Kara no Kyoukai, or, beginning a battle with Derrida

Since yesterday I have been watching Kara no Kyoukai after working. It's a sombre fantasy anime, set in a world where there seems to be no run-of-the-mill deaths whatsoever, as everyone who dies ends up with parts either strewn all over the place or bent in places they weren't supposed to go. The art and music is good, and you can see that the creator (Kinoku Nasu) wanted to make its content philosophical, with lines like,

There are two ways to escape. Escape without purpose, and escape with a purpose. The former is called floating, and the latter, flight. You're the one who decides which one your overlooking view was. But it's a mistake to choose your path based on the sins you carry. We don't choose our path depending on the sins we carry, but instead must carry our sins on the path we choose.

You can see why I would be drawn to it, as it, like most Japanese works in which I can identify philosophical themes, harbor an unshakeable metaphysics involving a solid identity, as when the anime again says,

A rose is born a rose. It doesn't change into another flower just because it was grown in a different type of soil or water. And

Even if you poke your eyes out, you will still see what you were meant to see.

It has a Kantian epistemology tempered with a Humean one (at least at the surface), referring to how humans eventually see not by vision but by cognition, and fit whatever it is that they understand in the box of common sense. Whatever is outside of that box is an incitement to madness. Properly, that analysis comes out of the mouth of someone who has neither humanity nor common sense.

It also has a process philosophy, which informs the character of the female protagonist:

Everything in creation has a flaw. That's why everything wants to destroy itself and build from scratch.

I had to pause at length in one line, however.

You say you are hollow. But being hollow means you can be filled without limit, right?

This is where I would assert a deconstructive logic to metaphysics, in that being filled without limit is exactly what being hollow cannot mean. Hollowness cannot be filled without limit, since it is this very limit, that the line's definition of terms itself is destroying, that necessarily defines that something is hollow. Had the subtitles read "empty," then I would have paused the video longer - or had that hollowness been attached to nothing at all, and hence is no different from that nothingness, then that line would have made sense.

Let me fix that. The only time when that line would make any sense is that if there was nothing at all, which would bring us to the strange impossibility of the question, "If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear, is there a sound?"

In all probability, however, I might have nitpicked the thing like a bastard because I was avoiding the existential mine that first quoted line throws at my face. It's a goddamn whopper, that one.


Image credit to http://cdn.myanimelist.net/images/anime/12/21741.jpg

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