Vincent and Jules were sent to retrieve the briefcase that belonged to Marsellus Wallace their boss. We don’t know how Brett came in possession of the briefcase, that was never explained, the briefcase was a MacGuffin tactic to get the story moving, however Wallace wanted it back. There are theories as to what’s in the briefcase, the best theory is that it is the soul of Wallace and he had sold it to the devil for notoriety and wealth, what most notoriously wealthy people must have had to do, times are tough.
When Vincent opens the case he sees an orangish glow, makes you believe there is something other worldly in that briefcase. It could have been a Fred Flintstone night light ( the orangish glow due to Fred’s orange pants ), some glowing rock, a radioactive substance that emits light, but I really do agree with the consensus that is was the soul of Wallace. So what is a soul?
- the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.
DeCartes would suggest the soul is separate from the body and resides outside of the physical world. Much like dualism between mind and body, our bodies also possess a soul, they are two parts that make up the whole being.
I remember when I took a class in Artificial Intelligence, we collaborated with the psychology majors at MSU Billings to learn about consciousness and what psychologists understand about consciousness and the many theories on its origin and ability. One of the papers we were assigned to read on the matter was a topic on the mind and body. Dr Havens looked at the reading and told the class that he initially scoffed at the idea of putting that paper into the list of material to cover he was like “another mind body paper…haven’t we beaten this thing to death already?” but it was part of the material to learn.
Baruch Spinoza would say that if the soul did in fact exist, it is a part of God. Spinoza believed in monism that everything was part of a single substance and that single substance is God. His ideas upset the religions leaders of Judaism, to say that the soul is not immortal, and that the God of Abraham’s word is not divine and gospel lead to his excommunication in 1656.
One of the things Spinoza attempted to do was lay out the framework for demystifying the Universe. A lot of philosophers try to resolve all the philosophical problems by organizing ontological and metaphysical notions into a mathematical sense with the use of axioms. A series of propositions that are “obviously” true and build the next proposition.
Spinoza didn’t want his work banned, so he wrote Ethics between 1661 and 1675 in Latin didn’t bother translating into German, and his work actually didn’t get published until after his death. Part One of Ethics defines the nature of God with 15 propositions. He makes use of an ontological method to prove that God does exist.
To me it seems kind of simple, what he is basically saying with
Proposition 1: “A substance is prior in nature to its affections.”
is that emotions are not a part the divine entity. We don’t have an anthropomorphic sort of God that you see all the time, the man who lives in the clouds sort of figure with a long white beard who judges and has emotions much like human beings. And further
Proposition 5: “In nature, there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute”
Spinoza suggests that God is the set of everything including the infinite there is only one set of everything you can’t have more than one everything. By saying that everything is God and existence is, so is God, otherwise there would be nothing.
In math this would be null and the set of everything the universal set is U. Since there is something voila God exists, yay Spinoza. We’d always be reminded by my math professor in college with set notion, { } is the empty set, so is ∅ but if you were to write { ∅ } that is not the empty set, that is a set containing the empty set and you would be beaten with an eraser ( not really ) for messing that up.
From an ontological sense we could feasibly believe that we are all part the whole. We are made up of the same elements that make up everything around us so it would make sense, perhaps the solution to it all was in Wallace’s briefcase.
Author: admin
Obviously my interests include philosophy. I think thinking and thought are the beginning of every great thing. It’s how we understand and perceive the world. Periodically I’ll change things up and blog about something math or computer science related or even a blog about mythology. I am not political, trendy, or savvy, but I do like a good story. That is why I try and find a movie clip that hints or encompasses what I want to blog about. Sometimes the relevance is there, sometimes it’s a reach and I just really love the movie that I put in the post. The intent and purpose of my blog is to make you think, make me think and together our thoughts can be shared in a collection of material.