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.
Random Xpat Rantings 
I have no experience of psychedelics, though I’d like to have. But I have been to the edge. Tugged the lever to initiate death twice, deliberately, coldly (and unsuccessfully, obviously). Once one has faced the void and stepped back (or have been pushed back), the ordinary shit in life doesn’t faze one so much.
And there’s maybe a fascination there too. A will to escape the perpetual burden of becoming. The treadmill of choice. The inevitability of moral decisions, for all decisions have a moral component. Perhaps that is what moral relativists are running from?
Ernest Becker wrote a very insightful book called The Denial of Death, positing that most of what motivates us is at base an attempt to run from facing full square our inevitable demise. Perhaps there should have been a companion volume entitled The Denial of Choice? Unless one is a fatalist, life is a summation of choices. Burdensome, frustratingly unpredictable in effect, inevitable. Post modernism is an attempt to say that choices don’t matter, in the biggest picture, because there can be no truly external frame of reference.
So yes, you’re right. Death is post modernist.
I say embrace our clumsy, ill-informed choices because we do make them, no matter what.
OMG! Men Who Are You? I have done LSD (yes and I am opened about it). I mean – it is quite difficult drug to take. Because as we know this reality is information and we live in simulated 8d cube which can projected in a way how we see our reality – 3d. And when you take LSD you enter different dimension. People say hallucinations – no, those are amplifications and they are digital by nature. And I am always sitting in the bathroom looking at the floor (yes, it is mesmerizing) and asking myself – what exactly am I looking at? WHo can explain me? Maybe you can.
And another drug is mescaline (tested). AMAZING! Give me your thoughts please.
I also started a blog – but your intellect, acumen and wittiness is way more superior than mine. But you have to give me a credit that I am Russian immigrant living here figured out everything myself. What ever is on my site. Can you maybe somehow shout me out amongst your subscribers? I really want to have people commenting and inspire me for more thinking and writing. Well, if it is too much to ask – I will be fine. You know I am this overworked, tired with so much testosterone. But if put in the right conditions – would return to femininity. extraordinary-love.com is my blog.
Thank you and I will not leave you alone.
Great comment Jake. I can see that it just rolled off of your fingers, even though each sentence is deeply soaked in meaning – like Tolkiens writings. It’s not quick plot you scan skim; you could chew on each sentence for as long as you care.
That comes from a contemplated life.
“The inevitability of moral decisions, for all decisions have a moral component. Perhaps that is what moral relativists are running from?”
As an example, my relationship with V.
The eternal connundrum. A pretty young sincere virginal woman who wants nothing else but to marry you, and will use every possible means of seduction to get that aim, including at first forgiving other lovers – or even perhaps allowing them.
But in the end it comes down to a conflict of interest. How can we not be empathological? Or are we being psychopathic?
It’s a conflict of interest; there is no moral solution to a conflict of interest.
It’s naive, and I’d say a naivete born from inexperience, that could posit that free will absolves the moral dimension. “just tell her the truth and let her decide”
Doesn’t work. Try it. She will STILL want monogamous marriage, and STILL feel huge pain that will STILL deeply damage her mind and her future.
Exactly as you say; there is no ultimate frame of reference. That’s the inevitable phiolosopy of science. Science itself is embedded in our biology. Our personal frame of reference is inescapable, and there is no ultimate morality – no amount of empathy gets us to an omnicient point of view that is best for everyone.
There is no best for everyone.
And yet to attract women, we need empathy.
And so to love others, while at the same time being honest to our own true nature, we must cause horrible and possibly life damaging hurt.
Moral relativists might want to run from something, but we’re all dragged eventually into the inevitability of moral relativism. It’s the exact place that humans by our nature can not abide. The very place of uncertainty; agnostacism at it’s easiest and lazy-sloppiest, multi-perspectivism once in sharper big picture focus.. Either way, morals lose a single perspective the longer you look at them. This does nothing to dull the pain of causing suffering, or of compromising to suffer oneself.
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