Knowing, Framing, and Enframing

Abstract

The first half of this chapter is an exercise in the philosophy of film, which treats Christopher Nolan’s body of cinematic work as Nietzsche treats a Wagner opera in the final essay of the Genealogy—as a key cultural site at which the complex interaction of the elements of the ascetic ideal play themselves out. The second half takes the analysis into the realms of science and philosophy: taking orientation from certain of Nietzsche’s claims about how modern philosophy adopts a scientistic stance, it weaves together these suggestions with some complex and controversial arguments advanced by the later Heidegger, to defend the idea that our contemporary age is best understood as the age of technology, and how this has informed and deformed some central cultural projects—in art, particularly the advent of modernist painting and its continuation in contemporary photographic practices; and in philosophy, in its treatment of secondary qualities, and more generally in its willingness to regard physics as metaphysics.