So far, I’ve heard people call this movie “dull,” “pretentious,” “too cerebral,” and “too slow.” Critics said the same thing about 2001, and nowadays it’s one of the 5 greatest scifi films ever. Possibly the most ambitious film released this decade, if not ever, The Fountain is a multi-layered love story wrapped around a science fiction-slash-fantasy riddle told with three different timelines. The director Darren Aronofsky has pulled it off again in his follow up to his first two fine films, Pi and Requiem For A Dream.

Hugh Jackman plays Tomas, a Spanish conquistador who seeks the Tree of Life in the 16^th century, and Tommy, a 21^st century scientist who is hellbent on developing a medicine that will cure brain cancer, and finally Tom, a 26^th century space traveler in a bubble heading towards the Mayan underworld, Xibalba. Rachel Weisz plays his love as the imperious Queen Isabel and the dying wife Izzy.

The absence of an overriding narrative that predetermines a single interpretation, on how the different segments tie together, or if they are actually part of Izzy’s novel “Fountain,” and the back-and-forth pace of the film all demand far more intellectual commitment than the audience may be capable of giving, since they’ve been raised on a steady diet of callow box office blockbusters and pre-packaged entertainment. Perhaps the key to the riddle is not understanding the movie intellectually, but appreciating its dense and rich symbolism (inherited from Buddhism, Mayan and Christianity) by absorbing the experience.

Although the Fountain has flaws, (its running length at 96 minutes is far too short, the absence of patience for the average filmwatcher) its merits override them. A movie about tragedy that finally has the courage to take itself seriously with the fundamental themes of life, death, immortality, even at the cost of alienating the audience.

*A truly cynical witticism by La Rochefoucauld.

Hypocrisy, or “frontin,” is one of the least respected vices in modern society. Observe its impact when a politician is revealed as an hypocrite, where his behavior or speech is insincere, that he pretends to be what he is not. When his credibility is shot, his career no longer exists.

However, hypocrisy was much worse during the Victorian age, where its exaggerated concern for the external appearance of virtue led to insincerity and deception. This concept is brilliantly exemplified in The Red and the Black, a magnificent representative of 19th century French literature. Stendhal’s claim to immortality lies in his perceptive writing that balances social commentary with psychological insights of the main characters, the arrogant yet clueless Julien, the virtuous Madam de Renal, and the impulsive Mademoiselle Mathilde de la Mole.

What I found most interesting was the portrayal of “hypocrisy” according to the protagonist’s perception and as the overall characteristic of society during the Restoration period. The trouble is, Julien despises hypocrisy, but at the same time, he realizes that in order to acquire success he has to give in and be hypocritical. He holds a romantic view of Napoleon, but conservativism has forbidden such sentiments. Since the only possible route for the son of a bourgeois is the priesthood, Julien learns Latin in order to impress Chelan, the local priest, and this is only the first of a long series of insincere acts that helps him to get ahead. Authenticity is cheap.

Rousseau, one of Stendhal’s philosophy muses, claims the source of hypocrisy is society itself because it is artificial and its members develop deformed natures. Society is deemed artificial because it imposes inequality among its members, especially when inherited social rank and inherited rank have nothing to do with the innate abilities of the person. Also, the artificiality of language creates a gap between the ideals and behavior in the real world. These ideals such as beauty, freedom, happiness, are all impossible to actualize in the real world because they are indefinable. There is nothing in the real world to correspond to these abstract ideals. The pursuit of abstractions in a socially invented hierarchy of wealth and rank causes psychological damage to people. One cannot truly live in an artificial world and escape the charge of hypocrisy.

Stendhal carefully showed how hypocrisy could betray a secret truth of character, and more importantly how the phony emphasis on piety actually drained all passion from the interactions of people in Parisian society.

The majority of people are so afraid of the possibility that life has no meaning, that it lacks any intrinsic worth whatsoever. This nihilism, due to the fear of the inevitability of meaningless suffering, is bolstered by the modern scientific view of the human species as just the “moldy film” of a tiny planet orbiting a very ordinary star in a ocean of billion of stars in a very ordinary galaxy in a cosmos of billion galaxies.

Nihilism is intolerable, and inspires the religious and the philosophical to invent an ontotheology that asserts the existence of the hinterwelt, a world beyond that of their life, that a supernatural entity or ultimate reality exists and can account for everything, and particularly suffering. This assertion is fetishized to the point that its origin as a human conjecture is forgotten, and their original motivation, the fear of potential nihilism, is also swept under the rug. Therefore, life has meaning and value, thanks to this ontotheological realm! Long live ontotheology! Whosoever denies this ontotheology must a crazed nihilist!

Nietzsche aims his critique at all types of nihilism, and their byproducts, ontotheologies. The ontotheologians routinely dismiss Nietzsche as a nihilist who is merely the bullhorn for the dissolute, degenerate, and the wicked for he hacks at the very foundations of the meaningfulness of human existence, and tries to erode all reason for living. However, Nietzsche is subtle: he is saying that the foundation is not necessary, it is superfluous. One can live, while, at the same time, be completely aware of the ugly facts of life.

Nietzsche’s critique of ontotheological nihilism is not presented as his disinterested philosophy, and nor does he direct his rhetoric to the nihilists who are slaves to their fears and uncritical conformists to the ontotheological structures of modern society.

Regrettably, most people cannot and will not understand his rhetoric. At least there are the very few who have the courage to say yes to everything, with their eyes wide open to the utter capriciousness of life, complete with all its pain and suffering. They don’t need a “grand justification” of life itself, content to sing and dance their cares away, for they are potentially free spirits, noble and divorced from the herd of conformists.

Nietzsche thinks his rhetoric can affect those potential free spirits and give them the immunization against the seductive rhetoric of the ontotheological nihilists. Those nihilists utilize their rhetoric in order to control or exclude those joyful nonconformists. Slaves to fear and anxiety, the herd exacerbate their situation with their envy of the life-affirmer’s freedom from fear, their resentment and their worry that the life-affirmer’s rejection of the nihilist’s reactive way of life will undermine the effectiveness of the ontotheological structure that was invented and nurtured over centuries by tradition in order to delude themselves that life isn’t contingent and accidents or misfortune were “meant to be.” Motivated by envy, resentment and fear of the life-affirmers, nihilists create life-denying and freedom-controlling norms of rationality and morality.

These motivations are the electricity that activates the device that creates modern morality. Gilles Deleuze claims these morals aren’t “created by acting but by holding back from acting, not by affirming, but by beginning with denial. This is why they are called un-created, divine, transcendent, superior to life. But think what these values hide, of their mode of creation. They hide an extraordinary hatred, a hatred for life, a hatred for all that is active and affirmative in life.”

Under the norms of morality, the life-affirmer is marginalized, condemned as naive, simple minded, irrational, and they are controlled or excluded by being tarred as evil and dangerous. The ontotheologian’s morality, dependent on the back-world that guarantees suffering is justified, actually degrades the natural functions of the body that is joyfully and spontaneously affirmed by those who do not fear life. People who are naturally life affirmers often succumb to the herd rhetoric and become enslaved by their slavishly fearful negation of life. Nietzsche directs his rhetoric to those free spirits in order to shatter the burden of the nihilist’s dogma. In his ridiculing of the nihilist’s rhetoric he outlines its genealogy and motivations to demonstrate how one can become immune and become a free spirit that affirms life.

Nietzsche’s intent is to write with a hammer that sounds the hollowness of those sacred cows, the ontotheological and moral claims. The god of ontotheology, in its metaphysical, epistemological and moral guises, has already died a long time ago to the wounds inflicted by the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, Hume and Kant, and to the literary riffs of Voltaire and Dostoevsky. Hegel’s Aufhebung in particular spelled the epitaph of God when the genuine experience of faith has been sublated and surpassed for the sake of the historical reasons of the state, and towards the Absolute, leaving behind the intermediate philosophy of religion as a museum artifact that was once useful. This allowed room for Nietzsche’s genealogy to flourish with a dialectical analysis that highlighted the conflicting elements of culture. Within the demise of metaphysics, when ontotheologies no longer have any rhetorical effect, nihilism necessarily follows. On the psychological level, nihilism is also the necessary effect of the decline of the belief in God. It is not that people are no longer afraid, but slowly, we moderns are beginning to identify the black hole of nihilism as it yawns beneath us, a bottomless chasm… and the worst is to come!

My initial thoughts about this distinction is that it centers around the role of rhetoric in language, and its relation to philosophy, or philosophical language. Typically, rhetoric is considered as the speech that acts on the emotions. This is what preachers, politicians are adroit at in order to manipulate emotions, and they develop a technique of persuasion.

Is philosophy rhetorical? If we predetermine philosophy as a rational process or theoretical thinking, a theoretical mode of thinking or speaking or writing, then it does not include rhetorical elements, for “emotions” are incongruent with the nature of rational thought. The old school philosophers like Kant disparage rhetoric as something that deludes and borrows from poetry just enough to win over people before they think about the subject.

However, perhaps the old school philosophers have been too hasty in their attempts to condemn rhetoric, for it may already possess a philosophical structure.

In order to claim to know something, one must be able to prove it. To prove is to show something to be something. And in order to do that is to use demonstrative speech, which establishes the definition of something by tracing it back to first principles. Now, these first principles themselves cannot be proved or be the object of demonstrative speech. Were it otherwise, they would not be the first principles. They are non-deducible. If these original principles cannot be demonstrable, then they cannot be characterized as rational or theoretical.

If the first principles themselves are non-deducible then they do not have an apodictic or demonstrative character. They are instead “indicative” or allusive, and that gives the rational speech the framework in order to function. Because rational speech is the process of clarification, then the original clarity of the first principles are not rational, for they “show.” Something that shows is figurative or imaginative, metaphorical, showing something that has a sense. The first principle is a speech that transfers a sense. Thus, indicative speech is structurally imaginative. We consider metaphor as the fundamental character of rhetorical speech, then all original or “archaic” speech are not rational but rhetorical speech. In other words, rhetoric is not just the art of persuasion, it is the speech that is fundamental for all rational language. Rhetoric comes before rational language.

We use original speech to indicate sense in first-hand experience, and that means the essence of speech is semantic: immediate, not deductive or demonstrative, illuminating and purely indicative. Rational language is dialectical, mediating and demonstrative, and lacks any pathetic character whatsoever. Original speech is fundamentally figurative, metaphorical, and ultimately, a pathetic essence.

Formally, the language of the sacred and religious world is original, immediate, and purely semantic, whereas the language of the rational and historical world is mediating, demonstrating, and apodictic.