Werner Herzog on beer, yoga and what he would ask God
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you haven't read it yet, read A Guide For the Perplexed, which is basically him talking about stuff (mostly films) in his own words. But the films become catalysts for his random musings, he can't help but dish out great throwaway lines about the wonders and meaning of existence no matter what he talks about.
It's one of my favorite books on this side of the century.
Somehow I doubt T-Rexes had the intelligence of a crow.
What would lead you to a conclusion one way or another? The Tyrannosaurus seems to be well evolved to a similar hunt/scavenge lifestyle to crows. They likely had a large set of sensory input to process.
“ And secondly, what is not really much in the debate is that there seems to be evidence that we will disappear as a species. Probably fairly soon. And we should look into that as well.”
Can someone look into this please?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounters_at_the_End_of_the_W...
> I wouldn’t ask God, but in general: why is there existence, rather than nothingness? It’s the biggest of all questions and it’s not my question. It was posed 2,500 years ago by Greek philosophers. It’s the question of questions and, of course, there’s no answer.
"So others can know me"
Knowing and being known by God is life changing.
Or better expressed: we are the universe experiencing itself.
It’s just a human projection onto them to make it easy for us to talk about that we think in those terms.
so in a sense it’s us being egotistical by projecting our perspective onto God to talk about It, and by assuming that God has ego.
I think in a sense, God is beyond all our concepts of morality and everything, so They are unknowable unfathomable. The great mystery.
Man In Sky could be read as the ultimate human ego trip, and we keep repeating it with anthropocentric distortions about UFOs and so on.
This is just one perspective. The concept in reality it’s probably so big that it’s going to be impossible for us humans to agree, natural for there to be disagreements and, even when there’s apparent disagreements, still contained within the totality of whatever it is that God is.
In fact, I think it's even egotistical of us to believe that we can think our way through the concept of God, that we can even talk about it.
In a sense, I think there's validity to the approach of some traditions that say that God can't even be talked about, can't even be named. A stance that reflects the required humility.
Again, this is just another perspective of an infinite concept. I'm not saying I'm right about this. I'm just theorizing and speaking from my experience and ideas. Of course, there will be disagreements. And I think it's natural for there to be.
What's unnatural and stupid, I think, is to persecute each other over any disagreements that we have of a concept that is seemingly so large as it could contain all these things without contradiction.
So, please be kind to each other in your talks about God.
Faith comes in many forms, because it is fundamental to consciousness and culture.
It is extremely easy to make errors when one uses English to represent logic, or to use binary logic where it is not sufficient. Reduce the frequency of these two simple and extremely common errors and you can change the world.
If you're asking why there is existence, first, existence does exist, as existence "is" existence, and second, God is Existence Itself (Ipsum Esse Substitens) by which everything is, so again, if you're addressing God, you are already addressing the Act of Existence Himself!
For various values of God, perfect, He, and need, which are debatable ad astra/ad nauseum.
if you're addressing God
What are the chances someone is not literally addressing the literal God, but is rather posing the question using that language poetically, with zero belief in an actual God? I'd say that’s clearly nonzero.
I'm just an intern running simulations for my professor. I have seventeen other simulations with minor tweaks running concurrently. I am also living in a simulator, ironically created by myself in the parent universe. We are testing whether it's simulations all the way down and up.
> 1) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2) The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 3) Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4) God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5) God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
He felt like it, and saw that the light was good.
Something, light, is better than nothing, darkness. 'It was good,' I believe is the answer to that question.
I believe: '...it was good...' is the answer. Why was it good? Because, at first there was nothing. Then, there was something, light, and _that_ was good, not the nothing.
The question I believe you wish to ask, without asking, is: "God, why do you exist?"
That's not this question though.
I don’t mean to ask "God, why do you exist?" because “Why is there something instead of nothing?” encompasses that possibility without necessitating it.
What is a method to permanently relieve mass human suffering, that has practical step-by-step instructions, achievable with modern technology, would be widely believable and easily fundable.
Your idealistic question gets into philosophical territory when you consider what it means to be human without suffering, or wether some forms of suffering can be good.
In other words, your question starts from a premise that might not be shared by others. Whereas, “why is there something instead of nothing” is a widely shared curiosity.
Step 1: Assemble H-Bomb
Step 2: Boom
Step 3: Relief (?)
> For Herzog, the problem is that there are always more ideas than time to accomplish them. “I name at least 10 projects, there are 20 more behind that,”
The universe is our playground, and "God is against all".
"So, as we struggle to resolve our IT issues, it’s a little stressful, but I’m also struggling to suppress a laugh. Eventually, Herzog decides it’s a problem with the Teams video-call platform we are using: he delivers this information like he’s been prophesising this disaster for years but no one’s heeded him. “I’ve had it a dozen times before, it’s very, very frustrating,” he says. “And I keep predicting that if we do not do Zoom, we will lose the conversation. I hang up now.
Five minutes later – turns out he’s right! – we catch up again on the Herzog-endorsed Zoom."
Many of his best films are documentaries, but he frequently blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction, such as by giving his documentary subjects scripted lines or by using non-actors in his movies; he calls his approach to art the pursuit of "ecstatic truths". Among the general public, his most well-known film is undoubtedly Grizzly Man, which is a very good film, but he has made many that are just as good. My favorite of his is Lessons of Darkness, which is a kind of audiovisual poem showing the destructiveness of humankind through images. The film opens with a quote from Blaise Pascal, which was in fact invented by Herzog himself [1].
Herzog is also a very, very good writer (and he somewhat paradoxically prefers, according to this interview, to be remembered as a writer rather than as a filmmaker). His non-fiction books Conquest of the Useless is great, and Of Walking on Ice is supposed to be wonderful. He just came out with his first novel, The Twilight World, as well as the autobiography mentioned in the article. For a taste, one chapter of the autobiography was published in The New Yorker [2] recently.
[1] https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Herzog.pdf
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/the-mysteries-...
He also voiced characters on The Boondocks, Rick and Morty, Simpsons, American Dad, and Metalocalypse.
Of his "straight" documentaries, Encounters at the End of the World is great. It's a film about the people who live at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Like his other biographical documentaries, it mixes quirky people and humour with brutally realist view of the world, all to great photography and music.
The Fire Within [3], his 2022 documentary on the popular volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, is wonderful. It's a superior companion piece to his earlier films about volcanos (Herzog really likes volcanoes), Into the Inferno and La Soufriere.
Of his fiction films, you can't avoid Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo. But a personal favourite of mine among his 1970s films is Heart of Glass [4], a quirky and beautiful retelling of a Bavarian folk tale, set in the 1700s.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHfVnM_duRg
[2] https://letterboxd.com/film/encounters-at-the-end-of-the-wor...
[3] https://letterboxd.com/film/the-fire-within-requiem-for-kati...