/lit/ - Literature

>>11561622
the real confusion for me just stems from this concept of the term 'postmodern' which is the elephant in the room. postmodernity itself is this concept of a universal criticism which on the surface appears to be irrefutable. i remember having these arguments with derrida and butler people and feeling like i was always coming away losing. how can i deny that everything is interpretation?

with land, an internal critique of postmodernity really begins in earnest (there are other ways also: peterson is one, as is girard). postmodernity is a curious period, the era of putting everything in quotation marks, the school of suspicion as mass-evangelical. but we argue in the master's language, and derrida and foucault were masters. you can see why land would have found so much in common with moldbug here: that postmodernity in its various guises was always the cultural vanguard of the cathedral apparatus. very hard to recognize from within, and in the 90s and 2000s still reigned supreme everywhere.

it was only later, although i'm still not sure exactly when, that the wind began to shift. certainly it has something to do with the left's inability to deal with islam and the sophie's choice tragedy there: feminism, or multiculturalism? (the answer: neither, the Patriarchy is the problem, let's double down on that!). and now in the era of trump it is only all-too-clear what postmodernism signified: not a 'skepticism about metanarrative' at all, but a demand for absolute fealty to the two strongest narratives within that movement: race and gender, which today become intersectional feminism. and which fail to impress land, who sees a kind of hobbesian battle for power in academic circles. he thinks this goes back to protestantism, and he might be right.

so he's one opponent of postmodernism in that sense (and maybe now it is more clear why i was resisting the use of that label earlier...from a historical perspective, it just doesn't make sense). peterson is another germane figure in this regard, given that his whole intellectual influence - namely, starting from jung rather than freud, and solzhenitsyn rather than marx - paints a different picture of the 20C (it would be good, as always, if he would read a little of derrida, lacan or foucault, if only to show that he could reach across the divide a little bit, but that's just my own wish, and i understand why he doesn't). and ofc there is the perennially underrated rene girard, who is my boy, and who also represents an alternative to postmodern craziness.

but this is a hegel and land thread, so i won't take it too far off topic. i've actually been annotating my copy of the PoS quite heavily this summer and really enjoying it. hegel is pretty dope and i've been talking everyone's ear off about him IRL for the past couple of months when i felt like i really understood what the phenomenology was all about. the hegel-lacan bromance is well known, but the hegel-land romance has some legs too.

>>11375220
well, i'm glad that i'm not the only one who feels that way. it does feel kind of weird to say it, sometimes, like your brain is just this empty dish. but honestly that's how it feels. and if nothing else it does kind of predispose you to a kind of greater charity towards others (and more suspicion towards yourself). it's not good to be too hard-headed about things.

and i don't think great philosophical texts are written as if they *were* software programs either. i think our inbuilt human bullshit detectors would notice this. the tiny percentage of people philosophy delivers up who are truly worthy of being called sages are who they are because they believe what they are saying, and they were involved in a sense with the world in a way that seems lasting. we're convinced by them because it's the truth, or some new iteration of it. there's a conspicuous lack of bullshit in it. or, as you say,

>a certain undeniable aura of integrity

i like that.

>I mean for kant, if we could glimpse the thing-itself, we'd see just how we're the sock puppets of the forces that control us, and the whole arena human moral struggle would look like a sad little game.

yeah. an outcome to be avoided. it's weird: i don't have, in a sense, too much of a problem agreeing with land or whoever when they say that the whole world is just disappearing into capital, that the organic is only the inorganic's way of assembling itself into technology. i'm okay with this in a way because it seems better than fuckface mimetics. but more than that, i have this feeling that, if that is so, i want to know this so as to engage with other humans in a less horrible way, or relate this information such that it becomes useful. it's kind of weird how it works like that. even when you write anything, you have to imagine yourself presenting it *to* another human being, somewhere, as perceptive as you are, and hopefully more so! the more that philosophy tends towards the inhuman (and i do think this is a good look, and is actually a better way of handling nihilism than via the scapegoating which it often masks or hides) the greater the sense you have of actually needing to be human with your fellow humans, however mysterious the idea of actually *being* human becomes, however alienated you feel from yourself, however small and pathetic in the eyes of capital and technoscience you are and so on.

there's some mathematician i read about who said that at higher levels the universe doesn't make sense, it's just that you learn to get used to it.