Nilsi

Nice video overall. The version of postmodernism you’ve presented is mostly just Derrideanism, where it’s all about deconstruction and endless reinterpretation. However, many postmodern thinkers grappled deeply with what comes after "déconstruction" and weren’t simply nihilistic academics. When Nietzsche (who, for some reason, you haven’t mentioned once throughout the entire talk) famously proclaimed the death of God—i.e., the death of grand narratives—in his 1882 work Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), this was only the beginning of what is considered his "mature works." It also marked the start of his Umwertung aller Werte ("revaluation of all values"), a project cut short by his mental deterioration. From this, we get concepts like the "Übermensch" and "Eternal Recurrence," both of which are about affirming life and embracing one’s "Will to Power"—that is, one’s own values and highest vision—despite fully accepting that there is no rational or transcendent justification for any of it. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze expanded upon Nietzsche’s ideas. To put it briefly, he developed a post-metaphysical metaphysics of absolute experience, anticipating and paralleling the teachings of your sacred cow, Peter Ralston (who, to be fair, is quite on point within his domain of thought). Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition argues for the priority of difference—distinction over identity—while Capitalism and Schizophrenia is about "deterritorialization" and "reterritorialization," which Ralston would call "opening" and "grounding." Deleuze’s unfinished work, Immanence: A Life, written shortly before his tragic suicide, centers on the singularity of "a life." This contrasts with your favored Heideggerians, Derrida, and Dugin, who still posit a "Sein" beyond "Dasein"—a "Being" beyond "being." For Deleuze, however, "being" is already absolute "Being." This is, of course, what the death of God signifies, which is why Nietzsche said things like, “Mankind, in its most profound self-abasement, in its most profound self-alienation, has dared to invent an ideal world of being in order to devalue and afflict with suspicion the only world that exists.” It would have been nice if you had actually engaged with the thinkers and ideas behind postmodernism more deeply. We could have had a much more profound and nuanced discussion on postmodernism and made meaningful contributions to the discourse. As it stands, your presentation is just a collection of loosely connected ideas that you’ve appropriated for your own purposes (whatever they may be). Fair enough, but don’t expect any serious intellectual to give you too much applause for what you’ve done here.

The issue is that he overgeneralizes complex philosophical ideas and thinkers to fit his own narrative. I recall an interview where Wilber mentioned reading two to three books in the morning to gather material for his work. He was specifically searching for certain patterns in these works and selectively used them to confirm his biases. My main issue is the know-it-all attitude with which he then presents these ideas, as if skimming a few books or reading the glossary of a deep thinker’s work while having breakfast suddenly makes him an authority on the subject.

I wonder what you make of Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism," which is precisely about finding the conditions of real experience not in some vulgar British way of distrusting intuition, or in some rationalist a priori concepts, but in the immanent process of becoming and difference itself; or to speak with Nietzsche: "The fundamental fact of human will, its horror vacui, compels it to seek, invent, and become - life itself is will to power, and nothing besides."

I'm not sure what to make of this question, but I guess you want me to acknowledge some spiritual truths. So, I'll just say that I have, of course, experienced myself as a singular being, with my experience being total, and so on. However, I don't see that as a more real or desirable experience than my day-to-day life, where I experience myself as a human among other humans on a little blue dot in a vast, unexplored universe, and so on and so forth. And it's not that I doubt or react against those spiritual experiences. It's just that, to bring it back to the beginning of this discussion, I'd rather forget about it because I don't want to spoil the sacredness of human life with something as vulgar as spirituality.

Yes! Deleuze has developed this quite rigorously in his metaphysical magnum opus Difference and Repetition. I'll leave you with a few of his quotes: Maybe we European academics aren't as "clueless" as you might like to think.

Also, just to set this straight, and here I want to be very clear: I'm not interested in awakening or spirituality. That doesn't mean I don't understand these things or haven't experienced these aspects of reality, and it doesn't mean I'm epistemically and metaphysically naive. It's just that I'm fundamentally humanistically oriented, and that's the value I can provide - if you take me seriously and make an effort to understand what I'm trying to say. Which doesn't mean that I'm not also blowing smoke up my own ass sometimes or intellectually overextending a bit.

I'm obviously describing experience. It's not like I just pull this stuff out of my ass or regurgitate some hearsay. I’m very academically inclined, so I make use of this language to describe nuanced aspects of reality and my lived experience of it. That’s just my personal bias, and you don’t have to share it, but dismissing me as some neurotic intellectual shows me that you’re not making the effort to actually engage with what I’m trying to communicate or read between the lines.

I disagree. It is precisely in "forgetting" that reality can unfold. If everything were remembered, reality would be completely passive and static. It needs this irrational moment of forgetting to experience itself and to make space for remembrance, which is never complete but perpetually fleeting.

What you are describing are exactly the consequences of a "free market economy." Isn't it obvious that these government institutions are completely corrupted by the logic of capitalism? The economy doesn't fail because it has enslaved all other social institutions, making them so dependent on its survival that they will do anything to protect the capitalist imperative.

That is the greatest gift. It is precisely in impermanence that life becomes meaningful. Think about the last time you were at an amazing party with your friends, dancing, music blasting, maybe some drugs in the mix. I claim it was precisely your unconscious awareness of the transience of that moment that allowed you to feel truly free and ecstatic. This reminds me of the old joke about a guy who walks into a coffee shop and orders coffee without cream. The barista replies, "Sorry, we don’t have cream, but I can give you coffee without milk." Even though it’s empirically the same black coffee, on an even deeper level, it’s not. The same applies to life and death. You might think your experience of life would be the same whether you were immortal or would eventually die, but I argue that it’s precisely the transitory absence of death that makes life meaningful in the first place.

That's like saying, "The early heroin dosages were pretty good, you know, before all the nasty repercussions of being addicted to hard drugs."

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could probably write a whole book on the scheming going on in mainstream Islam, just based on personal interactions. Today, an acquaintance talked about how some drug dealer friends justify their criminal activities as part of their jihad, since they only sell to non-believers and thus righteously punish them in the name of Allah by reinforcing their addictions. So supposedly, it really is an act of the highest morality. Of course, deception and aggression are totally haram, but if your hoca, representing the Big Other in this case, says no, you just go to the next guy until you find someone who will tell you what you want to hear, giving you plausible deniability - "the guy said I can do it, so I'm good." This postmodern Islam seems ubiquitous, with few "true believers." It's exactly what Žižek calls "interpassivity" (as opposed to interactivity) - an implicit agreement to maintain the facade of belief, even though everyone knows it's bullshit and that everyone else knows it too. But of course, this can never be made explicit, or else that whole social structure would collapse. To be extra heretical: their "God" is as real as Santa Claus. You know that Christmas ritual where the parents know it's bullshit but pretend for the sake of the kids, and the kids know it's bullshit but pretend for the sake of the parents - and that's precisely how the tradition is kept alive. All that being said, I still much prefer this over some fundamentalist who unironically believes all of it.

Obviously, the world is insanely complex, and there are many counter-intuitive ways to influence systems. The famous “Tank Man” from Tiananmen Square was arguably more influential in shaping Chinese history than most high-level CCP politicians of that time could have dreamed of, even though he was totally anonymous and likely „just“ a regular working-class man. Since you’re specifically referring to jobs, the answer would probably be leaders in socially relevant fields like economics, law, education, science, or the media, to name a few. Given the postmodern capitalist hellhole we live in, where every “real” value can be liquidated by money - or, to speak with Baudrillard, where everything is mere appearance, and the image becomes the almighty tyrant over the real, the general wisdom that the closer you are to money, the more of it you can accumulate - with money being virtually synonymous with power - likely holds true. And something like a senior partner in private equity is probably the ultimate master of this "Flatland." Sam Altman’s statement that “compute is the currency of the future” seems relevant and sensible in this context as well. Just look at him or people like Zuck; they are probably some of the most powerful individuals in the world.

Yeah, especially in mainstream Islam, it is considered heretical to discuss the immanent aspects of God. I have many Muslim friends, and this is always a big point of contention in our discussions.

Ken Wilber's oeuvre is a tour de force of spiritual writing, offering much to appreciate if you're inclined toward such topics. His earlier works - The Spectrum of Consciousness, The Atman Project, Up From Eden, and to some extent his magnum opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - are particularly gripping. In these, Wilber's spiritual sincerity and his desire to make sense of reality are at their most urgent as he's trying to reconcile his personal experiences and convictions within the context of humanity’s great philosophical and scientific heritage. The greatest strength of Wilber's work - its vast scope, weaving together a monumental array of materials to map out the "always already true" spiritual nature of reality - is also its greatest weakness. Profound ideas and thinkers in their own right are systematically simplified and, arguably, appropriated to support what Wilber already believes to be true and wishes to conclude anyways. This is not an academic work, nor is it political, and it’s precisely where it tries to be these things that it lands flat on its feet. However, if you're looking for a comprehensive roadmap to spirituality and don't mind dense intellectual writing, there's much to enjoy here.

“If you’re in a dream at night and there are thousands of people starving, there are two ways you can stop their hunger. One is that, in the dream, you can try to feed them all, but the second is you can wake up, and that will end their suffering immediately. But they’re both right; they’re both true.“ This is Ken Wilber at his best. I have no issue with idealism and spirituality. I’ve had my fair share of „awakening“ experiences over the years, and I’m not going to deny their reality. But it’s refreshing to see someone acknowledge the irreducible value and reality of life, rather than just programmatically sticking to the spiritual side of the debate (although, as a good Nietzschean, I must, of course, be just as ride-or-die with life as you idealists are with spirituality).

The quote also incidentally reminds me of this Charli XCX song, which fades out with the lyrics, "Fall in love again and again," repeated ad absurdum, evoking a sense of repetition compulsion, and highlighting the inseparability of love and death (drive).

Sunny in the sauna surrounded by light, L’Hotel, Paris [2008] - Nan Goldin

Yes, and decades later, he delivered the most intelligent and poignant critique of Wilber. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve shared this interview here over the years, but it remains as fresh and relevant as ever.

This is INSANE! [starts at 01:23]

"I would love to know¹ that we can fall in love again, and again, and again..." ¹ This could also be interpreted as a paronym of "Noé," similar to how the director's name, Gaspar Noé, is pronounced in English.

Exactly, which is why he’s the ultimate postmodern politician. If it served his agenda, he’d be championing LGBTQ+ rights and global warming tomorrow without batting an eye. Calling him „orange“ is absurd; the only orange thing about him is the tone his shitty self-tanner gives him. He doesn’t believe in universal ideals like rationality or liberalism. The only thing he believes in is power, the most slippery and relativistic force there is.

Why are you even fixated on these ideas? That’s what I want to know. Why is a "lack of emotional reaction" somehow more real to you? And why do you assume that "peeling back layers" will get you closer to some "truth"? I’m not trying to argue either way here. My point is that you're lost in ideology, and that’s the real attachment. The core ideology - this rational conception of metaphysics - still clings to your idea of idealism being more "true" than materialism. So, the attachment hasn’t really "died" at all. It’s like the creature in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979): “The ultimate horror of the alien is not just that it is an indestructible, horrific being, but that even when you kill it, it somehow persists. It is the pure embodiment of drive, the Lacanian lamella - an entity that cannot be eradicated because it embodies a life that is beyond life and death, a ‘living dead’ that continues to haunt even after its apparent destruction.” - Slavoj Zizek