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Internet Critic Discussion Thread
This is a thread for people to discuss Internet critics without having to go elsewhere.
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Please keep the snarking to a minimum. If you have to snark, please snark about the actual opinions of the critics, not about the fact they exist or that this thread exists.
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Comments
though he is right about how the whole infinite realities thing ultimately undermines a good chunk of the drama
The closing credits to Inland Empire consist of a synchronised dance number to Nina Simone's nearly eleven-minute "Sinnerman".
i'm just going to opine about this a bit. i hope that's ok. Because, i'm still kinda getting acclimatized to philosophy and i remember what it was like to first encounter this stuff and why someone might, i think, have trouble with that segment of the video.
i think, firstly and most obviously, the terminology is a barrier. Kyle explained some of the terms he used e.g. 'facticity' but not others, e.g. 'subject'. But even when a term has been explained to you, it's not necessarily possible to understand its use. You can know how a stave works but be unable to sight-read music, and understanding mathematical symbols in principle isn't necessarily enough to read an equation and get any sense out of it. Same principle applies with technical terms, i think. It doesn't help that some of the terms sound very similar to one another ('being-in-itself' and 'being-for-itself' are easily confused) - nor that a lot of the terms are familiar-sounding words that we're used to just kind of passing over on our way to the actual content words in colloquial English. Terms like "is there" and "subject" are usually not the most interesting words in the sentence. E.g. in a clause like "this action being, in itself, significant", the most important information is that the action in question is significant. i suspect this is the root of the mistake of interpreting philosophical writing as "meaningless" or "obfuscatory".
Secondly, though, i think most people are just not accustomed to thinking in ontological or existential terms. Like, i confess that when i first encountered stuff about Heidegger and Dasein, i felt a bit frustrated. Because i was thinking, ok, i'd read definitions, but i still didn't feel like that told me who or what actually *is* Dasein? In what context does this apply, what does it actually mean? And i think this is because this kind of metaphysical way of thinking is not taught in schools and is wholly unfamiliar to most people. So i can easily imagine someone with no interest in philosophy, who had not encountered these ideas before, watching that video and coming away nonplussed.
(Disclaimer: i have not actually read Being and Time, hopefully @Baldanders will correct me if the following is inaccurate)
Basically, Heidegger was interested in ontology, the study of being. He was attempting to develop a kind of insider's perspective on what it means to exist. To do this, he felt it was necessary to take the perspective of a being capable of contemplating its own existence - i.e. a human individual, a "subject". But the word "subject" already had certain connotations in philosophy, baggage that Heidegger didn't want. He wanted to distance himself from the philosophies of predecessors, especially Descartes, and from biology, anthropology, and purely subjective accounts of human experience. So he came up with his own term, "Dasein".
What sets Dasein apart from earlier notions of "subject" or "human being" is that it is characterized by how it relates to surrounding people and objects, its openness to the world around it. There is no inner self, human beings are not these isolated blobs of consciousness inhabiting human-shaped organic machines; Dasein exists in the world, and is continually interacting with it, shaping and shaped by it.
I assumed it was just a fairly light comedy up until now.