One way of understanding romanticism: I had a conversation with friends - one of my friends, a sort of "New Atheist" type, was expressing frustration about art, and some of my other friends are in the art world. The New Atheist type said, "I wish there were a group of objective standards by which one could judge whether art is good or bad." All my other friends got very angry about this, and utterly rejected it. To my mind, this shows that all my other friends are still, in some sense, romantics. To me, this shows that modernism is just an extension of romanticism, and postmodernism is an extension of modernism. We are still romantics. Even classicism is a kind of romanticism. I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticism. If there were a way out of romanticism, it would be the establishment of some kind of standard that people would agree upon. But we can imagine what would happen if such a standard were imposed - immediately, there would be people...
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Why I Love Egos
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Why do I love egos? It's hard to say.... Why does anyone love what they love? Why do you love those you love? In a way, love never has a reason. (Or at least, not one that one could put into words....) Because if there is a cause of your love that you could name, that would imply a kind of exchange, or the possibility of an exchange. It would imply that if something could take away the cause of your love, or present the possibility of getting what you love elsewhere, then you would no longer love the person you love - which would imply that you don't love them in the first place. So, I cannot assert anything as the reason that I love egos - all I can say is, here are some of the ways that I notice that I love egos. ...And, I'll bet that you love some egos, too. And I invite you to notice that you love them. And perhaps notice that you love some egos that you hadn't noticed that you loved. For love is, truly, the answer. ...
Note on the dates of postmodernism
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Sometimes you will find textbooks, magazine articles, etc., that date postmodernism as having arisen in the 1960s. I think this is a perfectly silly, stupid, and arbitrary way of dating it, which should be completely scrapped. If, by postmodernism, we mean something that arose in the 1960s, then postmodernism is truly meaningless, a totally arbitrary non-concept. (And even in the sources that cite 1960 as the beginning of postmodernism usually hedge their bets, by putting in disclaimers that say something along the lines of "but we can find precursors of postmodernism even earlier" yadda yadda.) If postmodernism is to be a meaningful division of cultural history, then the most reasonable way of sketching it would be to say that postmodernism gradually arose during the great crisis that spanned from 1914 to 1948, and that it had been fully established by 1945, with the development of nuclear weaponry and the defeat of that particular wave of fascism. I woul...
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If I could characterize Hegel with one word, it would be: unpredictable. Hegel always has the hot take. He is predictably unpredictable. Just when you think you understand him, just when you think you know him, you read another sentence from his work that forces you to reconsider everything you thought you understood. I've said before that Hegel's entire project is the critique of romanticism, that critique for Hegel means immanent critique- thus, so to speak, romanticism's critique of romanticism- and that - brilliantly! - when he zeroes in on romanticism, the essence of Hegel's discussion of romanticism focuses on irony, the irony of the romantic. Even here, Hegel is being a romantic, because what he seeks is, you might say, poetic justice. He wants romanticism to be hoisted by its own petard, like the person who is punished in the afterlife in a brilliant, torturous way - the ironic twist that turns everything back on them - "contrapasso". What mak...
Reasons I am not a postmodernist
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I am an unabashed egoist (or at least egoish ). I am an unabashed humanist. I am an unabashed materialist. I am unabashedly in favor of existence & being. I unabashedly support science. I unabashedly believe in nature, including human nature. I unabashedly believe in truth. I unabashedly believe in rights. I unabashedly believe in progress. I think all of these things matter, and that they're good. I want to maintain these, to make sure all of these keep existing. I want to maintain the ego, maintain humanity, maintain the material world, maintain nature, maintain science, maintain rights, maintain progress, maintain existence, maintain being. I believe strongly in maintenance . We have to learn to be custodians . We must learn to be the janitors of being. "Another flaw in the human character is that everyone wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." - Kurt Vonnegut I want to maintain the modern, kee...