"The impossible quest for that ersatz authenticity is wearing us down. In the absence of sustaining, reciprocal, non-schematized relations with others, however, the self, as the Invisible Committee asserts, begins to break down: “The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get.” Even though consumerism reifies and exalts individuality, it is ultimately self-annihilating. Rather than losing ourselves in the flow of socially meaningful and useful activity, we are congealed in the aspic of our stultifying self-consciousness, replaying strategies of competitive selfhood, disguising ploys for attention as disinterested solicitude. The ceaseless cynicism is corrosive."

via @namhenderson

via pruned, think i read this for kelsch

There is certainly more than one way of winning an argument, but there's just one way of knowing: the empirical way. If there's a way of knowing something about meaning — including whether measuring meaning threatens meaning — that's the way. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of meaning. But there is more than a little something wrong in blind pursuits when the means to enlightenment are at hand.

[it must be very easy, being sure and right all the time. i suppose the reason i cannot be a libertarian like will is that i am neither sure nor right all the time.]

In postmodernity properly understood, one can discern both the extraordinary technological progess science has achieved and its utter failure to capture the full and true nature of man. Likewise, it can understand that what typically passes for a postmodern response to modernity is only its unwitting continuation, hyperbolically tracing its impoverished account of both reason and nature to often comic conclusions.

I heartily recommend Terry Eagleton's recent lectures at Yale on Christianity and philosophy.

I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.