“Outing the It That Thinks: The Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem”, 2011-11-16 (; backlinks):
…The way I saw myself [as having free will] up to the age of 14, the age my mother made the mistake of buying me an old manual typewriter at a local yard sale…And at one point, I typed the following: Everything has a cause. / A → B → C / A = outer event / B = inner event / C = this very thought now! ! ! ! ! !
I had stumbled across determinism. The insight had the character of a religious revelation for me, quite literally. I even wept, realizing not only that everything I had been taught was a lie, but that I was myself a kind of lie. I was an illusion weeping at my own illusoriness. How f—ked up was that? Whenever I got high alone, I would listen to Pink Floyd or some-such and just sit staring at my experience, trying to will my way through it, or daring it to show its paltry hand. I became a kind of naive nihilist, blowing away my buddies and alienating all the babes at parties with my arguments against the freedom of will. I would always finish the same way, swinging my arms wide and saying, “It’s all bulls—t. All of it. It can’t be and yet it is. Bulls—t, through and through!”
…Later, while at University, I read Heidegger’s Being and Time in an effort to understand deconstruction and Derrida, whom I thought just had to be wrong, whatever it was the crazy bastard was saying. This would be my second religious revelation, one that would ultimately lead to my disastrous tenure as a Branch Derridean. The facticity of my thrownness made a deep impression on me.
…It would be a poker game, of all absurdities, that would bring this absurdity to light for me. At this particular game, which took place before the hysterical popularity of Texas Hold’em, I met a philosophy PhD student from Mississippi who was also an avowed nihilist. Given my own heathen, positivistic past, I took it upon myself to convert the poor fool. He was just an adolescent, after all—time to set aside childish thoughts! So I launched into an account of my own sorry history and how I had been saved by Heidegger and the ontological difference.
The nihilist listened to me carefully, interrupting only to clarify this or that point with astute questions. Then, after I had more or less burned through my batteries, the nihilist asked, “You agree that science clearly implies nihilism, right?”
“Of course.”
“Well… it’s kind of inconsistent, isn’t it?”
“What’s inconsistent?”
A thoughtful bulge of the bottom lip. “Well, that despite the fact that philosophy hasn’t resolved any matter with any reliability ever, and, despite the fact that science is the most powerful, reliable, theoretical claim-making institution in human history, you’re still willing to suspend your commitment to scientific implications on the basis of prior commitments to philosophical claims about science and this… ontological difference.”
Tortured syntax aside, I understood exactly what the nihilist meant: Why believe Heidegger when you could argue almost anything in philosophy? I had read enough by now to know this was the only sure thing in the humanities. It was an uncomfortable fact: outside the natural sciences there was no way short of exhaustion or conspiracy to end the regress of interpretation.
Nevertheless, I found myself resenting that bottom lip.
“I don’t follow.”
“Well”, the nihilist said, making one of those pained correct-me-if-I’m-wrong faces, “isn’t that kind of like using Ted Bundy’s testimony to convict Mother Theresa?”
“Um”, I replied, my voice pinched in please-no resignation… “I guess?”
So, back to the “Bulls—t” it was.
I should have known.