Übermensch
It’s easy to name superheroes. That’s because they’re everywhere when it comes to movies. They tend to come in great variety too; in all shapes, sizes and costumes and capes. But what they all have in common, no matter if they’re Stuart Little or the Iron Giant, is that they are all wielders of great power and can beat the unbeatable odds. But to quote a well-known trivia: “With great power comes great responsibility”. That one may be so well-known that no one would ever offer a prize for guessing it. But there’s often a lingering question about how it applies to us normal human beings, as well. And as it so happens, one of the great thinkers of the modern times has tried to answer that question for us. Nietzsche often pondered what role humanity plays in the grand scheme of things. Granted, this is practically a regular day for philosophers everywhere, but Nietzsche believed that we were fundamentally flawed from the start. Historically, we’ve made a whole series of bad decisions, and that he reasons is because a large chunk of us have not adhered to a social moral code. Morality is subjective.

In his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche tinkers with the idea of a human who has surpassed his peers in an ultimate realization of the Will to Power. This ‘Ubermensch’ is the next step in human evolution, a truly independent individual who has the power to banish herd instincts from his mind and has become a master of self-discipline. On screen, our heroes don’t necessarily need to be the pinnacle of social and moral integrity. But every hero does tend to follow through on the fact that they pursue to do the right thing, often going against the vast majority of the people around them. Superman is probably the best example of just such a hero. His very name seems to echo the ‘Over-man’ of Nietzsche’s theories. In a world that may not accept him as their adopted son, he does what he knows in his heart is the right thing to do.

Read the full article by subscribing to the print magazine or the digital edition.

The post What lies beneath… (Part 2) appeared first on The Teenager Today.

Movies have a way of sticking with us. They form a sense of understanding for us and our world, and yes, even the most action-packed blockbuster movies have an underlying theme that when examined, reveal themselves to be core philosophical thought experiments dating back to Plato. So while you may think that you’re just watching an entertaining movie, you might be pondering big, heavy ideas that have been vexing humanity’s deepest thinkers for millennia. For instance…

The State of Nature and the Social Contract

The most common philosophical question that we see in movies is the thought of why the human race as a species adheres to social structure and what would happen should the structure fail. This is the basis of almost every post-apocalyptical movie there is. In most cases, the absence of this social treatise to not just kill someone and take everything they own is dealt with standard primal anarchy. Just watch the last Mad Max movie and you’ll see what I mean. The entire human population has degenerated into tribal warring clans, fighting over scarce resources and the right to dominate over the weak. There are no laws, leaving Max, a former law-bringer, scrambling to survive.

Seems completely alien to the world we live in, right? But millennia ago, this is the way human beings functioned; this is what Thomas Hobbes called The State of Nature. To get from that version of existence to the one we’re all familiar with, Hobbes speculated that those people must have agreed to what he called the social contract — you give up your right to drop an anvil on your neighbour and take his stuff, in exchange for things like personal safety and the expectation that people will follow a reasonable moral code.

Movies frequently make it a point to mention our willingness to not hammer someone for his property if we can get the assurance that we’ll be safe from other people’s wanting to hammer us. The heroes in the wildly popular movie The Avengers battle a villain who represents the social contract on steroids.

Read the full article by subscribing to the print magazine or the digital edition.

The post What lies beneath appeared first on The Teenager Today.