, moving along to Gautama Buddha, then Nagarjuna, Bodhidharma, Zen master Rinzai until it arrives at the (in my opinion) purest form of Zen Buddhism uncontaminated by any superstition or unnecessary beliefs systems, opinions or practices whatsoever. The film will then show the carrying of this essence of "true" Zen through to the present time, if it can still be found in the present time, and thus show a remarkable contrast between on the one hand the life of those profound lovers of wisdom that are the true masters of Zen and the chaotic, delusional, self-obsessed madmen who sometimes call themselves and their way of thinking “philosophical” that are the star players in the circus of the world as it was shown in the first part of the film.
Thus I conceive that the film will show very poignantly the profound peace and freedom that is Zen (or meditation, contemplation, spirituality, or whatever you wish to call it) in comparison with the chaotic, confused, rational thinking mind, which has created the cold, chaotic and murderous and mechanical societies of today. I might soundtrack the images of the mechanical world created by thought with raw techno music in the style of Jeff Mills or Underground Resistance, a music which to me expresses very strongly the fundamental chaos, restlessness and coldness in the human "civilized" world that is in my opinion the result of the rational but confused thinking mind in the Western "philosophical" tradition.
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