Perhaps we can't rightly call anti-realism vis-á-vis history, (or even contemporary events) post-modern, but it certainly gets lumped in with the term, and it's a cornerstone of Alt-Right thought — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you cite some examples of anti-realism as an explicit doctrine of the far right? I can’t help but think your own realist-based thinking is leading you to inappropriately lump together as ‘anti-realist’ everyone who doesn’t accept the scientific consensus of what has been objectively proven to be true, and ignoring their reasons for rejecting it. There are a wide variety of realisms, and I view the far right , to the extent that generalizations can be made here, as embracing a more traditionalist form of realism than the one you endorse. I think this is the source of your difference with the far right, and pomo’s alleged influence here is largely a popular scapegoating for cultural trends they have almost nothing to do with, based on an inability to read them effectively.

Formal logic and Symbolic logic are not able to deal with the real world phenomenon and states very well.
— Corvus

They are at the very heart of the development of digital computers, such as the one you're reading right now. — TonesInDeepFreeze

What Corvus should have said is that they are not very good at cognizing in the way living systems do, as Hubert Dreyfus famously showed 60 years ago with his ‘What Computers Can’t Do’ and his more recent update ‘What Computers still can’t do’. Of course they are a part of the real world. Specifically, as technological
implementations they function as appendages to human ecological systems , the way a nest belongs to the bird’s ecology and the web belongs to the spider’s built niche. While an animal species are stick within a single ecological niche, humans continually construct new ones. As we evolve culturally, so will our built niche, which may involve the replacement of symbolic logic with different technological languages.

↪Joshs

Right, but the question was: "did elements of the Nu/Alt-Right grow out of/use ideas from post-modernism?" not "does Nick Land understand Deleuze in particular?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

If we agree that there are in fact substantive ideas offered by particular authors labeled as postmodern , then in order to determine whether someone’s ideas ‘grow out of/ use ideas from pomo’, we first have to establish what exactly we’re talking about, and I think that requires picking a specific writer, whether it be Deleuze, Foucault or Lyotard. and determining a connection with Land’s work.

it seems unreasonable to assume that someone who had a successful career as an academic publishing on Deleuze and wasn't subject to particular criticism until after he adopted controversial political opinions completely misread his sources — Count Timothy von Icarus

A lot of scholar glom onto and base their careers on parsing each word of a major figure. They hew so close to the original texts that it is difficult to see where their thinking departs from the master until they write something controversial.

You’d be surprised by how wildly students of particular philosophers can misread them. For example , Graham Harman, who founded object oriented ontology, a branch of speculative realism, offers a reading of Heidegger about as far removed from pomo as I can imagine. I recently read a piece which claimed, somewhat convincingly in my opinion, that Land settled on a libertarian Kantianism, which it seems to me is impossible to characterize as ‘growing out of’ Deleuze or pomo. Your thinking doesn’t grow out of an approach that is built out of a direct critique of what you’re growing into.

I think its the case that Land was always a traditionalist, but also a cultural hipster who joined the latest intellectual fad (which happened to be Deleuze) without absorbing more than superficial elements of him. As he became older and learned to read philosophy more carefully he discovered his true mentors were not pomo at all but transcendental idealism.

When it comes to tendencies, attitudes, dispositions and so on, I have only encountered human diversity, so for me any view which characterizes people as all having the same tendency, attitude or disposition I find egregious — Janus

.

It’s not necessary that a metaphysical outlook be identically shared among members of a community. Each of those diverse humans you have encountered has an interpretive system for construing events which is partially unique to themselves.

Land isn't responding to only Deleuze, although it seems likely given some of his lines that he would say he is doing to Deleuze what Deleuze claims to do to other thinkers: "buggering" them to produce demon offspring. That the demon offspring is recognizably related to the author but a sort of heretical corruption is sort of the point. I don't know how someone who conceives of their philosophy in such a way can be "misread," as it would seem that "misreading," shows proper application of the method that is recommended — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re not resolved of the responsibility to read Deleuze carefully. You don’t get off the hook that easily. Deleuze’s work is rigorous in what it is trying to say. It can be placed in just as precise a region as any of the other philosophers of our era. Deleuze lets us know the difference between ‘buggery’, where he uses authors like Leibnitz and Spinoza for his own purposes, and where he rejects what he doesnt like in their work. Readers of Anti-Oedipus have no doubt he was influenced by Freud and Lacan but leaves them decidedly behind at a certain point.Readers also know where he stands in relation to Derrida , Husserl and Hegel. Deleuze work tells us where to situate him with respect to the history of philosophy, praising Foucault and Heidegger but also letting us known where they fall short , venerating Nietzsche as his most important influence, resurrecting Bergson for his notion of lived duration but critiquing his subjectivism.

Despite his differences with Derrida, I believe Deleuze would endorse the latter’s thoughts about truth and relativism:

For of course there is a "right track", a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.

isn't saying "thou shalt not have hierarchies," itself an absolutist decree being made from on high? Why aren't we free to generate the neo-facist, neo-feudal aesthetic we find interesting? Isn't this more true to the goal of exploring "the infinite plurality of creative spaces?" How committed to this infinite creativity are you really if your response to some forms of it are "no, you cannot be creative like that!" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Deleuze is not commanding anybody to discard hierarchies, he’s showing how we can understand them as deconstructing themselves. Either you see this or you don’t. If you don’t, then Deleuze’s opinion is that your idea of freedom is a compromised freedom because it is unable to see beyond stratified categories that restrict as much as they liberate you. It’s your loss, not Deleuze’s. He’s just offering what he sees as options. It’s up to you whether you recognize them as useful alternatives or not.

↪Joshs
Sartre basically hovered around the starting line just like the rest. — Fire Ologist

Is there only one starting point? You dont find that certain philosophers provide you with more clarity than others?

But Nietzsche, like all of us, could only move in self-contradiction. Self-transformation, self-creation, lays out an ontology and metaphysic of self-material, action upon that material, and new self material - these all fall prey to the disconnect between appearance and reality. — Fire Ologist

There can only be a disconnect between appearance and reality we still take seriously the notion of reality as something independent of our experience. Throw away that notion and we also jettison the concept of mere appearance. And what’s wrong with self-contradiction if it moves us from one meaningful-in-itself value system to another?

We honest thinkers are deep in the cave. I find it an interesting place to be. — Fire Ologist

You seem to be at Sartre’s starting point, looking out a world where all the old verities and certainties have been put into question. Sartre’s response reflected the fact that there was one verity he was not prepared to question, that of the self-conscious subject. As a result, his attitude was one of mourning the loss of those old certainties. By contrast, Nietzsche was able to destabilize Sartre’s Cartesian subject, and as a result, he could take joy in immersing himself in self-transformative becoming rather than desperately search for ways to secure wisdom for the knowing subject from the rubble of the past through dialectical materialism.

". To be clearer, do you find that hypocrisy in what is maintained in praxis and what is professed via propositions cannot occur and, if so, due to what reason(s)? — javra

One can certainly lie to others about one’s views for various reasons, but I don’t think that apparent hypocrisy between opinion and action generally involves self-deception so much as failure to take into account the practical implications of one’s views. Theory is rarely able to account for the unpredictability and indeterminateness of real life situations.

What is this "more primordial and fundamental" way of thinking from which mathematical 'qualities' derive? And how does the derivation work? And are "objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness" "peculiar to mathematical logic"? Why? — Banno

Mathematical logic and its use in geometry produces pure, but empty idealities. They introduce the pure idea of precision, exactitude, accuracy that then becomes the basis for the aim of exactitude of correctness in the empirical
sciences.

“The only objectivity that belongs to exact natural science is based upon "geometrization," an idealization which is able to encompass theoretically, by idealizing them, all the possibilities of experience as experience of what is identical in infinitum; it does this by means of ideal concepts—con­cepts of what is in itself and of ideal truths as truths in themselves.” (Husserl)

The catch is that applying the pure idealizations of geometry to the natural world is describing a world that is no longer ‘empty’, no longer protected from contextual change in meaning. There are no pure forms , shapes in nature, and no self-identically persisting objects. For the purposes of convenience, scientists, beginning with figures like Galileo, fabricated a geometricized idea of the empirical object. As Husserl writes of this invented object:

“A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities, its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging. But only ideals have a rigorous identity; the con­sequence would be that an individual is truly something identi­cal—i.e., an entity—if it is the ideally identical substrate for general absolute ideas.”

What Husserl means when he says only ideals have a rigorous identity is that in order to adopt the notion of a self-identical empirical object, or the concept of a logical subject and predicate , we have to conceal the subjectively changing processes of actual experience, to ‘freeze’ them into temporarily unchanging identities so we can compare and manipulate them. The world doesn’t come to us packaged as self-identical objects.

“ It is high time that people got over being dazzled, particularly in philosophy and logic, by the ideal and regulative ideas and methods of the "exact" sciences — as though the In-itself of such sciences were actually an absolute norm for objective being and for truth. Actually, they do not see the woods for the trees. Because of a splendid cognitive performance, though with only a very restricted teleological sense, they overlook the infinitudes of life and its cognition, the infinitudes of relative and, only in its relativity, rational being, with its relative truths. But to rush ahead and philosophize from on high about such matters is fundamentally wrong; it creates a wrong skeptical relativism and a no less wrong logical absolutism, mutual bugbears that knock each other down and come to life again like the figures in a Punch and Judy show.”

“The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it. One must finally achieve the insight that no objec­tive science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense.

Heidegger writes:

The ontological presuppositions of historiographical knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor of the most exact sciences. Math­ematics is not more exact than historiographical, but only narrower with regard to the scope of the existential foundations relevant to it.

Because of examples such as these, I don’t then necessarily equate a being’s often unconsciously occurring Umwelt (for lack of a better word) to - in the case of humans - the self-professed worldview which is consciously upheld and maintained. — javra

The two don’t have to be in conflict. There are communities of scholars devoted to a particular metaphysics or philosopher, and yet no two people interpret that ‘same’ metaphysics or philosophy in exactly the same way. The publicly agreed-upon understanding is a shorthand, an abstractive generalization which conceals within itself the variety of ways it is implicitly used by different people. You may be surprised by the fact that “self-proclaimed Christians that adhere to all ritual aspects of their faith and uphold this metaphysical worldview at the same time in practice are in many a way atheistic”, but they may see no contradiction here.

It seems to me that the terms 'worldview' and metaphysics' are too often used interchangeably and this is confusing. I think, by reflective reasoning, the latter attempts to globally make sense of (i.e. translate into conceptual categories) the local 'presuppositions and implications' (i.e. parochial biases ~ e.g. mythological, theological and/or ideological blindspots) of the former; in other words, 'worldview' is to (native) grammar plus (naive) vocabulary/idioms as 'metaphysics' is to theoretical linguistics – or object-discursive & meta-discursive, respectively — 180 Proof

Wow, it sounds like a person would need a PhD in order to be qualified to form metaphysical presuppositions. I may be wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and connect your take on what metaphysics is with an Analytic approach. This makes sense give that, historically, the Analyric community has been much more interested in Hume, Leibnitz and Kant than Hegel. I am thinking that it is only in the philosophies that came after Hegel and were strongly influenced by him that we get an articulation of metaphysics as comparable to worldview. That is, as an overarching framework of intelligibility that orients us to the world and ties all its aspects together in a global unity, but that in most cases is held naively, unconsciously.

Maybe those people are not real post-modernists, but they do exist:

addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,”
— WSJ — Lionino

A lot of confusion around the word postmodernism. In the field of philosophy it tends to lumped in with trends that are quite tangential to it and in many cases opposed to it (Marxism). Pomo authors like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida often get blamed for the excesses of wokism and cancel culture, when in fact the repressive moralism coming from these movements is attributable to such doctrines as Critical Race Theory, and figures like Franz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci. These approaches are heavily influenced by Marx and psychoanalysis, which are put into question by pomo writers like Foucault and Derrida.

How one regards the significance of formal proof and formal theories may be philosophical, but the incompleteness proof itself about formal theories does not require any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t it require interpretation? It may seem as though it is in the nature of proof that it be absolutely transparent to anyone who understands mathematical proof, but hasn’t there been a lot written over the past 70 years or so (I believe Ian Hacking had some interesting things to say about proof) ‘relativizing’ its very nature?

If I read correctly from that article, it is more about power and politics. According to him, according to some PM writers, science and mathematics are oppressive systems etc. So it appears to be more critique about how amazingly correct and effective mathematics is, not that mathematics is not objective. (I'm thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer here — Olento

I think you’ll find that the most interesting pomo analyses of mathematics are neither strictly about power or politics, although these are never absent . Rather, they reveal the historical and philosophical origins and significance of the concepts of objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness that is peculiar to mathematical logic. That is to say, they don’t deny that mathematics contributes these qualities, what they are interested in showing is that such qualities are secondaryto and derived from more primordial and fundamental ways of thinking that are precise in a different but more powerful way.

that a rhetorical question meant to convey that Descartes and Leibnitz knew little about mathematics? Or is it meant ironically to say that indeed they knew a lot about mathematics? In any case, of course it is famous that Descartes and Leibnitz are among the most important mathematicians in history. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Indeed they are. I was suggesting that even though pomo philosophers have not contributed specifically mathematical innovations, the best of them have as deep an understanding of the underpinnings of math as did Descartes and Leibnitz.

In any case, the proof of the incompleteness theorem does not depend on any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t this depend on how one interprets the significance of performing a mathematical proof? Are you familiar with what Wittgenstein had to say about what it is we are doing when we construct a mathematical proof?

Then we also have "selective readings." I would place "deflationary" versions of Hegel, Marxist readings, etc. in here. They don't misread so much as pick and choose, but they do sometimes misrepresent to the extent that they claim that the original author's reading is their own (e.g., Marxists turning Hegel into a boring libertarian Marxist.)

Where does Land fit in here? IDK, it seems pretty hard to argue he wasn't rooted in to core of continental and post-modern philosophy early in his career — Count Timothy von Icarus

One problem here is the impossibility of coming up with a one-size-fits-all definition of what it means to be left or right wing. So much depends on the issue. I have my own peculiar way of thinking about the conservative-liberal binary, which is easy to poke holes in, but at least it gives some basis for discussion. It resembles in some respects the attempts by Jonathan Haidt and George Lakoff to provide a profile of a personality type which gravitates to one pole or another of this binary. But whereas their analysis was based on psychological disposition, I view this binary as a developmental spectrum paralleling the history of philosophical eras. For me conservatism is equivalent to traditionalism, and philosophical traditionalism, from the vantage of writers like Deleuze, supports hard categorical distinctions that lead to the placement of particular genders , ethnicities, races, within rigid, opposed boxes, and organized hierarchically. This is of course a gross simplification , but hopefully you get the idea. Deleuze’s approach, by contrast, abandons hierarchical , categorical thinking for endless differences upon differences both within and between, that blur and entangle the boundaries between distinctions that place individuals and groups either exclusively inside or outside.

Nick Land is an unusual personality, to say the least, so it may be impossible to place his thinking within any familiar political category, but to the extent that he embraces any significant features of Deleuze’s thinking, I would have to say that he doesnt see the world the way that traditionalists do, based on the way I have characterized philosophical conservatism.

. He was certainly able to keep up with the discourse, and had he never made his swing over to the right, I don't think anyone would question his falling in squarely into the POMO label.

Which is funny since it's hard to see what could be more "challenging the foundations of power and dogma," in these settings than being right wing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true if left and right stand for nothing besides mindless reactions against whatever the other side does.
But if you entertain my view of the binary as correlated with stages of a historical intellectual development, it matters what one is challenging the foundations of power and dogma in favor of. If Land subverts the establishment’s norms because he truly believes in rigid boundaries of gender, racial, class or whatever, and their strict hierarchization , then this places him by my reckoning on the philosophical right. If , on the other hand, his aim is to anarchically tear down all extant hierarchies and stratifications , with no desire to replace them with new ones,( I’m reminded of Zizek endorsing Trump in order to blow up the whole political order in preparation for his Marxist utopia), then I’d place him on the philosophical left regardless of how violent and disruptive the results.

The subject seems to bring out antipathies the way Communism used to. Notice how Jordan Peterson uses the term 'postmodern Marxists' to rally his troupes and disparage the current era of alleged meaninglessness. — Tom Storm

What’s amusing about this is Peterson doesn’t realize that thinkers he mentions as card-carrying postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault offer ideas directly counter to marxist dialectics. Postmodernism arose in opposition to, not as an elaboration of Marxism.

It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science (which is tentative and subject to revision) or philosophy (which might be seen as a swirling chaos of theories and positions — Tom Storm

You’re right to see maths as a central concern of pomo thinkers. They recognize that the essence of modern science is the marriage of the pure mathematical idealizations invented by Greek and pre-Greek cultures and observation of the empirical world. The peculiar notion of exactitude which is the goal of scientific description has its origin in this pairing.

But I was unable to review the critique, as I do not have a NYT subscription. And there is a paywall in front of the article. — Bret Bernhoft

A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World:

It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.

The vision has attracted a good deal of controversy. But the real problem with Mr. Andreessen’s manifesto may be not that it’s too outlandish, but that it’s too on-the-nose. Because in a very real and consequential sense, this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it. You can see it in the work requirements associated with public assistance, which imply that people’s primary value is their labor and that refusal or inability to contribute is fundamentally antisocial. You can see it in the way we valorize the C.E.O.s of “unicorn” companies who have expanded their wealth far beyond what could possibly be justified by their individual contributions. And the way we regard that wealth as a product of good decision-making and righteous hard work, no matter how many billions of dollars of investors’ money they may have vaporized, how many other people contributed to their success or how much government money subsidized it. In the case of ordinary individuals, however, debt is regarded as not just a financial failure but a moral one. (If you are successful and have paid your student loans off, taking them out in the first place was a good decision. If you haven’t and can’t, you were irresponsible and the government should not enable your freeloading.)

Would-be corporate monarchs, having consolidated power even beyond their vast riches, have already persuaded much of the rest of the population to more or less go along with it.


As a piece of writing, the rambling and often contradictory manifesto has the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency. It rails against centralized systems of government (communism in particular, though it’s unclear where Mr. Andreessen may have ever encountered communism in his decades of living and working in Silicon Valley) while advocating that technologists do the central planning and govern the future of humanity. Its very first line is “We are being lied to,” followed by a litany of grievances, but further on it expresses disdain for “victim mentality.”

It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as just Mr. Andreessen’s predictable self-interest, but it’s more than that. He articulates (albeit in a refrigerator magnet poetry kind of way) a strain of nihilism that has gained traction among tech elites, and reveals much of how they think about their few remaining responsibilities to society.

Neoreactionary thought contends that the world would operate much better in the hands of a few tech-savvy elites in a quasi-feudal system. Mr. Andreessen, through this lens, believes that advancing technology is the most virtuous thing one can do. This strain of thinking is disdainful of democracy and opposes institutions (a free press, for example) that bolster it. It despises egalitarianism and views oppression of marginalized groups as a problem of their own making. It argues for an extreme acceleration of technological advancement regardless of consequences, in a way that makes “move fast and break things” seem modest.

If this all sounds creepy and far-right in nature, it is. Mr. Andreessen claims to be against authoritarianism, but really, it’s a matter of choosing the authoritarian — and the neoreactionary authoritarian of choice is a C.E.O. who operates as king. (One high-profile neoreactionary, Curtis Yarvin, nominated Steve Jobs to rule California.)

There’s probably a German word to describe the unique combination of horrifying and silly that this vision evokes, but it is taken seriously by people who imagine themselves potential Chief Executive Authoritarians, or at the very least proxies. This includes another Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel, who has funded some of Mr. Yarvin’s work and once wrote that he believed democracy and freedom were incompatible.
It’s easy enough to see how this vision might appeal to people like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Thiel. But how did they sell so many other people on it? By pretending that for all their wealth and influence, they are not the real elites.

When Mr. Andreessen says “we” are being lied to, he includes himself, and when he names the liars, they’re those in “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview,” who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

His depiction of academics of course sounds a lot like — well, like tech overlords, who are often insulated from the real-world consequences of their inventions, including but not limited to promoting disinformation, facilitating fraud and enabling genocidal regimes.

It’s an old trick and a good one. When Donald Trump, an Ivy-educated New York billionaire, positions himself against American elites, with their fancy educations and coastal palaces, his supporters overlook the fact that he embodies what he claims to oppose. “We are told that technology takes our jobs,” Mr. Andreessen writes, “reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.” Who is doing the telling here, and who is being told? It’s not technology (a term so broad it encompasses almost everything) that’s reducing wages and increasing inequality — it’s the ultrawealthy, people like Mr. Andrees.

It’s important not to be fooled by this deflection, or what Elon Musk does when he posts childish memes to X to demonstrate that he’s railing against the establishment he in fact belongs to. The argument for total acceleration of technological development is not about optimism, except in the sense that the Andreessens and Thiels and Musks are certain that they will succeed. It’s pessimism about democracy — and ultimately, humanity.
In a darker, perhaps sadder sense, the neoreactionary project suggests that the billionaire classes of Silicon Valley are frustrated that they cannot just accelerate their way into the future, one in which they can become human/technological hybrids and live forever in a colony on Mars. In pursuit of this accelerated post-Singularity future, any harm they’ve done to the planet or to other people is necessary collateral damage. It’s the delusion of people who’ve been able to buy their way out of everything uncomfortable, inconvenient or painful, and don’t accept the fact that they cannot buy their way out of death.

Which is another reason why I'm a techno-optimist — Bret Bernhoft

Are you supportive of Mark Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto?

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

Or do you agree with this critique of Andreesen?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/marc-andreessen-manifesto-techno-optimism.html

I personally view fabricated truths as deception - be it self-deception or otherwise - if not outright lies. But that's just me. — javra

Can there be a notion of progress in ethical or scientific understanding that doesnt need to rely on a true-false binary? You wrote earlier that we all “consciously or unconsciously cling to some form of what Mircea Eliade termed an axis mundi”. Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’?

This sort of seems inevitable to me. What kept POMO on the left in the first place? The relativism it allows for allows it to be reformulated in right wing terms quite easily. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nick Land is not a relativist in the pomo sense of the term; he is not simply reformulating but missing the essential features of ideas by Deleuze , Derrida and others. If someone produces a set of ideas and they are grotesquely misread, should we blame them for that, or should we blame the one who completely misses their point? I agree with you it is inevitable that any complex, difficult to understand new ideas will be misread in ways diametrically opposed to the intent of the author, but I sense that , given the fact that your own thinking differs from the ideas of figures like Kuhn, Derrida and Deleuze, you see unproductive elements in what you call pomo ‘relativism’ and therefore you dont think they’re being entirely misread by people like Nick Land.

↪Tom Storm There was the famous Sokol affair, where a postmodern journal published an article arguing that quantum gravity was a social construct.

Unbeknownst to the publishers it was satire, exposing the lack of scientific rigor of the postmodernist.

Not sure they've fully recovered from that — Hanover

Pomo was never in high regard among the general population , so there was nothing to recover from. Those who have a rigorous , scholarly understanding of the best works in this area of philosophy know that Sokal never bothered to do his homework, having failed to show an adequate comprehension of the arguments involved.

↪Joshs I respect many of your views, but:

But it is one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. [...] They tend to be metaphysical, or naive, realists about both ethical and objective truth.
— Joshs

How is that not blatantly incongruous (this in non-dialetheistic systems, if it needs to be said)? — javra

I didn’t mean that I believe , or postmodernists believe, that
the far right ignores or distorts facts. I meant that those more moderate than the far right who share with the right a rejection of pomo relativism believe that the right is ignoring or distorting facts. In other words, both the non-pomo left and the far right believe in the non-relativist objectivity of scientific truth. They just disagree on what constitutes the proper scientific method for attaining objective truth. Postmodernists, on the other hand , disagree with both of these groups on the coherence of their various ideas of objective truth.

↪Joshs
As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.
— Joshs

Yeah, what would mathematicians know about maths — Banno

What would philosophers such as Descartes, Leibnitz or Avicenna know about maths? Don’t be fooled by the fact that recent philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl didn’t contribute innovations that would be considered mathematical within a conventional criterion of maths. Their work was intimately engaged with and reflected a profound understanding of the deepest foundations of mathematics and logic, every bit as much as predecessors like Leibnitz.

The article I shared was about as sympathetic as you might expect, and more than I expected. It takes an example from the literature,
Absolutism is deliberately replaced by cultural relativism, as if 2 + 2 = 5 were correct as long as one’s personal situation or perspective required it to be correct
— White 2009,
...and points out that
First of all, cultural relativism is out of context in this setting. When postmodernists claim that a mathematical truth is never absolute, they mean it is to be interpreted relative to a background. Certainly 2 x 5 = 1 is true in mod (3) arithmetic. No sane mathematician or educator would go around redefining addition or any other mathematical construct because his or her “personal situation” requires it to be correct. — Banno

This article is as ignorant of and unengaged with the actual arguments of key pomo figures like Deleuze and Derrida as is Sokal’s. None of the philosophers I follow claim that 2+2 can equal anything other than 4. They recognize that it is precisely the nature of numeric calculation that it abstracts away all meaningful contexts associated with what is counted, leaving only the repetition of ‘same thing, different time’. Derrida writes:

“I can manipulate symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification…Numbers, as numbers, have no meaning; they can squarely be said to have no meaning, not even plural meaning. …Numbers have no present or signified content. And, afortiori, no absolute referent. This is why they don't show anything, don't tell anything, don't represent anything, aren't trying to say anything. Or more precisely, the moment of present meaning, of “content,” is only a surface effect.”

The contentlessness of numeration leads to the fascinating fact that its components originate at different times and in different parts of the world as a human construction designed for certain purposes . And yet, even though these constructions emerged as contingent historical skills, their empty core of the identical ‘again and again’ allows them to be universally understood.

But the later Wittgenstein complicates matters here. Maths may have at its core empty repetition of the same, but its evolution plugs this into operations, rules and procedures that don’t guarantee in advance the persisting identity of their sense. As Lee Braver interprets him,

Wittgenstein’s early conception of meaning and his commitment to Logi­cal Stoicism drove him to rid the arena of truth and logic of all human interference, which required that the states-of-affairs asserted or denied by a proposition be completely delineated, as we saw with the questions con­cerning whether the book was still on the table under all possible circum­stances. He gave up this dream when he recognized our ineliminable role in
applying the rules. No matter how assiduously we strive to passively obey a rule, we still need to make the phronetic judgment call as to whether this state-of-affairs counts as an instance of the rule: “if calculating looks to us like the action of a machine, it is the human being doing the calculation that is the machine.”

We feel that all possibilities are settled in advance because we rarely step outside the normal circumstances where our footing is so sure we imag­ine it to be perfect. Wittgenstein spends considerable time constructing scenarios that throw our intuitions out of whack and leave us uncertain about what to say. This doesn’t expose a disturbing, problematic gap in our everyday usage, but rather shows that we get along fine without the propo­sitional omniscience he had previously found necessary. Without meaning-objects’ applications coiled up, as it were, within words or the mind like a retractable measuring tape, Wittgenstein now sees each application as metaphysically unguaranteed by past instances.

“We must not suppose that with the rule we have given the infinite extension of its application. Every new step in a calculation is a fresh step. . . . It is not in the nature of 23 and 18 to give 414 when multiplied, nor even in the nature of the rules. We do it that way, that is all.”

No matter how clearly the world seems to take us by the hand and lead us, it is always up to us to recognize its authority and interpret its commands; neither past usage nor reality forces us to go on in one particular way. We will never get to the other side of the ellipsis of “and so on . . .”—not because of our all-too­-human limitations, but because there is no other side; that’s the point of an ellipsis.

Since the notion of infinite extensions occurs paradigmatically in math­ematics, Wittgenstein spends a great deal of time on this subject, origi­nally planning part II of the Philosophical Investigations to focus on it. Just
as linguistic meaning occurs in our use of it, so mathematics only exists in our calculations, which means that
“there is nothing there for a higher intelligence to know—except what future generations will do. We know as much as God does in mathematics.”

Mathematics and grammar are inventions, not discoveries. As Simon Glendinning writes, each new application of a rule “is ungrounded or structurally abyssal. That is, it is logically prior to a determined rationality (or irrationality).”Without timeless mathematical truths, the notion that humanity has always followed a rule incorrectly is simply incoherent: how we follow it is the right way. “The point is that we all make the SAME use of it. To know its meaning is to use it in the same way as other people do. ‘In the right way’ means nothing.”This seems to entail the worrying possibil­ity that if everyone began, say, adding differently—getting “6” from “2 + 3,” for example—then that “wrong” practice would become “right”, but this concern hasn’t followed the argument all the way out.

If we see this “new” way as maintaining the same rule of addition we have always used, then it isn’t new at all. If no one (except a few cranks) judges a change to have occurred then we have no ground to say that a change
has occurred. It isn’t so much that our notion of green may turn out to be grue as that, if we all “change” from green to grue without noticing it then no change has taken place—and scare quotes proliferate. If a tree changes color in the forest and no one realizes it, then who exactly is claiming that it changed? We imagine God sadly shaking his head at our chromatic apos­tasy, but the only way for this picture have an effect would be for Him to make His displeasure known—which would mean, in turn, that someone did notice. Alluding to the most famous modern discussion of skepticism, Wittgenstein asks:

“is no demon deceiving us at present? Well, if he is, it doesn’t matter. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.”

A deception, carried out perfectly, becomes truth.

Maybe there is a post-modern argument to be made that these social or historical factors shouldn't be ignored as much as they are (that said, historical analysis of mathematical concepts seems quite common in mathematics books I've read). But we aren't fixing anything with its own axioms, we are studying what happens, given we provisionally accept some axioms. This to me seems like a distinct difference. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not just a matter of avoiding fixing our axioms.
Axiomization itself, and the propositional logic it is grounded in, are deconstructed by writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger and Deleuze.

Then, finally, a huge swath of the public did start taking their critiques seriously, but it tended to largely be the far-right of the political spectrum who did this. "Who funds this research? Who stands to gain financially? What are the power relations in the field? What are the socio-historical factors influencing theory?"

These finally became areas of core focus, but ironically the goal of the critiques became things like denying climate change and denying that vaccines were beneficial. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The only thing the far right took seriously from pomo critiques of science was the fact that they were questioning science. They never had the slightest understanding of exactly what pomo was questioning about science, and so didn’t realize that pomo was not so much interested in rejecting the value or legitimacy of established scientific assertions, but instead wanted to bring to light its unexamined presuppositions so that it could be dethroned from its authoritarian pedestal. The far right, by contrast , maintains science on a pedestal of extreme authority, and specifically rejects scientific conclusions when they are derived using methods that are too ‘relativistic’ for the right, such as climate science.

Many have gotten the idea that the far right in the U.S. believes truth is something made up, and they blame pomo for this. But it is one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. I've heard it said the right is living in a post-truth world. My response is that one could not fond a find a group of people more wedded to a doctrinaire and almost fundamentalist concept of truth.Talk about facts of the matter. The Trumpian right fetishizes and reifies facts with a religious zeal. Unfortunately they reduce scientific facts to simple causal relations. They tend to be metaphysical, or naive, realists about both ethical and objective truth.

It is this Ayn Randian mentality toward rationality that makes them unable to appreciate ambiguities and complexities of the sort that crop up in climate change and covid science. The continual on-the -fly adjustments in medical recommendations in response to new study results over the course of the pandemic do not fit the simplistic image many Trump conservatives have of how science was supposed to operate. Their thinking about science has on the whole not progressed beyond a Baconian hypothetico-inductive methodology. As a result, they lost faith faith in the veracity of what they were being told.

How does one organize previous interactions? Surely, it's only an image, memory or concept of them that can be organized - presumably for reference. Organize, how? Form a mental model? Classify as to type? How does this process differ from describing the interactions themselves and deducing natural laws? — Vera Mont

A cognitive organization , as a living system, exists by functioning , and it functions by continually making changes in itself, prior to volition. This self-changing process leads to the disintegration of the cognitive system (or organism) if it doesn’t manage to maintain a relative normative consistency throughout these changes. Notice I am not making a distinction between change from within and change from without. The cognitive organization has no pure interior; it is radically outside of itself , always already in the midst of its world. What we call knowledge of the world is the system’s successful accommodation to the unique aspects of new experience such that it can assimilate such experience within its normative schematics. This is what happens when a theory successfully predicts observed phenomena. Our world always appears ‘lawful’ to the extent that perceived events can be placed within a network of referential relations.

. In my dictionary, a "presupposition" is
a thing tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action
i.e. that which has not yet been observed and analyzed — Vera Mont

There must always be pre-existing cognitive structure to organize what is perceived. With each actual perception, such structure is both invoked and altered by what is perceived. Accommodation from scheme to world accompanies each assimilation from world to scheme. But because this modifying of of scheme by world need to allow for a relative ongoing stability of meaning, the presuppositions we bring to every encounter with things remain fairly consistent for long period of time. Kuhn described this relative ongoing consistency of presuppositions in terms of normal science , and the significant alteration of presuppositions in terms of revolutionary science, or paradigm shifts.

↪Tom Storm I suspect that postmodernists talking about mathematics woudl be a dime a dozen. Google supports this.

But a mathematician talking about post modernism... that might be interesting. — Banno

As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.

This leads me to think that social constructivism/constructionism is not necessarily postmodern in the philosophical sense, even if these distinct approaches are lumped together in the popular imagination.

EDIT: And note that the theory discussed in that paper is based on the social construction theory of John Searle, not usually regarded as a postmodernist. — Jamal

One could examine social constructionisms along a realist-relativist dimension, with Searle being a realist and writers like Ken Gergen identifying themselves as postmodernist relativists.

Are they merely descriptions, or are they presuppositions concerning what things are and how they behave?
— Joshs

You can't pre-suppose the world. Maybe a creator god can, but humans are in and of the world. They can't suppose anything that they don't already know something about — Vera Mont

I wasn’t suggesting we pulled these presuppositions out of our butts. Presuppositions are the products of human-world interactions. They are guides to future interactions based on ways of organizing previous interactions, and subject to change as the way we modify our environment by interacting with it feeds back into these presuppositions.

The "laws of nature" are just descriptions of how things behave.

Perhaps you meant to ask why things behave the way they do, or why their behaviour is consistent? — Michael

Are they merely descriptions, or are they presuppositions concerning what things are and how they behave?

I would reflect on the Bodily feeling presently "occurring" or released (?) during what one might interpret as anger or as hatred. Presumably, both would be felt as, for lack of a better word, "unpleasant," subject to possible varying degrees or subtle undectable differences (if any. maybe degree of unpleasantness is the only difference) — ENOAH

The distinction between somatic feeling and cognition harks back to a long-standing Western tradition. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

I dont agree with this split between feeling and thinking. Pleasantness and unpleasantness are not just meaningless bodily sensations that happen to get tied to different experiences via conditioning. They are better understood in terms of enhancement to or interruptions of goal-directed thought. We are sense-making creatures who attempt to anticipate and assimilate strange new events via familiar schemes of meaning. We strive to make the world meaningfully recognizable and relevant to our purposeful activities, and pleasantness-unpleasantness are meanings that express our relative success or failure in making sense of things. Anxiety, guilt, fear and anger result from our finding ourselves in situations that threaten to plunge us into the chaos and confusion of incomprehension.

. The deflationary theories of truth that came out of undecidablity, incompleteness, and undefinablity seem in the same wheelhouse (more an inspiration for POMO, or ammunition for it, than possible targets) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not necessarily. After all, Gödel, the originator of the incompleteness theorems, was guided by his self-declared mathematical Platonism, the belief that humanly-created formal systems are ‘undecidable' only in being incomplete approximations of absolute mathematical truths. Husserl’s phenomenology questions the philosophical naivety on which Godel's theory of the object rests.

↪Joshs Does that to you then imply that something like 1 + 1 = 2 is constructed within specific culture contexts, such that the quantity "1" is arbitrary rather than ubiquitously universal? — javra

I’m not a mathematician either, but I know that there are multiple interpretations of the status and role of the number one (and zero) , including whether it is a basis for all other numbers or whether it is derived. Some argue that the concept of 2 is more fundamental than 1. Theses disputes suggest in a subtle way the cultural basis of concepts of number.

They may question whether mathematical concepts truly represent universal truths or if they are constructed within specific cultural contexts.
— Tom Storm

struck me as inherently plausible as a PM position, but inherently implausible as a serious position per se. Im not sure how it could be argued that natural numbers, for instance, are culture-bound as a concept. — AmadeusD

The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl analyzed the historical origin of numeration in terms of the construction of the concept of the unit. Number doesn’t just appear to humans ready-made as a product of nature. It requires a process of abstraction. First one has to recognize a multiplicity, and then ignore everything about the elements that belong to the collectivity except its role as an empty unit. Enumeration, as an empty ' how much', abstracts away all considerations that pertain to the nature of the substrate of the counting. Enumeration represents what Husserl calls a free ideality, the manipulation of symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification.
So rather than a perception of things in the world, counting requires turning away from the meaningful content of things in the world. The world is not made of numbers, the way we construct our perceptual interaction with the world produces the concept of number, and this construction emerged out of cultural needs and purposes , such as the desire to keep track objects of value.

↪Joshs
So what would Thompson consider to be the difference between his valid thematic and Augustine’s valid approach? It can’t simply be that they contradict each other, since everything exists in a state of contradiction with respect to everything else.

He might say that Augustine’s self-contradicting thematic approach unfolds more slowly and ploddingly than his own, and he prefers approaches that transgress into new territory more aggressively since they bring him pleasure and a richer sense of meaning. We could say Thompson swaps out the ethical notions of refutation , truth and falsity for fast vs slow speeds of transformation.

Again, he might say it, but he'd have no justification for it. For it would be equally valid to say that it is Augustine's approach that unfolds more quickly and with more agility than Thompson's, traversing greater depths of creative space. But presumably, in choosing to advance his interpretation, and in choosing to label it "pragmatism," Thompson does not think his speculations are simply equally pragmatic and unpragmatic, worthwhile and not worthwhile, when compared to all other possibilities. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t think he wants to justify it, not as a trans-historical absolute. All preferences , for the large over the small, the faster over the slower, the more pragmatic over the less pragmatic, the more worthwhile over the less worthwhile, produce differentiations made intelligible with reference to a specified content , a sense of meaning. Thompson isn’t assuming that content is absolute. On the contrary, such preferences only maintain their stable sense within a given cultural context. So within Augustine’s cultural context it would make sense to say that his approach unfolds more quickly and with more agility than Thompson's, traversing greater depths of creative space.

This what Thompson means when he says

We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

He doesn’t mean that we navigate among these domains from some neutral vantage beyond them all, but by being shaped and changed in the interactions within and among them.

Anger is a manifestation of our own failure to find a more productive expression, one which solves the problem. The problem is, the proximate cause is not always the only - or the real - problem — Pantagruel

I think I agree, but I would add that it is not the expression of anger which is the biggest problem today in our polarized world, but the failure to see the world from the perspective of others such that what appears as malevant intent can be seen instead as the other’s best effort to live ethically based on their vantage. Anger is blame, and blame impugns intent, delegitimizing the other’s motives. Whether we express our anger or not , as long as we cling to blame, we delegitimize the other, as seen in today’s political discourse.

The point is, you can't reduce anger to a logically valid behaviouristic framework. Human interactions are "overdetermined" to use psychiatric jargon — Pantagruel

Yes, but overdetermined by what? The litany of aggravating events that pile up over the course of the day are not stored in some internal ‘anger pot’ as the accumulation of a random collection of negative energy, they are interpreted in terms of how they impact our ability to make sense of our world , how we are valued by others and how we value ourselves. Emotions are not expressions of assessment thought in terms of formal logic or rationality , but of our relative success or failure at maintaining a normative equilibrium, an ability to keep our world recognizable, coherent and anticipatable. This we share with all animals.

Our emotional health depends on our sense of control and agency, and everything that happens to us in the course of a day puts that equanimity to the test. Whereas a single disappointing or angering incident may be not threaten our confidence or self-esteem, a multitude of such events , especially by people we consider friends, may plunge us into self-doubt and magnify our anger.