What's the difference between Kaspar Hauser and an innocent baby?
Perhaps the difference is that the baby's physical and psychological development is not yet fully developed, it is a real white paper, and the society stipulates the whole process of painting on this white paper. If you do the right thing at the right time, he will eventually grow up. To be a socially acceptable person, even if a little rebellious, is predictable rebelliousness. But the 16-year-old Kaspar already has an almost adult soul. The first 16 years of his life have not been socialized, and he will not be able to make up for a disciplined childhood. He is a person who has not been constructed by culture and is destined to be It is a complete alien and can no longer integrate into society.
So what we see is a story of such an unpolished life being stifled by the hypocritical and secular civil society of the 19th century, and in one dimension, a story of human nature being stifled by science.
In 1828, in Europe at the time of the story, Enlightenment thought had already occupied an important place. Kant believes that enlightenment is the process of human beings getting rid of their own immaturity. Personal enlightenment refers to the prescriptive understanding of people; civic enlightenment refers to a professional and social status learning. In such an age of rationality, Kasper is the opposite extreme—he has no prescriptiveness, he has never learned, and he is a capitalized "state of immaturity."
The Enlightenment opened Europe's eyes from traditional authority and political tyranny, thinking that it had obtained real freedom, but unknowingly fell into the discourse of science. Later generations evaluated this period as "the most formalized stage of the development of Western civilization", full of "the hypocrisy and unscrupulous egoism of the early capitalist society based on privilege and hierarchy."
A very obvious performance is the dialogue between the village of truth and the village of lies. The philosopher in the film judges whether the person is lying through the double negative of logic, and Kaspar uses the simplest and most direct way to get the answer. . Infuriated philosophers insist that this is not logic. The maid said she could understand Pascal's way, while the philosopher fought desperately to assert his authority and dignity - understanding was secondary, reasoning was paramount. This represents a consensus after the Enlightenment: "The truth of reasoning is necessary and reliable, and has its root in reason of mind (philosophers); the truth of fact is accidental and unreliable, and its root is in perceptual perception (the maid) , Caspar).” But postmodern research argues that the process of legitimizing science is actually a paradox. That is, in order for people to recognize and accept it, science inherently needs some kind of metaphysical presupposition to serve as its truth premise and to form a legitimate narrative accordingly. Caspar saw through the paradox with a primitive intuition, which angered mainstream scholars at the time, but coincided with the postmodern critique of the 1970s.
On the other hand, postmodern theory holds that scientific knowledge is only concerned with the selection, qualification and verification of truth, and only uses the language game of "indicative statement". This knowledge is generally accepted unconditionally by its truth value. In this process, ethics and justice may be ignored. This is also confirmed in Kaspar's experience: experts make attempts to harm him in front of him to verify whether he is aware of danger, dissect Kaspar's body after his death to find his incompatible The reason... In the eyes of experts, he is just a body of research significance, not caring about his emotional needs. This is actually a "cultural imperialist logic" that denies narrative knowledge, and corresponds to the crisis of legitimacy explained in the previous paragraph.
In the film, Kaspar is actually leading us to conduct a kind of alienated examination, to see the social problems of "modernity" from an external perspective.
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