Aesthetic Materialism

  CURTIS YARVIN IS A POSTMODERNIST  "They Hate Us For Our Freedom"   Since 2007, there has been a tiny, marginal movement on the internet, or several overlapping movements, started by a person named Curtis Yarvin, better known by his assumed name, "Mencius Moldbug."  (I'll use that name; it's less obscure.)  Spreading out from Silicon Valley, where it first became trendy, the movement(s) have been known by various names.  Moldbug originally called his political philosophy "formalism" - at that time, he was advocating for the government being run in the style of a corporation - especially a Silicon Valley startup - with a powerful CEO.  But that never caught on, and he abandoned it in favor of "neo-cameralism."  But this turned out not to capture anyone's imagination either, and so other names appeared: the Dark Enlightenment, neo-monarchism, and most famous of all, the "NeoReactionary movement" - NRx for short.  Are all thes...

One book that somebody should write, and I would read it with great interest and curiosity, would be "Why Wasn't Kant a Phenomenologist?"  We almost got something like that in Heidegger's book, "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics," but I need someone to go further than Heidegger, to explain much that Heidegger leaves unexplained.  Because I, for one, when I read Kant, cannot help but feel that he is tending towards phenomenology - and, of course, after Kant, phenomenologists sprouted up like mushrooms.  To oversimplify matters entirely, the problem is essentially this: Kant seems to have recognized something like the antinomial character of metaphysics - therefore, he "should" have renounced metaphysics altogether and insisted on focusing simply on the phenomena themselves, refusing to allow any of the phenomena to acquire any metaphysical residue, so to speak.  It almost seems inevitable that a philosopher, having confronted the Kantian antinomie...

  I'm an anti-postmodernist, but I'm not a dogmatic anti-postmodernist or a reactionary anti-postmodernist.  I'm not saying, "Let's go back to the good old days of modernism."  On the contrary, a commitment to modernism means a commitment to go forward.  I do recognize that there is a rational kernel to postmodernism, and I take postmodernism seriously.  I think it's worth considering postmodernists' points of view, just so long as theirs is not the only point of view worth taking seriously. Postmodernists do not believe in science, in progress, in nature, or in truth.  I do believe in all of those things.  I believe in science, I believe in progress, I believe in nature, and I believe in truth.  But I don't believe in them dogmatically.  I believe in them, because I think there is sufficient evidence for them, as rough, vague, working hypotheses, subject to change at any moment.  The preponderance of evidence is, for now, in their favo...

  Fundamentally, in a way, I think we are not yet postmodern.  We do not have the luxury or the privilege of being postmodern.  Postmodernists see modernism as a fait accompli - been there, done that.  But I see modernism as a problem, a problem that has not yet been solved.  There is more work to do .  The modernist project was not completed, it was merely abandoned.  Or perhaps it is better to speak not of the modernist project, singular, but rather of the modernist projects, plural.  There are more novels to write, there is more art to create, there is more music to perform, and, at another level, there is more politics to achieve, there is more economic transformation to accomplish, there is more ecology to revolutionize, and so on.  We did not finish, and we should not kid ourselves that we did.  I will not be a part of the abandonment.

So, this is a follow-up to my earlier short essay, " What's important about theology ".  I was tempted to call this one "the problem with theology," but I avoided that because "problem" has such a negative connotation (although it shouldn't.)  But in this short essay, I will try to sketch out what makes theology so devilishly difficult. I started off that earlier essay by saying that theology dealt with two "puzzles."  I used that word purposefully.  But of course a theologian doesn't usually use the word "puzzles."  Indeed, a proud theologian might take offense at the use of this word - it might offend their dignity.  (Similarly, according to Mark, the "people" often took "offense" at what Jesus said.  "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.") Theologians usually don't like thinking of the questions they are pondering as puzzles.  The word "puzzle" sounds too trivial, as though s...