The great Simon Critchley says everything I ever wanted to say about The Thin Red Line. Even though he makes a very easy and common mistake: the vast majority of the voiceovers in the film are from a character we actually see very little of, and not Witt, as most critics think. I think this doesn't really matter so much, because the voiceovers are meant, I believe, to run together in this way like a chorus in Greek tragedy. I especially like Critchley's emphasis on the unresolved metaphysical debate at the heart of the film--which seems to bypass most people completely, who seem to think the movie is endorsing some sort of pantheism.

Anaximander and the Ontological Difference

Perhaps the earliest surving fragment in the history of philosophy is Anaximander's sentence:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
- The condemnation for the crime -
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

More here, if you are interested.

I came across this while reading Vattimo on Heidegger. It is of particular importance for Heidegger's notion of overcoming metaphysics, which is also strongly tied towards being-towards-death and finitude as they are first expressed in Being and Time. It is an extraordinary fragment, extraordinary poetry really, and it is extremely difficult to make out the meaning of it. What is the crime? It would seem it is the "event" of my being, my singularity which only arises from the consideration of my death, that which Derrida notes in The Gift of Death is mine alone, the very thing which makes me "irreplaceable." My finitude is the condition for individuation (here I must say that Schopenhauer noted this in his way) and we might say that for Heidegger, and Vattimo, the "forgetting of Being" that takes place in metaphysics, the conflation of the ideal and the real, the ignoring of the ontological difference (the difference between Being and beings), is precisely tied to this notion of a crime: my Being in place of something else; the tying together of my being with Being, and therefore the origin of the idea of immortality.

As Derrida notes, to accept one's death, to give it and to be given it by God (Being), that which is not me, is to take on responsibility for the crime of being.

Note: This post hopefully explains to some extent my undoubtedly bizarre affection for Schopehauer. I see him as a thinker who went some way towards a rigorous distinction between Being and beings, someone who strenously observed the ontological difference. The problem is, if the distinction is rigorous it completely devalues beings (value is a function of Being). To completely devalue beings seems to me to be possiblly another metaphysical error, though a very odd one. This is, however, the opportunity I see in Schopenhauer.

For us ordinary mortals, Schopenhauer included, if not Jesus and Buddha (and Zarathustra?), this clear distinction is impossible. As Cioran said, "God is, even if he isn't." We have to live in the "interval," as Vattimo puts it, between Being and beings. We have to try, as Nietzsche wrote, to know that I dream and that I must dream. The gift of death, as Derrida sees it, seems to enable this.

It should also, finally, be noted that the terms Being and Nothing are interchangeable. It is beings that must vacillate between themselves and Being, their negation. To be or not to be. So in that spirit I will close this out with Hamlet's extraordinary meditation on his own death. Where else to end but Shakespeare?

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.