Prim yet Improper.

Praying Mantis

As we old farts attempt to dwell merrily in a Post Irony Condition - otherwise known as Wallace's search for useful narratives that are neither abject snowflakeism, Starbucks didgeridoo-libtardism or unchecked, self-aggrandizing fanaticism in beaky caps masquerading as an "enlarging" cause but is, in fact, a narrow, sentimental, and ultimately "pathetic" form of bondage to a chosen self-image - let's attempt to pour scorn on Cynicism and the Cynics. Mind you, perhaps I'm a little too touched by my own experience as a callow youth in what many might have considered a Remand Home. I fondly remember a week long lecture from the pulpits advising the student body to beware of cynics, cynicism, insubordination, Bolshevik attitude, dumb insolence, it was quite a long list with no mention of Socrates, and as a paid up member of the back row, it was a week I thoroughly enjoyed. Any large language model, and pretty much every dictionary will tell you that there are two kinds of cynic which apparently mean  different things. The word cynic comes from a Greek word that means dog-like, so think about that before patting yourself on the back. The ancient word Cynic belonged to a school of philosophy that was founded around 400 BC. Good to know that Schopenhauer, an admirer of Poodles who once threw a seamstress down stairs which resulted in a judgement against him which directed him to pay her a quarterly pension for the rest of her life, may have fitted in very well with the ancient cynics, who took joy from publicly flaunting convention, engaging in improper acts, and were all together very outspoken. Yet in their rejection of conventions Ancient Cynics chose an asceticism that believed in self-sufficiency, simplicity on the understanding that true happiness lay in freeing oneself from worldly concerns, they eschewed wealth, fame, social status, comfortable housing and stuff generally. The other meaning of cynic from Webster's Dictionary goes like this :  "..a person who distrusts human nature and believes people are motivated solely by self-interest, often expressing this with scorn or sneering. They are skeptical of altruistic motives, questioning the sincerity or goodness of others' actions and expressing this through negativity and fault-finding." Webster's definition of cynic makes an excellent description of what dumb insolence might look like to the frail. Baxter and I are still inclined to suspect that the opposite of cynic is "idealist" : "One guided by ideals especially one that places ideals before practical considerations," or "an adherent of a philosophical theory of idealism." Idealism as a philosophy claims that ultimate reality is mental, it exists above and beyond a materialist's material world. A manifestation of Schopenhauer's Will, as opposed to Hume's empiricism or Marx's materialism. "What do you want? Give me a washing machine, a mule and Pork Chop! A shotgun sound and away I ran." As a potential narrative for Post Irony this abuse of the Bob Dylan line leaves plenty of room for good old fashioned pre-late stage postmodern irony, a whole world of healthy cynicism and a puerile skepticism, sounds about right to this end of the keyboard.

Schopenhauer as an inspiration to us all.

Late Blooming Chicory

What does "objective love" mean? If your time here on earth was at any time informed by Arthur Schopenhauer you'd have heard that human emotions are a manifestation of the central and never ending, totally irrational, pretty much random, restless driving force that underlies all of reality. Arthur called this force Will.  Here manifestation means to make tangible and all of reality means everything in the universe. If the Will, for Arthur, is the underlying force, the reality, then the  world as an Appearance of the Will, or the world as a Representation of the Will, is the universe of everything that we experience through our senses which are then parsed by our collection of irrational and wholly unreliable emotions.  Arthur would have placed religion in the category of Representation, it was an Appearance, a manifestation of the Will as interpreted by our fickle, capricious, inconstant emotions which for Arthur was essentially a mechanism of suffering. To reach for the title of a pamphlet Lenin wrote about his own ambitions, his classically human desire to rule the world was summarized thus: "What is to be done?" Unlike Lenin, Schopenhauer had options rather than a series of scientifically supported solutions to the permanence and inevitability of interminable suffering. Arthur gave us people three basic drives which in people are internal tensions that lurk and become urgent needs which are sometimes thought of as motivational forces which compel us to satisfy needs that include biological drives, psychological drives and social drives, and here worth remembering that for Arthur, reality as interpreted by our emotions, was just one nightmare followed by another. Anyway, Arthur's first drive is Egoism, this most prevalent of drives is all about me and how much more important and deserving I am than anyone else. The second drive Arthur boldly decided is less common, or is supposed to be less common, it's what Arthur thinks of as malicious and negative. Of course some of us are prone to it especially around elections time, and yes it's when you wish that horrible things and terrible suffering would happen to other people. The third drive is compassion, an ability, nay a desire, to see beyond your own ego or maliciousness and recognize the inevitable suffering of others. Somewhere in this third drive, Arthur sensed the beginnings of an understanding that could lead to a shared and cooperating social concord. He might have been the Franklin Roosevelt of his day, instead he searched for an escape from the torment of emotions, their insistence on interpreting an irrational Will and as a result driving us, without our consent toward greater and greater follies. Arthur's solution was two fold. We could seek temporary relief in the aesthetics of this or that art form. The ballet, opera, getting bombed out of our skulls at an Eisteddfod or a Pink Floyd concert. Or we could find a permanent solution, a salvation in an asceticism that ignores all desires, dreams, human relationships, does away with the will-to-live and finds inner peace and harmony far away from the endless cycles of misery that would otherwise be cast upon us. So, let's not get too cute but objective love for Arthur might well have been surrendering to a callous and unloving reality by giving up on the will-to-live, not suicide, but Schopenhauer's Will, the irrational and restless force that is reality manifest through our emotions. And there we go, Borges "fiction as metaphysics." Joyce's submission to life through Molly Bloom's "Yes, Yes, Yes...." David Wallace's fruitless search for a comfortable narrative to replace the cynicism the poor chap perceived in late stage postmodern irony.

Late stage Irony Wallace and Schopenhauer

Blue Convolvulus or Bindweed

 OK lets agree that in his understanding of Post Irony, David Foster Wallace was of the opinion that in it's maturing phase postmodernism had turned irony into an end in itself, it had become a cynicism (in the modern sense of cynicism not the Diogenes of Synope's meaning) a cynicism masquerading as irony and as such it had sort of got stuck with an assumption that authenticity, truth and commitment where just very uncool. He argued that by the 1980's it had got to the point where any suggestion of authenticity, truth or commitment received a sneer, a rolled eye, a cruel laugh and all those classic back row reactions which some of us took solace from and still do. Baxter and I do have to say that while we both love this Post Irony stuff, and we are inclined toward the idea that Wallace's call for new and positive "guiding narratives for ourselves and our communities even while remaining mindful that any narrative is not altogether true or universal" is a sad marriage between abject snowflakeism and Starbucks didgeridoo-libtardism. However Baxter and I are right there when it comes to a general desire to engage with a narrative that avoids elitism, sentimentality, whimpering and whingeing. There's a suggestion that Our new Comrade David Wallace's critique of a white nationalist narrative would include the following wonderful words, "unchecked, self-aggrandizing fanaticism - dangerous attachment masquerading as an "enlarging" cause but is, in fact, a narrow, sentimental, and ultimately "pathetic" form of bondage to a chosen self-image." How beautiful, not at all ironic, but let's just say if you were a believer in white nationalism it might be deemed cynicism. Oh that he had lived to conjure a string of pearls for a critique of Christian White Nationalism. Our other friend Arthur Schopenhauer, if you asked him to give thought to a new and positive guiding narrative he would have laughed, or he might have laughed, more likely he'd have directed one of his Poodles to bite you in the leg, because Arthur Schopenhauer was anti-narrative philosopher. He didn't look at the world and ask: How can I be happy? Nirvana for him was Nothingness, an acceptance of the vanity of existence, understanding that the will was restless and born to suffer, no narrative or belief could stop that, so the rational answer to the human condition was stop dreaming and stop believing. Safe to say Schopenhauer had little faith in an objective love, and David Wallace couldn't find one.

George Luis Borges' metaphysics, David Foster Wallace's Post Irony and Joyce's Ulysses

 

Purple Passion Flower Vine

If the back row can take this seriously and stop rolling their eyes I'll remind you that Borges took much of his metaphysics from Schopenhauer. A précis of Schopenhauer's work suggests: "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." Beware of what Schopenhauer understood by Will and by Creative Imagination, if you don't know, don't pretend you do. Borges's own thoughts on the subject included the idea that "Fiction is Metaphysics." Then, yesterday, we briefly played, ironically, with this understanding of metaphysics using the Modernist James Joyce's Ulysses, until overwhelmed by our own genius, Baxter and I sunk into a deep ennui with ill-temper that required lunch and a lie-down, which, according to Schopenhauer, genius is inevitably prone to. Our question this morning goes this way: "Does whatever comes after Postmodernism in the West, treat Plato and Immanuel Kant with respect, will these two giants of metaphysics become an example of really boring, soon forgotten and passionless or will they keep their place as tedious collectibles in one or other of the many Ivory Boarding Houses that does the laundry, serves breakfast, interesting lunches and dinner so no one has to think for themselves?" OK, as fans of Post Irony, what Baxter and I really need is for Kant to offer us an endless Critique of Postmodernism, then we might get a better understanding of this awful accusation that Postmodernism resulted in an all pervading cynicism where a buffoonish, snow-flaky understanding of authenticity defined as "genuine feelings and human connections" are impossible. Oh diddums, that's inches away from saying what we need is a good war.  Ask Baxter, try being on the receiving end of a radical Spleen's theosophical invective. Here we go, my good friend's still waiting for the Spleen's Jesus or maybe his Buddha to send him a manual. So let's just hold fast to the Chariot Theory of God and Men and assume an Almighty is an inevitable gathering place for Ideal Forms. Anyway, David Foster Wallace, was born in 1962, he was a depressed person, he threw coffee tables at his girlfriend, that sort of thing, he hanged himself in 2008 when he was 46. His critique of Postmodernism goes something like this: he reckoned the Postmodernism of the 1950's and 1960's used irony as a tool of rebellion. Good Lord! Beatniks, hippies, sex, drugs, rock and roll, pluralism, social safety nets, national health, unemployment benefits, mixed marriages, irony from the children of Franklin Roosevelt and Ernest Bevin. But on it went, in 1970's postmodernism, according to David Foster Wallace, who would have been a teenager at the time, became a fashionable cave, it was hip, it was super cool, people learned to love it, which resulted in a pervasive cynicism. David wanted a return to his ill-considered understanding of authenticity, he was a teacher looking for enthusiasm perhaps, maybe the back row really pissed him off and his solution to the cynicism he saw being promulgated by the cave of postmodernist irony was this new human condition referred to as Post Irony. The simpler answer might be to remain an existentialist by not parking the boat in a harbor of convictions that demands an enemy for an anchor. But there again we have the very ancient Chariot Theory of God and Men, a demand that experience precedes essence as well as an understanding of authenticity that suggests that like cats we people make our own meaning, so get over it. David Foster, who might not have grasped the fundamental argument of the postmodernists, which is that we're all better off without the wriggling around and lies meta-narratives require to maintain them, was born in Ithaca New York not Ithaca Ulysses' home Island or Dublin the birthplace of James Joyce's own metaphysics. Tomorrow an unironic introduction to hypocrisy.