How This Postmodern Thing is Going So Far

For over 57 years, I managed to avoid learning enough about postmodernism to have any idea what it was. (Would it have been possible for me to remain ignorant about it for so long if I had lived in Paris? That's a non-rhetorical question. I have no idea to what extent postmodernism precepts might be a "part of the air" in Paris. I don't know whether it would be as difficult to live in Paris and not know what postmodernism is as it is to live in the US and not know the rules of baseball.) I heard mostly negative remarks about it and mostly accepted those remarks. Then, just a few months ago, I heard about Jordan Peterson for the first time, because Peterson was annoying some of my friends. Some negative remarks he made about postmodernism caught my attention because they sounded so absurd. So, for the very first time ever, I looked for postmodernists and what they themselves said about what postmodernism was. Very soon, I had my hands on a copy of Derrida's Of Grammatology. I devoured that magnificent book, and exclaimed,

"I'm a postmodernist!"

Unfortunately, however, the remarks I heard about postmodernism, apart from those made by actual postmodernists, continued to be the sort of negative remarks I had heard all my life, and had little or nothing to do with what postmodernists actually said. Although I'd started to call myself a postmodernist, I am not against technology, or against reality, or against authorship. Neither are Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard...

I am against patriarchy, colonialism, over-simplification, racism, sexism. Far from being opposed to technology or science or reality, since this cataclysm which has resulted in my identifying as postmodern, I have greatly intensified my study of advanced mathematics, electromagnetism, industrial manufacture, quantum theory and other STEM subjects.

As far as being "against authorship" -- what could that possibly mean, for an author, such as myself, to be "against authorship"? I suppose that this particular misunderstanding of postmodernism comes from the incomprehension of the very basic postmodern insight that the effect of any piece of writing depends just as much upon its readers as upon that which was actually written.

Perhaps this last insight can help me somewhat when I see people claiming all sports of nonsense about an entire group of people, the postmodernists: just as any author cannot control how his readers will understand or misunderstand what he or she writes, so postmodernists cannot control what people will say or write about us. All we can do is persevere in our own efforts. Perhaps if, now and then, we notice that someone actually understands something we've said, we can recognize that recognition. That might be better than trying to chase down the endless nonsensical things said about us, like a man trying to chase down a swarm of bees because one of them has bitten him.

Perhaps I should be hesitant to apply the label of postmodernist to myself so soon after having begun to study postmodernist literature.

Perhaps it would be good for me to keep in mind how seldom those who are considered the major figures of postmodernist literature actually referred to themselves as postmodernists. Perhaps it would be better for me to say that I've read some Derrida and found him to be profoundly delightful and not at all incomprehensible (perhaps because I share many of his interests). I haven't really had a comparable experience yet with any of the other postmodernists (as they are known by others, and much more rarely to themselves).

I think it makes sense to keep the postmodernist label for now, a couple of months after having so hastily adopted it. Although I have so far only read one postmodernist with great enthusiasm, I have a great deal in common with most of those in the group: a lack of recognition of anything I can call absolute truth; as I mentioned above, an opposition to patriarchy, colonialism, over-simplification, racism, sexism; the realization that relativity occurs not only in physics but also in ethics; a suspicion of claims of having found "the answer," whether those claims have been made in the name of Buddhism, Christianity, Marxism or what have you; a particular concern for the environment -- those sorts of things.

And if eventually the nonsensical definitions of postmodernism by people claiming to be its adherents, its opponents or its more or less sympathetic observers -- all three can be quite annoying -- prove to be to much, then I can reject the postmodernist label -- and I will have that, too, in common with many of the great postmodernists.

Martha Nussbaum, Non-Insider

In 1947 Martha Nussbaum was born. Her name at birth was Martha Craven. She claims to have repudiated her own "aristocratic" upbringing and to dislike elites and in-groups, whether it's the Bloombury group or Derrida. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and the University of Chicago, received more than 60 honorary degrees, and a few days ago she won the Berggruen Prize, which comes with a $1 million cash award.

In the mid-1980's, when Nussbaum was a professor in both the Classics and Philosophy Departments at Brown, she published The Fragility of Goodness, a book which added considerably to her already considerable prestige in academia. In the late 1980's, I was a Collage Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We College Scholars were given The Fragility of Goodness to read. Prof Nussbaum came to the University of Tennessee to speak. There was a Q&A after her lecture. I asked several questions.

I have never been particularly drawn to nor particularly repelled by Nussbaum's writing. I think I went to the trouble of coming up with questions for her because I was drawn to the aura of power around her. Double full professor in the Ivy League at around age 40, that's sumpin. Many camerapeople followed her around, including at least one video camera crew. I don't remember what my questions were. I'm quite certain they were uninteresting.

By this time, 1988 or early 1989, I had heard the name Derrida, but not with connotations which tempted me to read him.

Bill Moyers interviewed Prof Nussbaum on TV about The Fragility of Goodness. In his introduction, there are several shots of Nussbaum's visit to the University of Tennessee. In one shot, from behind the speaker's lecturn, in the upper-left corner of the screen, is a small smudge which may or may not be me.

In 2007, Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher whom I still liked somewhat at the time, despite numerous German-speaking friends having assured me that he was an asshole, published a book about Derrida. That was the first time I was strongly tempted to read a text either by or about Derrida. However, my competence in the German language never ceases to grow, and the more precisely I'm able to understand Sloterdijk, the less I like him. I didn't get a copy of Sloterdijk's book about Derrida, nor, at the time, did I get any books by Derrida.

Less than 2 months ago I finally began to read Derrida. I've taken an immediate and immense like to him. I'm a postmodernist! Who knew?!

Jordan Peterson Accidentally Helped Me Realize I'm a Post-Modernist

Can it really be less than 24 hours since I began to read Derrida? Yes. It be.

About a week and a half ago, I first started to notice the existence of Jordan Peterson, in the remarks of otherwise seemingly sedate and reasonable people expressing extreme distaste for him. I soon heard Peterson, on YouTube, describing what he asserted was postmodernism. I was hazy about what exactly postmodernism was, but not so hazy that I couldn't see that what Peterson was saying had to be inaccurate.

More precisely: Peterson is warning us all about neo-Marxist postmodernists. He claims neo-Marxist postmodernists want to destroy Western civilization. That they say people belong in groups determined by their ethnicity and gender, and that all these groups are condemned to war against each other forever.

So I did what I could have done decades ago: I turned to actual Marxists and postmodernists for their definitions of Marxism and postmodernism, and learned that, outside of the imaginations of people like Peterson and his fans, neo-Marxist postmodernists don't exist: a defining characteristic of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all meta-narratives, and Marxism IS one of those very meta-narratives.

Now: Marxists and postmodernists will agree about SOME things. Such as that Jordan Peterson is constantly making stuff up and selling it at high prices as invaluable truth. But any reasonable person of any political or philosophical tendency will see that, if he or she takes a little time and effort to examine the matter.

A huge bell went off in my head, because, for decades, I had been skeptical toward all meta-narratives. I'm always insisting that things are more complicated than that. You know that episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa is reading some Buddhist literature, and has a sudden epiphany and yells, "I'M A BUDDHIST!" Same thing happened to me, except I didn't yell, and I realized I'm a postmodernist, not a Buddhist.

Yesterday, I began reading the 40th anniversary revised edition of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's English translation of Derrida's On Grammatology, with an introduction by Judith Butler and a new Afterword by Spivak, and, people: these are my peeps.

And we don't want to destroy Western civilization or war against all other groups. Derrida is a total Western-civilization-phile from Homer to Heidegger.

My advice, besides checking out Derrida and Spivak and Butler, is to not believe anything Peterson says. About anything. At all. Ever. When Peterson disses a dead writer like Derrida or a living one like Butler, READ THAT WRITER.

Man, wouldn't it be a huge irony if Jordan Peterson, of all people, unintentionally caused people to read more good books?

It was with some reluctance that I sought out an English translation of a book by Derrida, rather than the French original, but undergraduate French classes were a long, long time ago. In the case of Of Grammatology, I was fortunate -- we all are fortunate -- because Spivak, the translator of Of Grammatology, is a tremendous writer in her own right. I have no idea, yet, what the quality of other English translations of Derrida or other French postmodernists might be.

Why "Ancient Aliens" Sucks

Because much smarter people have asked the same questions and come up with much, much better answers.

Just because something is not easily explained is no reason to jump to conclusions such as "aliens did it." If you dig deeper into the work of academic historians and sociologists, I think you'll find that they've explained many things which the "Ancient Aliens" crowd calls "unexplained mysteries." For example, there's no mystery about why the Egyptians built pyramids: they believed in an afterlife. Pyramids were palaces for the Pharaohs to live in during that afterlife. They mummified corpses so that dead people would still have their whole bodies in the afterlife instead of being disfigured. If you're interested in eerie similarities between separate cultures, read The Golden Bough by James Frazer; you'll find a lot of very eerie similarities between separate cultures which have nothing to do with aliens. And Frazer was writing between 120 and 75 years ago, around the same time as Freud, who's also really good. More recently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk and others have attempted analyses of worldwide cultural phenomena, in addition to all of those people who are more specialized in the histories of individual cultures. The real scholars are so much more interesting than the ancient aliens bunch. I don't think it's impossible that aliens have been among us, not at all. I just think that any culture advanced enough to visit us from another planet would have no difficulty whatsoever in concealing every last trace of itself from the likes of Giorgio Tsoukalos.

For Non-Theological Philosophy

It used to be, in Western society, that a philosopher was also a theologian, and a mathematician, and a literary critic. A philosopher was just about anyone who wrote for a living who wasn't also a poet, and sometimes someone was both a philosopher and poet, like Dante, for example. It's not well-known that Galileo wrote commentaries on Dante, but in his time it didn't seem strange -- he was a learned man, everyone agreed on that. Why shouldn't he write commentaries on Dante? The fact that the philosopher Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, and Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz in the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, were also leading mathematicians of their day, did not seem at all remarkable to their contemporaries -- they were philosophers. Who else but a philosopher should lead the way in math? The fact is that the term philosopher meant something very different back then, it referred to a learned man, and a learned man was expected to study all fields of learning. The division of labor which makes it seem strange that an astronomer is also a literary critic, or that leads some people to claim that a biologist like Richard Dawkins is not competent to write on theological matters, because he is a biologist, is a recent intellectual habit in our society, not more than a few centuries old.

Nowadays, a philosopher is -- what? Philosophy is a rather ill-defined term today. I think it's defined negatively, by the things which it is not, by the disciplines which have broken away from it. Philosophy is no longer astronomy or chemistry or mathematics, although the combination of philosophy and mathematics lasted somewhat longer than the combination of philosophy and some other fields. (A philosopher can of course still be an astronomer or a chemist. The difference is that now it would seem odd.)

Theology has not yet completely broken away from philosophy, or should I say, philosophy has not yet completely freed itself from theology. This is good for the reputation of theology and bad for that of philosophy.

One of the chief tasks of theology, a task which has grown steadily in importance over the past couple of centuries as atheism has begun to spread like wildfire, is to KEEP THINGS MURKY.

CLARITY is an archenemy of religion. And so when you make some clear points in a public forum about religion, and it's clear as well that you have the Abrahamic religions in mind, and above all contemporary Christianity in the US, there's a fairly good chance that some theologically-minded individual will come along and accuse you of having said something which does not apply at all to the Upanishads. And it's not unheard-of that this individual would be a professor of philosophy. Faculty in both philosophy and theology will bore and infuriate you with long speeches closely resembling sermons, and they'll make things even worse by enthusiastically quoting people like Nietzsche and Freud. Nietzsche hated, hated, hated theology and was crystal-clear about that, Freud took for granted that his stuff was not to be mixed up with that stuff those jokers down the hall in the theology department were instigating. Both Nietzsche and Freud underestimated how low theologians would stoop. They're like that repulsive booger which has attatched itself to to the end of your finger, and you shout in horror and shake and shake your arm and hand but it stays stuck there.

Life can be confusing under the best of conditions, and when it comes to philosophy there is often the difficult attempt to re-define certain things most of us take for granted, there are often long or rare words and texts in many different languages. But don't let the long words and various languages of theology fool you, philosophy does not have to be lumped in with theology. Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Sarte, Derrida & co are atheists, they aren't having any of that stuff -- although some of them do often cite authors of the time of the Christian hegemony, also known as the Late Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance eras, and show how substance and sense con be separated from the obligatory religious goobledeegook of those times.

With recent theology, the division of labor has proceeded to the point, I fear, that the goobledeegook has become their whole profession. Kierkegaard may mark the end of the era where philosophy and theology were still combined. (Karl Barth, Karl Barth! they're shouting. No. I really don't think so.)