Story: - Vincent as a philosophy teacher? What would happen? Wait and see...
Setting: Cloud and Co. are at Cosmo Cayon, sitting round the big big bonfire, Cloud and Red and Cait sith gone to the caves...
(I know Vincent didn't come until after we went to Nebelheim , but who cares? I am therefore abusing my right as an author to add Vincent, the only one who I think can teach philosophy, into the Cosmo Cayon scene where all you saw were people staring into the bonfire doing nothing. Besides, I thought that since everybody was doing nothing, they could have a little talk about philosophy...)
To Teach Philosophy
~The story begins with Vincent's most famous words...
Vincent: ......
Tifa: Aren't the stars beautiful?
Everybody: ......
Vincent: They are but a handful in the hundred billion in the universe...
Tifa: But we are too on a planet that is one in a hundred billion in the universe.
Vincent: How extremely unfair, then, that we are born in to this one planet in a hundred billion, not knowing our purpose in life, and not knowing of the why and the how of the reason we are given life.
Yuffie: Hey, you not knowing your purpose in life doesn't mean we don't.
Vincent: Then what is your purpose in life?
Yuffie: To restore my country to its former honour and glory by...(hesitates and looks around furtively) Why must I tell you?!?!
Vincent: But this is merely brought about by your circumstances. If you are not who you are now, you would not then want to bring glory back to 'your' country, is it not?
Yuffie: I am who I am now, and no one can change that! (sticks tongue out.)
Tifa: I agree with Vincent though.
Aeris: Me too... I don't know of my purpose in life too...
Yuffie: No way am I agreeing with anybody, including that freakish vampire!
Tifa: Yuffie! You're hurting his feelings!
Yuffie: ......
Vincent: That is of no matter. I've been subjected to Hojo's verbal and physical torture for so long that I don't feel anything now.
Tifa: Vincent...
Vincent: I sometimes wonder if this is all is just a dream, and that I'm a figment of imagination in someone's mind...... There was once a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, and after that was forever wondering if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
Tifa: No you are not dreaming! You may hope that this is not real, but it is! You just wish that all this is a dream, but it is not! You must face your reality, Vincent. Like I did a long time ago when Nebelheim burned down... You must accept your reality.
Vincent: Ah, but you are wrong here, Tifa. How can you be so sure that this is the true reality?
Tifa: (Punches the rock hard ground.) Owww... How can this not be real? If there's no real object there, I wouldn't feel pain.
Vincent: How did you feel it?
Tifa: I felt something hard.
Vincent: You had the sensation of something hard, but you didn't feel the actual matter in the ground. In the same way, you could dream you are hitting something hard, but there isn't anything hard in a dream, is there?
Tifa: (reluctantly) Nope. (Thinks for a while.) But if the ground wasn't hard, why did I feel it?
Vincent: A philosopher once said that our ideas have a cause beyond our consciousness, but this cause is not of a material nature, but spiritual. My own soul can be the cause of my own ideas- just when I dream - but only another will or spirit can be the cause of the ideas that make up the 'material' world. Everything is due to that spirit which is the cause of 'everything in everything' and which 'all things consist in'.
Yuffie: Did someone say materia?
Vincent: ......
Tifa: And that spirit is?
Vincent: That philosopher's interpretation was that the spirit was god. The whole world around us and our whole life exist in God. He is the one cause of every thing that exists. We exist only in the mind of god.
Tifa: That's creepy...Does this mean that we are not people with flesh and blood, living in a world with real objects, but only ... ... someone's brainwaves?
Vincent: That is what I suspect. We cannot perceive the matter itself that our reality is made of, that much we have learnt. We cannot know whether our external reality is made of sound waves or of paper and writing. All we can know is that we are of spirit.
Tifa: If it really is this way, then our god, or mind which we live in, have ultimate control over us all?
Vincent: Yes.
Tifa: Then he or she ought not be so cruel, to create you as you are now - in limbo between your true self and the monsters that Hojo had incorporated into you...
Vincent: Speak for yourself. You lost all you could the day Nebelhiem perished in Sephiroth's fire.
Tifa: Not all. I still have my sweet memories of that place, and...Cloud.
Aeris: Life is a dream, I hope. When I wake up, I would be in the Lifestream in the arms of my mother, and not the lone Ancient in this Planet, hunted by Shrina and a burden to Elymra...
Vincent: Our Maker plays strange games... We cannot anticipate what might happen next, or what would happen when we find Sephiroth; but he can, for it is he who makes us meet Sephiroth, and he who makes us the dreaded creatures we are now. Who knows? May be when all this is over, we might be happy once again.
Aeris: I hope so...
Barret: (who has been quiet all this while) Do you think there's fate?
Vincent: That depends on which point of view you take - the existentialist view that man himself is in charge of his life, or that we are pre-programmed with 'software' and it is our job to discover what the codes are and carry them out correctly. I believe in the latter.
Barret: Was it fated that I must be parted from Dyne twice? And the last time was the final parting...
Vincent: I am no fortune teller.
Barret: Tell me! Was it!?!? (Bangs metal hand against the ground in frustration)
Vincent: If it follows that God has created us, and left it as that, then we have free will; but if we are but electromagnetic brainwaves in someone's brain, it is the mind's that controls us. Which means what will happen will happen, and we can't change anything...then to us, there is fate.
Barret: (Bangs some more) What's the use of all yer fancy talk, when you can't do anything about the whole damn world even if you have reasoned out everything? Stupid!
Yuffie: Exactly! The only things that interest me are those gleaming orbs...
Vincent: But you must see that it is precisely of the stars that make us think! It was the movements of the galaxy and the universe and later evaluation, that made us into humans, and therefore an intelligent creature capable of thought!
Yuffie: Uh... I was talking about materia...
Vincent: ......
Tifa: I think that philosophy has some use...
Aeris: Life is a dream...we are but brainwaves...
Yuffie: Stop it, will you? Even if it is a dream, we still must live it through, right? Unless this God of yours decides to kill you now with a freak lightning bolt, you would still have to accept whatever comes your way!
Vincent: But it would be God who decides if you would or would not accept what comes your way, not you.
Yuffie: No wonder you are still so melancholic...(Rolls eyes)
Barret: I've had it with philosophy! All that reasoning of what our purpose of life is, has no particular use to my life. And even when all the answers to your philosophical questions answered, you can't bring back the old Corel, or Dyne, or my friendship with the village's people...
Vincent: But it can help you accept that that must happen...
Yuffie: No one's controlling my life, only me! And what happens then would only be my fault!
Vincent: If that's what you think...
Yuffie: Yes, that's what I think! Only we can change our lives! Unless you want to tell me that my country would forever be a stupid tourist attraction!?! I would never let it be, even if he or she up there makes it so!
Tifa: Er...Yuffie, calm down a little will you?
~Thankfully, a mechanic comes at this moment and tell them that the car is fixed. Cloud, Cait Sith and Red then come back at this point, and they go off to the new Nebelheim...
~End
P.S. I know. Weird, right? But most stuff I churn out are weird, and nowadays I keep thinking about philosophy... so I decided to incorporate it in my writing... Hope I succeed, anyhow. R&R, k? Thankz.