Voto:
A beautiful mess, Enea, here we risk burning ourselves. You know that to address these things, ten lines are not enough; this isn’t a Spielberg movie, after all. One of the most overused interpretations of the monolith is that it represents God himself; I won’t deny it, but this is also the most populist and sheepish interpretation, if you’ll allow me. Unfortunately, it also seems to be the farthest from what one might expect from Kubrick and Clarke. According to Clarke's book, the monolith is nothing more than a supercomputer conceived by an alien intelligence to achieve set goals (to bring forth and develop life in the universe). I’m not saying that for Kubrick the monolith is what it is for Clarke. Even the hypothesis that it is God himself does not sit well with the main themes of Kubrick’s filmography, which could not be more cynical and disenchanted toward human affairs. So, coming back to your question, I exclude a divine meaning for a specific reason: Kubrick never infused any of his films with answers pertaining to God. Kubrick was a secular Jew, but in the end, this reveals little about his ideas on certain themes. I only know that looking at his few films, what stands out is a secular-materialistic vision, or if you prefer, a secular-materialistic theology, but never aimed at a search for the divine as something other than oneself, that is, as something other than humanity (as happens in Tarkovsky, for instance). But you say that if I give a metaphysical meaning, it’s possible to incorporate the divine within it. Let me ask out of curiosity, are you perhaps referring to that part of metaphysics as the search for God in the phenomenology of Husserl? The object of metaphysics is being as being, and theology represents its culmination as the science of God. But Nietzsche identifies in metaphysics (and in religion, which he calls metaphysics for the masses) something that he describes as "nothing but the projection outward of uncertainties intrinsic to humanity, thus a form of passive opposition to life, as well as a physiological reaction to the impossibility of bearing the anguish of a world that 'dances on the feet of chaos.'" I understand that you don't have much sympathy for Nietzsche, but you can't say that choosing his thought to find answers in the film doesn't hold up. On the other hand, I believe this is the only theory that doesn't creak, because looking for otherworldly answers or from distant galaxies and new forms of life (Spielberg does that better, LOL)? I can tell you more than this because I couldn't respond differently, given that I truly believe that what Nietzsche thinks about Platonic metaphysics finds confirmations in the film. I’d say we should be cautious with certain grotesque attributes that load the term TRANSCENDENCE, which transcends limits of space and time with anthropomorphic caricatures. You know, often the difficulties of an atheist arise from having a wrong concept of God. For Nietzsche, God is the self. Do you understand me? God has laid down the self; consequently, I don’t posit God. According to me, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, this concept of the Overman is that man bears the responsibility of being God himself is already a completion. I certainly don't believe that God is a monolith, but it communicates the idea that the universe follows laws that lead to a higher order in a certain predetermined sense. Even the Greek philosophers, with their metaphysical inquiries, often reached a "natural" knowledge of deity (which is not God) not far from ours, even though they could never arrive at the knowledge of "God." When I previously stated that the monolith represents metaphysics, I didn't mean Platonic metaphysics, which is what Nietzsche considers the cause of all troubles, because, according to him, and here I quote: "at a certain point, abstract metaphysical reasoning (whose consequence is the idea of deriving 'the right' rationally, as if it were an absolute truth instead of our simp
