I’ve been down the post-modernist rabbit hole. Far down. Marcuse, The Frankfurt School, Post-Formal Operations, the whole fucking nine yards. It’s a pipeline full of shit that spews out into nihilism or Advaita.
At the beginning of the day, you have to get up for a reason, and that reason is inevitably strongly informed by some pretty basic biological impulses. Try practising some post-modernist shit retention, see how long you last. The body has it’s own truth. Post-modernists (along with the rest of humanity) are largely slaves of their bodies, wishing they could abstract and satisfy their appetites in the theoretical realm. Foucault was a child with dialectical diarrhoea asking “Why why why????” Chomsky is doing the far more difficult, constructive work – the ‘how’.
Exactly that.
And still though, for me, death is the final non-answer that crazy drugs lean us to stare into. Death is post modernist.
Death is not organized at all.
It was the early 1900s when Goedell used math to stare into the abyss. Any system that can use symbollic references (any language) can’t be both true and self consistent. The nature of knowledge itself is a mind fuck, and you can’t get aroud that in any way, ever.
Life is not post modernist. Exactly as you say.
Death is truth, but as you say, so what?
For me I cant come to rest at pragmatism. I need to go all the way to the edge where we have no fucking clue. Just stare there.
And then come back and be pragmatic.
Otherwise it seems disengenuous. Like faking it.
I like to keep a small toe in the water of being dead. Possibly why ketamine has been interesting to me, and shrooms and LSD. They can get you so weirded out that start to not know where you stand. That’s the main value, as I see it. Just staring down the unknown, for a bit. It’s not really worth anything, but it’s a toe in a water.
I suspect that Jake you get my point, but a wider audience that has not gone down the Buddhist or Post-Modernist deconstructive rabit hole,LSD and intellect basically lead you to the same groundlessness, afer a while. Just go as far as you can, in any direction, and you are at the ends of the earth. The linked youtube video commenter said it well. Deconstructionism has to deconstruct that basis of it’s own argument. And so even if finally you can’t avoid deconstructionism, sooner or later you just have to give up and contruct.
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Update. While I admire Chomskie’s well wishes, I can’t help but to always wink at his sincerity. It’s as if he believes that his good wishes are inherently good.
And we can make very good arguments that they are – I can make those arguments, and I have. My entire blog is based, very obviously, on constructionsist philosopy. Is that a word? Constructionsist?
I just need to wink. I can’t hear the good will of Chomsky without needing some deconstruction and death at the same time. He’s so soaked in justice – as if that’s an actual thing (it arguably is, and it’s arguably not – which is the point – if you are not at once of both minds or at least agnostic about this, then you don’t get it yet). It’s kind of campy, even as much as I appreciate the truth and sincerity of the camp, and will sing along with and re-play and invent my own campy songs.
