After finishing watching "TENET", amidst the sound of gunfire and shells, I meditated alone for a long time.
I have always liked Nolan’s movies, especially his compression of time and space, which makes us feel that human imagination cannot keep up with the development of theory! Because of this, I dare say that many viewers will feel confused, conflicted, and even confused about the plot.
On this issue, I would like to make three points from a philosophical point of view, so that everyone can generally understand this movie from my point of view.
Spoiler warning
First of all, there is a discussion about cosmology. In the historical development of mankind, we originally had a divine thinking, which we call the theological era. In this theological era, we will feel that the entire universe is limited, created, organic, natural, systematic, and even hierarchical.
The most important key to the characteristics of these universes is that this universe was created once by God. This is not purely Christian, but is common in all pre-scientific worlds. This is generally the case with the Chinese cosmology.
The most important invention in science is Newton in the 17th century, especially his three laws. But for Newton's science, everyone was amazed. It was not until the emergence of Kant's philosophy that a "cosmological interpretation" of this scientific theory was proposed.
Kant’s philosophy put forward one of the most important criticisms of the existing theological cosmology. This criticism is to transform the original universe dominated by God's creation into a world dominated by humans. This change is what we call the "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy.
This transformation includes two aspects: The first aspect is that the world is not limited, but infinite in the process of human development and creation. This means that human imagination is infinite, human knowledge creation is infinite, and God is just an idea among human beings in this infinite ability and does not really exist.
In the second aspect, because what is imagined by infinity is an absolute force, this absoluteness is completely consistent with Newtonian science, the most important parts of which are time and space, and Mobile, these three factors are absolute.
For this reason, Kant’s philosophy is a very important interpretation of Newton’s science.
But the good times did not last long. By 1915, when Einstein proposed the general theory of relativity, everyone discovered that the original process of using absoluteness to explain time, space, and motion had happened. A fundamental shift because they are relative.
The main source of this relative time and space is because this energy can reach the square of the speed of light. This is a huge energy that we cannot imagine. From 1942 to 1946, when the Manhattan Project, under the auspices of Oppenheimer, applied theory to create the atomic bomb, we not only entered the era of nuclear energy, but we also entered the era of applying the theory of relativity. ——This relative time and space is exactly what the movie "Tenet" is about.
The second point is about important terms. For example, in absolute time we can feel the passage of time and the end of life. As far as absolute time is concerned, the limitations for people are that in addition to the limitations faced by life, human knowledge is also limited. And at the beginning, because human life is limited, death is an important end point for philosophers.
All philosophy must take into account the finiteness of time, and this limitation is achieved through human thinking or imagination, and infinite results can be achieved, but human life is limited. Time is absolute, so in the movie "Tenet", the most important thing, especially when taking action later, and many plots in the movie, is to tell you that there is a machine that can relativize time. And at the same time, it allows you to live in absolute time.
Therefore, you will see some very strange phenomena, as if time can go back. The purpose is to show that we can face relative time in absolute time, and even face absolute time in relative time.
So, when you watch this movie to the end, you will understand very clearly that when we are going to attack a certain bunker, time is reversed during the entire attack, but the way people attack, Time is absolute, you can still shoot and hit people, and there are even many buildings that are about to collapse and then return to their original appearance.
When relative time and absolute time are together, the conflict between the famous philosophical propositions mentioned at the beginning, "free will and determinism", is only limited in this movie. Played a very small role.
Free will can only choose which things will be reversed in time, and the rest is left to cause and effect.
Time can be turned back, we can go back to the past, or even the future, and know that everything that happens must be caused by cause and effect. Free will only plays the role here of what you want to happen; you can choose freely, and then this is the result that has happened.
From this point of view, when Nolan was filming this movie, because he wanted to confuse the relationship between relative time and absolute time, he left a bug here, which made it a bit unclear to everyone. It also slowly made everyone realize that one of the most critical issues had arisen in the entire movie.
In the end, not only did he have theological thoughts and love, but the last word at the end was reality. He also asked, what is reality?
The entire movie is about asking this question. If time can be relativized, will we still have entities? This question is of course a question often discussed in philosophy.
Thirdly, I think Nolan asked an important question here: Is life still meaningful?
If we live in absolute time and absolute space, then life is limited. Then every minute of the life we ??face is very precious; therefore, life is naturally very meaningful! But if our lives are not only relative, they can also go backwards, and even new paradoxes may arise!
Please note that the term paradox was originally used in Kant’s philosophy. One of the paradoxes is the paradox between causality and free will. And the paradox discussed here is actually that if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then this will form the biggest contradiction: the "grandfather paradox."
It is obvious in the movie that there is no answer to this question because it is basically a completely contradictory fact. How can you kill your ancestors and still continue to exist? How could you possibly kill your grandfather, leading to a situation where you might not exist, and then do something like this?
So Nolan just proposed a new paradox for this problem. For him, in the end he had to do something old-fashioned, where the male protagonist asked the other Russian villain, "Don't you believe in God?" Do you want all innocent people to die together? This person said that if you knew the future, there would be no question of life or death at all, so his worries were completely in vain.
Let me make some conclusions about this movie as a whole: we find that our imagination is actually not enough. Why isn't it enough? Because we all live in habitual thinking, and this habitual thinking greatly limits our understanding. To break away from this habit, you have to face this contradiction. If you don't want to face this contradiction, you have to live in a completely different world from others.
So, this is a question of possible worlds in philosophy.
This question changed everything. There was no way to know, and the director had no choice but to use "world destruction" as the limit of his imagination.