IcyMonkey wrote:
Nietzsche wasn't actually a nihilist. He coined the term nihilism, but he used it to describe the effects of the collapse of absolute meaning and the effects this would have on civilization. He actually spoke of it as a negative thing that had to be overcome for Western Civilization to avoid destruction.
He may not have technically been a Nihilist, but some of his ideas are certainly
nihilistic, in the popular sense. I mean, you yourself just linked to an essay of his that basically states that all of human thought is utter crap. I suppose a real "Nihilist" would be someone who thought the same way, but who unlike Nietzsche didn't care about finding a way to overcome it?
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The Dick essay is... well, it's interesting, certainly. I don't agree with most of it, but the ideas presented are just so intriguing(ly crazy). If the essay proves anything, it's that the line between insanity and genius is thin indeed, or perhaps nonexistent.
Yeah, I seem to remember reading something about him going completely batshit in his later years. I can't say I would be very surprised if it were true- to judge by his books, his grip on consensus reality was somewhat tenuous to begin with. Then again, so is mine :) My guess is he just decided at some point that he had had enough of being "sane" and wanted to try something different…
I'm going to break this up a bit, hope you don't mind…
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Wandering Idiot wrote:
By all means, feel free to rant about Berkeley and Derrida. If you go too far into postmodern deconstructionism, though, I may have to smack you...
Well, Berkeley ain't a postmodernist... he's a Modern philosopher ("Modern" usually taken to mean anyone from Descartes to Hegel). He and Hume are basically the first Modern Skeptics, and I think they set the stage for what Nietzsche and other philosophers will do later. However, they themselves didn't go as far as others would later.
Yeah, my comment was mostly directed at your mention of Derrida, since I remembered his name always coming up in conjunction with Postmodernism. Berkeley, from what little I know of him, reminds me of a more religiously-influenced and less grim version of Nietzsche. In other words, I don't like him as much ^_^
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As for Deconstruction... I have to say that it is one of the most misunderstood theories in the humanities today. No, actually, it's THE MOST misunderstood theory. Deconstruction does NOT mean that "every single interpretation is correct", neither does it mean that "words are the only reality". Both are GROSS oversimplifications of a theory too intricate to be reduced to sound bytes, akin to the frequent misrepresentations of Quantum Physics vis-a-vis Schroedinger's Cat. I really feel sorry for Derrida (who basically invented deconstruction)... the man's been spending the last few decades of his life trying to convince his detractors that he's not some insane nihilist-solipsist intellectual terrorist bent on destroying the literary world.
[Editor: Unfortunately, a lot of his "followers" seem to be just that, although it's probably just an affectation for some of them]
The sad part is, with Deconstruction and Postmodernism in general, that not only do most of its detractors misunderstand it, but many of its supporters do as well. I'm thinking specifically of the Alan Sokal hoax, where a physicist (Sokal) submitted a completely tongue-in-cheek parody to the "postmodern" journal Social Text, and actually got it published. This says more about the ignorance of many who call themselves "deconstructionists" or "postmodernists" (simply because it's the trendy thing to do in literary circles) than it does about actual Postmodern theorists, who know what the hell they're talking about.
I was being facetious with the smacking bit, but I suppose it was still something of a knee-jerk reaction. See, when I hear the words "Postmodernism" or "Deconstructionism", I tend to think of graduate students writing long-winded papers which use unnecessary verbosity, specialized language, and maybe a couple token leftist invectives to cover up the fact that if they have a point at all (which is frequently doubtful), it is neither illuminating or insightful, and could have been summed up in a few sentences of normal writing. I think of things like the (hilarious) Sokal hoax, or
this (actually, I was starting to get interested in that analysis- there must be something wrong with me :) No doubt both Postmodernism and Deconstructionism have an unfairly negative reputation based on things that are not strictly representative of their original intent, not unlike Communism, but those associations are nonetheless understandable, given that they both often turn out like such crap in practice. But I suppose, as you say, there's postmodernist deconstructionism, and then there's
postmodernist deconstructionism. I just wish there was a bit less of the former around (or the latter, depending on how you read that sentence) After all, I don't mind Postmodernism as described in Larry Wall's rather enjoyable
essay on Perl, although I'm not sure how close his is to the "correct" definition. Deconstructionism I'm a bit more wary of, no doubt due to having my enjoyment of certain books utterly ruined by having to read them in school, and extract "meaning". But I suppose even it has its uses.
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One of these days I'm going to post a rant explaining Postmodern theory, deconstruction, and all the rest of that stuff in detail... However, to really explain it my post would have to wind up being about twice as long as your infamous Reloaded rant, and even THEN it could easily be misinterpreted. The point is, whenever you simplify ANY complex theory, it winds up looking like idiocy.
While certainly, any simplification is by definition going to leave something out, I've always thought that the best and most elegant theories are those which are capable of having their basics expressed fairly simply. The theory of the conservation of energy, for instance, can be summed up in one equation ( E=MC^2 ) and a brief explanation of what the letters stand for. Of course, I suppose a knowledge of basic mathematics is an implicit requirement to understand it. Perhaps one of the reasons philosophical essays tend to be so wordy is that they lack a well-defined common ground from which to work, the way physics does with mathematics, since any such proposed common ground would immediately become just another subject of philosophical debate, and so have to sort of define where they're coming from as they go. I suppose in a way, Philosophy is simply the search for a way to make itself workable. Rather postmodern, that :) Hmm… I guess that's the real difference between Science and Philosophy - in the former, we put aside our Solipsistic questioning of reality enough to be able to have a conceptual base from which to work; while Philosophy can't tear its own down fast enough. Really, I think Philosophy has only a few ends if you take it far enough- a sort of Zen-like simple acceptance of the universe, or a ponderous structure of interlocking theories and countertheories that eventually becomes so unmanageable that no one is sure what they're about. Although I suppose I'm just adding another theory by saying this… Damn Philosophy's nasty tendency to swallow meta-commentary whole! Now I'm going to have to go read Gödel, Escher Bach to clear my head… You could have left me to my nice, simple, higher-dimensional geometry and quantum physics, but nooo, you had to go dragging me through the quagmire of meta-philosophy. You're an evil, evil man, Icy.
Oh yes, and-
*begins to chant*
Rant! Rant! Rant!
I think you should go ahead and write it. Enlighten us so that I, at least, can rescind my kill-on-sight policy for Postmodern theorists >:) Hey, tomorrow's Saturday, which is always a dead day at work- I need
something to read. Besides, I can't carry the banner of USENET-length posts for this forum by myself! (Believe it or not, I actually had one longer than the
Reloaded rant written for another thread, explaining what I see as the difference between Intelligence and Knowledge as it relates to implicit and explicit data, but I couldn't get the first paragraph to come out right and by that time the thread had become buried, so I scrapped it. True story.)
Hmm, it's late, so no doubt some portion of the above will seem silly to me in the morning. We'll see…