I Am a Continental Philosopher.

I have spent the first fifty years of my life on safari for meaning. I went everywhere I could. I hunted anything that appeared important to me. By going from one point to another in my thinking, I was constantly taking massive hits to my psychological integrity–consantly decentering, trying on value like shoes, widening out to the point of vanishing, unknowingly reducing out exactly who I am not. Because in our tradition the writing itself is meant to be part of the philosophy.. I am not writing to make reading difficult, I am writing naturally as I write, and not allowing my thoughts to change their shape and meter. I am not going to make the sentences clear and concise to package the idea for a quick sale. That is pseudo intellectualism. You can find that on YouTube. I am a Continental Philosopher. I know how logic can be flawed. I know how language is the primary scene of the Social. I know how people are made. I harmonize all those bits of insight from Kant to Hegel and Schopenhauer to Marx and Nietzsche then on to Freud and Lacan to finally crown the satisfaction with The Sublime Object of Ideology. When I left Ohio for Denver then Boston. Then DC during 9/11; then NYC shortly after. Then home again, then Maine, then Chicago & Madison. Then Berkeley; then Santa Rosa. Then back home again with two babies alone(a). All that time: Shakespeare, Defoe, Whitman, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Forester, Kawabata, Beckett, Naipaul & Coetzee. Never did I ever stop feeding myself everything that presented itself to me, rejecting whatever was antithetical to who I am (and finding myself Platonic enough to still feel pulled in the Soul and believing it is who I am), having the whole process carve away who I am not. I am a Continental Philosopher. The writings of our canon are what has survived my investigation into reason. And I am a Neomodernist—a lyrical one—a Critical Fiction writer, because those 10 authors are what remains of my intercourse with aesthetics (and that is how I understand myself). I write like this—not decorative or pretending—because I am pinned up against a wall that holds back the free play. When you go past melodrama, sidestep genre, grow bored with mere representation, then pull back from absolute free play, you find yourself knee deep in an ethical quandary. You feel the need to be meticulous in your aesthetics. You feel the need to be sincere. There is a New Sincerity. It is about synthesizing the changes and enacting purposefully a new humanity. The Other has been met and we see only ourselves. The reality of things has reset; confidence in the viability of meaning needs to be restored without myth. We maintain atheism as a space of unselfish means that insists humans become responsbile for themselves; that we no longer be the children of God. I am no great man—no one should need to be. We should manage the planet in a way that does not require a savior.