"HERE is but one truly serious philosophical problem", writes Albert Camus in one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century, The Myth of Sisyphus, "and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest— whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect."
I first read these very first paragraphs when I was 16 or 17 — I discovered the book on my father's immense bookshelf. Within the first pages, Camus referenced people with strange-sounding names like Schopenhauer and Jaspers, or even Nietzsche. There was something oddly compelling and profound in these pages, and it led me to my first philosophical excursions in life. I don’t know why my father had all the works from Camus and Sartre, but I read them all. Maybe it was because I had played games with him when I was even younger, during which he, after coming home from his doctor’s office in the evening, would instruct me to grab any book from his library — while he sat in his study next to it — and to choose any page, any paragraph, and read it aloud. He would then tell me which book it was and roughly on which side that paragraph could be found. He would then continue to explain the text to me.
This was deep into the '80s, a world pre-Internet. Reagan was the U.S. President, the Challenger had just exploded, and German school education still retained some remnants of a Prussian ideal. Some of my friends would still have to balance a book on their head while eating (to keep their backs straight), while others, later in university, would join certain brotherhoods — Schlagende Verbindung — and bear scars for life (a scar would mean you never have to worry about financial security again, as a CEO position at Siemens or BMW was an inevitability). Say what you want about this generation, but they surely can take an insult. I mention this just to provide some historical context.
Anyway, later I discovered the whole batch of 20th-century French philosophers. Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, etc. It still boggles my mind how much intellectual firepower France produced in these years after they handed France over so easily to the Nazis, whereas Germany really only produced Sloterdijk. Maybe the French were ashamed and needed to correct the record — I guess they were successful.
Around 1995, I discovered Wilber, and his Integral Theory fell on fertile ground, already plowed and made ready by the stages theory of Timothy Leary. I was experimenting with drugs, of course, and like Dali’s egg, my bourgeois mind was broken open. It engaged me personally for a while — professionally, it still does, now that I am a publisher and writer myself. But there was a growing discontent. I felt that Wilber was an exceptional writer — very motivated, very good at selling his ideas. Maybe even the "Einstein of Consciousness" — a genius marketing move, in any case. But his treatment of the French never seemed quite fair to me.
To this day, everyone — even the last Mohicans among the Metamodernists — refers to the French and their ideas in shorthand as postmodernists (which is partly true), with nothing else in mind than 'deconstruction,' which is utterly false. That, I believe, is Wilber’s fault, as he tended to explain postmodernism and the "Green Meme" within his 800-page tomes through two or three paragraphs — I am being hyperbolic here. Usually, it’s about four paragraphs.
The French had other goals entirely, justice being one of the most important. Even if that ideal was distorted (for better or worse) over the decades into political correctness, BLM, transgender policies, and whatnot, nobody can deny the huge influence they still have today. Their ideas continue to reverberate. And if any Integral theorist wants to say something cool, they usually plunder the corpus of French philosophy from the '60s.
The problem, in my view, is that all the so-called post-postmodern writers haven’t come close to what the French wrote, in terms of literary style, form, or content. None of these books have truly engaged with French ideas, given them their proper due, or offered better solutions. The reason again lies with Wilber’s exceptional writing and the sleight of hand he performed, which made everyone believe he was doing philosophy or psychology (or a hybrid of both), while the simple truth is that, from a historical and literary perspective, it’s hermeneutic spirituality. I don’t know if he did it intentionally, but his books are rooted in the same cloth as the great British hermeneutics of the 19th century — there’s really not much difference.
I am a firm believer that each stage of development comes with its own linguistic challenges and potentials. When you take French or other postmodernists seriously, it’s no surprise, since language constructs our cognitive world-experience. With modernity, we saw the rise of rational, formal-operational language that eliminated the implicit superstitions of religious gobbledygook. With the ‘postmodern turn’, we got a new kind of philosophical literature: ideosynkratic, experimental, poetic, brutal, honest, subjective and fascinating. It was that the shakles of modern ways of thinking where torn apart, and we could think in new way.
There is no such thing yet to be found in integral oder metamodern literature. NOT ONE BOOK that presents itself in a new style. Quite the contrary. As many pointed out, Wilbers literature is stylistically quite modern, and the problem of course is that this is reflected in his theory, which is kind of modern theory of evolution on steroids.
There are of course the books by Alexander Bard that stylistically and content-wise go beyond what Postmodernism can offer, books that actually content with the French, but he refuses - for a good reason - to even think in this categories. “The -Isms are dead”, Bard is on record for having said.
And the reason is, and most people concerned with these issues tend to forget this, that the term ‘Postmodernism’ is still a short hand; nobody knows what postmondernism is supposed to be, really. Is it an extension of modernity that critically falls onto itself, using modern techniques?; is is a dialectic move out of modernism?; is it a completely different and independent episteme? What about modernity itself? Any good historian worth his money will tell you that “our” western modernity is only the third or fourth modernity that happend in the last 3000 years. How do you square that with that great marketing tool of the spiral of development?
Don´t get me wrong, I love these post-postmodern theories as much as the next guy. They help me to navigate my inner life exactly because these are hermeneutic books and themes and approaches. But if I want to think about life itself, I still go to Camus: Because the very good reason to live is also a very good reason to die. And only in this field of tension I can find meaning.
Check out my most recent book here: https://www.parallax-media.com/books/phenomenologyofwill
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