Great Man of Theory Theory

or, the death of the death of the author

Thesis

Anti-thesis

“Great man of history” theory is the idea that history is driven by the actions of extremely few select, specific individuals: Hitler, Caesar, Napoleon, and so on. Its created as a contrast to systems-theory where history is driven by "forces", "economics", "production" or "access to food/land/resources". Its been a pretty popular subject to discuss for the past couple hundred years, in the attempt to contextualize your own human experience of being-in-the-world after the death of God. The idea being that before that death it was just presumably “gods plan; tldr”.

The most popular version is the latter, because that's basically the underpinnings of communist or marxist historisation, eg, “relations of production”, the idea that history is the direct process of an abstract notion of “technology” and an abstract notion of the masses of humanity. And the great man theory is sort of only something articulated as a reaction to that. Since before the materialist analysis was articulated, such things were just a given. People do stuff, things happen. Before the industrial revolution there weren't a man in Europe nervous and anxious enough to cast doubt on the premise “an action has a consequence/There is no action that is an inaction”.

The basic idea here is applying this same formula to literary theory. The answer to death of the author is the Great Man of Theory Theory.

My experience of reading philosophy is very different from how philosophy or “theory” is usually being “discussed”. The conceptual framework which I think most people probably share with me, is something like: There is an author, who writes a book, about some ideas. When you read the book and talk about it later with your friends, you are talking mainly about the ideas in that book, that are separate from the author. The death of the author-theory is in fact this taken to it’s extreme: once the words leave the brain of the author and goes into the book, there ceases to be any meaningful connection between them, and what is created, the book, ought to be considered an entirely separate thing, where Ideas exist in a metaphysical state separate from humanity. In fact, we even say, the author can be wrong about what he thinks what he wrote means. “He didn’t even truly appreciate what he was creating”, we say. The Book Full of Ideas is full of ideas the author didn't even consciously know himself.

Even within the strict materialism a modern intellectual man presupposes as a matter of course, this is inconsistent, and to explain how something like that could happen without breaking the laws of thermodynamics, you have to psychologize the author and accuse him of Freudian repression: The Ideas are “in” him, but he is not conscious of them, and has repressed them, for whatever reason. And at that point, who is really writing the book? The reader is doing most of the creative legwork.

Reading in this way is what we are instructed to do in schools. It’s supposed to be a mark of intelligence and good character to be critical. We’ve talked about that before.

That’s how you're supposed to read and that’s how you're supposed to think. That’s not how I read.

My experience of reading anything is much more intimate. It is not about the ideas, so much as it is the author. The reason I read Wittgenstein and was blown away when I was 19 isn’t because the platonic ideas I came into contact with were true, but because, as he himself puts it:

or, as we say today:

My experience of reading is extremely personal. I have previously flattered myself that I was thinking about Ideas – I was flattered in university that I was good at understanding and explaining Ideas to my struggling peers. But my dirty secret was, even then, that I wasn’t “good at understanding the texts we read and explaining them”, because I was “good at understanding ideas”. That’s not really the case. I was good at it because I am good at interpreting dreams. I am good at understanding people. I was good at explaining Heidegger to my study-group, because I am lonely, and autistic, and in-my-head, and neurotic. And so was Heidegger.

I would tell myself that I obsessed over Wittgenstein because he solved all, I admitted, my problems, and I proposed that he could solve a great deal further ones, if only I made everyone else really appreciate how good of a book Tractatus was. But that’s not really true. That’s just an excuse. The truth is I read it, and I felt a human connection to the author. In understanding him, I felt understood. The kind of social affirmation that I would assume “everyone else” got from each other just by their daily lives, which somehow I was excluded from, by being too smart, or too stupid, or just weird. “finally, someone else gets it!” - what this means is, finally someone gets me.

The death of the author and it’s consequences has been a predictable disaster for humanity that follows necessarily as the natural conclusion to adopting the enlightenment/positivist/materialist metaphysics. If all things is to be judged by their weight and measurements in laboratory conditions, then the death of the author is a necessity, figuratively and literally. The killing of intellectuals in revolutions isn’t an accident. It’s a logical necessity – and woe to the revolutionary who is logically inconsistent! (How embarrassing! You’re not going to get invited to the orgy.)

What I propose is that there is something wrong in our conceptual approach to literature, that is the product of a deeper more fundamental problem in epistemology and worldview, our assumptions about very basic conceptual categories. The enlightenment ideals of the disinterested observer stand in complete opposition with my own experience of reading, and the way I truly engage with the text, is something I would think of as a dirty secret: I am actually extremely interested and deeply invested. How embarrassing.

What is Philosophy? What is “wisdom”, what is “knowledge”? The codified doctrine of modernity is scientism: wisdom is repeatable experiments in laboratory conditions. Knowledge is sterile and clean. Philosophy is “reason” - alone – and it’s really a kind a pure math, or a brother discipline to math. Truth is ideology. Everything is purely conceptual and language. If we were all brains in a vat (TM) and all of human experience was a hallucination, nothing would change about philosophy, wisdom or knowledge, because we all conduct those in the sterile controlled laboratory conditions of our minds, where they are perfect and exists entirely separate from the disgusting and dirty world.

When I read anything, I don’t read for the joy of the sterile laboratory. I don’t read for the sadistic joy of vivisection and autopsy. In fact, I have a physical reaction if I enter into a hospital. I get sick from being there. The smell of industrial detergent nauseates me, and it smells like death to me. I read for the opposite. I read because it feels like getting to know a guy intimately, in all his biological horror and all his weakness and all his flaws.

When I read mein kampf, I feel like I could have been Hitler's friend. I understand what he’s going through to some extent. And my dirty secret is, that’s not a secondary purpose to my reading. It’s the primary purpose. Because I’m lonely and weird and there are not a lot of guys like me out there for me to be friends with, and in understanding the author, I feel understood.

People (weirdos, you) read because they want to feel that human connectedness. The people reading this right now (weirdos, you) don’t read this because there is some kind of “unified egg theory of everything” that is super smart and solves all the problems. I should know. I’m the author and my life is complete dogshit. I’ve wasted ten years of my life doing nothing, and I live like a below competent 20 year old. It’s massively humiliating to me. I spent most of my time barely making life work, I’m constantly confused and anxious about everything, because I am an autistic friendless weirdo. I’m just sort of good at making puns. There is no great Egg Weltanschauung. It’s just a bunch of shit mashed together as I go.

To the degree that there is one, it’s just what we would otherwise call “my personality”. Not a separate platonic idea or system that exists separately from me. It’s just me. I’m trying to do a complicated manoeuvre here where I illustrate the point both in spelling it out autistically, “formally”, in the “normal” respectable way, but also illustrate it in the format or structure of the article, in the contrast between “sterile” boring academic language, and the “disgusting” personal or confessional, like this paragraph. You understanding me makes you feel “seen”. Which, if you want to be fancy about it, is exactly the Hegelian subject recognising itself-as-subject by recognizing the other-as-a-recognizing-subject and recognizing yourself, not in the other subject, but in the very recognition of mutual self-recognition. But that’s boring and gay. The reason my stuff works, to the degree that it works at all, is because it’s intimate.

It’s not that there is no such thing as “intellectual value”, but it’s a matter of calibrating your expectations of yourself, and of the text. Discerning primary from secondary purposes. If there WAS no such thing as intellectual value, I would still read. How’s that for a thought experiment.

The appeal of reading for me is like when someone tells you about a dream they had. Not actually the retelling of the dream, which is usually very tedious and boring. But the very specific point where you feel like they have accidentally revealed more about themselves than they thought. When they accidentally tell you something revealing and embarrassing and you suddenly feel like you know something, know too much perhaps, about them. That, except, intentional. The feeling of being trusted with something intimate and important, from someone else who understands the stakes of what’s going on.

Enlightenment philosophy is in contradiction with itself. Philosophy is the “Love of wisdom”, love of knowledge. But knowledge is love. You understanding something to the degree that you can love it. Knowledge is grokking. “knowing someone in the biblical sense” means fucking. You can’t divorce terminology from the imagery it’s made up of. Knowledge is quite simply not a sterile lab experiment. It’s dirty and wet and hairy, it’s disgusting and muddy and bloody and full of cum.

It is essentially a king of idolatry or fetishization, of the kind of terminology I’ve tried to establish here. Worshipping the signifier over the signified, valuing the paint higher than the pictured image. The worship of “reason”, the basis of enlightenment philosophy, is at it’s root, fetishization of philosophy. It’s inherently perverted. Not in a derogatory, moralizing sense, but in a clinical sense.

Towards a new History of Philosophy

The Greeks inventing philosophy was the discovery that it’s fun to hang out with your bros and get drunk, and, what my dad calls, “solve the world situation”. Talking politics. Shooting the shit. Bragging. Solving a mystery, solving a puzzle. Making lewd jokes. Saying stuff like “If I was in charge I’d [..]” and being very convinced you know everything. Slapping your chest like a monkey.

The Greeks inventing philosophy was the discovery that it’s fun to hang out with your bros and get drunk and shoot the shit. This is the real philosophy. This isn’t the “lets read the books” philosophy.

Why is Plato the first guy who leaves a written tradition? Because he is so great? No. Because he was an autist who fetishized Socrates. The pre-Socratics didn’t need to. They just got drunk and hung out with their bros. What knowledge and wisdom really is, materially, is fraternity. That’s what philosophy is supposed to be celebrating. Sophia is a boys name. The Greeks were wrong. Wisdom is a masculine entity.

The western tradition of philosophy, ending in the enlightenment ideal of the perfect “lonely guy at the top of the mountain” is the perversion of this original point in degrees over hundreds of years, until all memory of the original purpose was lost in continuous re-iteration of the same autistic cope: “actually, I didnt even want to go to that drinking party with the stupid jocks, I’m actually too smart for that”. Behold the world this has created.

The entirety of the western canon is cope. It’s autismos rationalising why they aren’t gay, actually, it’s YOU who is the gay one. It’s actually gay to have friends. It’s actually gay to get a girlfriend.

The most “philosophical” part of my life was when I was 20, and I would go drinking every couple of days with my best friend at university, and we’d just get fucking hammered on beer and vodka, play chess and smoke 40 cigarettes each. That’s what philosophy is. One evening we spent 4 hours trying to deduce how a computer worked, because we knew it was supposed to work on binary logic gates, and just sort of trying to work out way from there to “how does that generate a moving picture of tits, as we see here on the screen here?”. That’s Philosophy. We’d discuss our plans for when he seized political power and instituted a brutal dictatorship. That’s Philosophy.

To the degree that there is a “written tradition” of philosophy, it’s to the degree that there are books that can simulate this experience. All written philosophy is a primitive VR-experience: a friendship simulator.

The entire western tradition of philosophy is an elaborate act of fetishism, where you worship the shape of love and reject the substance.

You could say that this was a gradual decline and that there was a distinction in ancient Greek, and this is all just modernism, and this is all just Karl Poppers fault. And I think there is a lot of truth to that. But I don’t think Plato is innocent. I think they were wrong about Athena being a chick. And I think this relates to the “and then one day, for no reason at all, the Greeks converted to Christianity” problem. But that’s beside the point for now.

Philosophy – real philosophy – is the other side of the coin to “working on a shared task”, military discipline, meaningful work, as generating a meaningful social sphere, a genuine culture. You go out and till the fields during the day, and then you go out drinking with the boys in the evening. You do military service during the day, then you go hang out with the bros in the evening. Yin Yang. Work – Philosophy.

Reading philosophy books is an attempt to time travel back in time and have beers with a guy you like. And to a degree, it works. What is important is tempering it, and recognizing what it can and cannot be. Prioritizing time travel beers over practical, real world beers with people who are alive right now, is the root of the perversion. It’s not “bad” - it’s a little miracle. It’s a great thing. But it cannot take precedence. It cannot take priority over actually making gains in the real world. That’s where it becomes perverted.

Parasocial Relationships and ad hominems and losing face online

The idea that character judgments should be outlawed from meaningful discourse is a weird enlightenment rationalization that doesn’t make any sense even in it’s own framework. It is wrong. It is just a piece of rhetoric.

The reason the “a president I would have a beer with” is memetically resonant enough to swing an election is because it contains something eternal and true, that is obscured in modernity: which is that ideological thought is fake and true knowledge is beer-centric. True knowledge is love is fraternity is beer-centric. Is hanging out with your bros, shooting the shit. Which, like all roughhousing and play-fighting, involves that you have to lose some times. See the Jordan Peterson evolutionary psychology “animals play fight and you have to lose a game once in a while or else the other rats wont play with you any more” talking point.

In a single axiom, to explain autistic losers who don't understand why they are getting “hate” “online”:

“It doesn't matter whether what you are saying is true, it matters that you can’t take a punch.“

I would not like to have a beer with you. I was trying to have a beer with you, but you rejected my beer. You are offending me by rejecting my beer, so I am going to punch you on your shoulder.

Autistic losers, book fetishists, are people who value the simulation over the simulated, because with the book and the time travel beers, you are always in control. You never have to react. You never have to lose a fight, you never have to show your belly and your neck to the other dawgz. You never have to mingle or engage with the messy disgusting biology of love, and you can just play with the sterile, safe representations of it. There’s no meaningful difference between a internet-personality-stalker and a book fetishist. They are both stuck in the “parasocial relationship”, but like all the roads to hell, people go willingly. It’s a choice.

Plato was GAY and I could FUCK HIM. I would absolutely destroy him. I’d trash him dude.

One of the most real things you can say to another person is just something as simple as “I don’t like you”. There is a man who I knew in real life many years ago, and is now a mediocre internet grifter. There are a great many things I disagree with him about, but nothing I could ever say to him, no amount of written out logical argument would ever be as profound as just saying to him, “I think you’re a bad guy”. I would not have beers with you.

Character judgments matter, because thought and ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in a biology, in your blood and in your guts. If modernity is fetishism and worshiping the picture over the depicted, then the human body is the frame.

I believe there is a metaphysical truth. I believe you can only interface with truth if you are of a virtuous character. It sort of rubs off on you. Its a symbiotic relationship. We NEED each other. And we need each other to be virtuous. Through each other’s virtues, we approach the Divine.

Synthesis