This scene is from the movie A Long Kiss Goodnight. The movie is about a woman who is a humble well-known school teacher Samantha Caine, who does not remember her past, and is not sure if Samantha is even her real name. All she knows is that she woke up one day 3 months pregnant with some strange key around her wrist.

Coming home from a Christmas party, she strikes a deer on her way home, crashes her car and hits her head. After a brief stint at the hospital, it all starts coming back to her. While cooking dinner, she all of sudden finds a skill that she didn’t know she had. Wielding the kitchen knife like some culinary wizard, she starts going berzerk on a carrot, then a head of lettuce, and for an encore pins one last vegetable to the kitchen wall.

“Chefs do that,” she says.

Return of the Snack. I’ve been away for far too long, I decided to blog once more, in my typical form.

Anyway…

Chefs chop things. Chefs mix, measure, fold, roll, among other activities in order to create tasty cuisines in the kitchen. If this were a Geico commercial, somewhere along the way there would be “if you’re a chef, you check the temperature, that is what you do.” That is the purpose of a chef, that is what it means to be a chef.

Nihilism – the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.

A counter to meaning and belief is this concept of nihilism. Nihilism is an extreme form of skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.
One of the most well-known philosophers who followed this sort of thought was Friedrich Nietzche. He felt that humanity, at a terrible price, could eventually work through nihilism by destroying all interpretations of the world and discover the true purpose for mankind. Like a Phoenix rising through the ashes.

Nihilism has three different forms:

• Political Nihilism – the belief that the destruction of all existing political, social, and religious order is necessary for future improvement
• Ethical Nihilism – also moral nihilism rejects the possibility of absolute moral or ethical values. Any sort of code of conduct is constructed on the basis of social and emotive pressures
• Existential Nihilism – this is the notion that life has no meaning or greater value

Seems kind of bleak if you asked me.

Let’s consider this perspective for a moment. You just went into the fridge to gather yourself a snack. Left-over french fries, and some chicken tenders. You throw it in the microwave and douse the plate with a bunch of ketchup ( if you are going to eat microwaved-left-over french fries the least you could do is smother them in ketchup ). You scarf down your snack and leave the plate on the counter.

Along comes the hungry ant, who senses that there is ketchup and food substance. Marching along the ant arrives to your dinner plate. The ant is not big enough to realize that this is a “plate”, to it the “plate” is some strange terrain but has attracted it because of the source of food. The concept of the “plate” is completely foreign to the ant, it is driven by food consumption and does not care for the concept of the “plate”. You know that it is a plate, and will be upset that Flik and his gang have decided to eat your ketchup.

From the ants perspective, it is full-filled. It made it to the ketchup. It did not need to know it’s grandiose position of walking on some dude’s “plate” to get to the goal, the ketchup.

Well, we are not ants. Looking from afar upon an individual human’s life, we could consider us to be just as insignificant. But I’d like to think that even though we cannot grasp our greater sense of purpose, we try because we must, because

“Chefs do that.”

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.