To: wayne
From: Peter Lee <pl86@columbia.edu> (by way of nysurf@nyweb.com (The New York Web))
Subject: the review of "at home in the universe" (from nysurf)

Hey guys,

If the review is an example of things to come, I'm not very encouraged.To be blunt, I thought it was a cruel joke, a perfect example of the pop-lite criticism that is shallow and simpleminded but tries to hide its poverty with sleek and seductive language. My warning signal went off when "deconstruction" turns up in the second sentence. I have to admit that the word images are nice, like the train metaphor or "the dionysian dreams of the 60's" but the very easy tendency is for these sophisticated linguistic constructions to become substitutes for actually engaging ideas. I mean, what's with this: "that every single thing in life is patterned is so positivist (in the protean sense), it's almost as if complexity is intent on bring back god. not necessarily the god of nietzschian principles, but god as a symbol for structure...." uh oh, references to nietzsche also set off my alarm, like the scene in the movie "Clueless", when the brother is sitting by the pool reading "Basic Writings Of Nietzsche" (did you notice: wanting to make absolutely sure that we understand that Josh is really, really DEEP and not trusting the audience to recognize the photograph of nietzsche on the front cover, the filmmakers plastered in big bold type "NIETZSCHE" on the book).
In fact, I'm forced to wonder whether the reviewer's read any more nietzsche than Josh. The evidence is the dreary and wrong nietzsche = nihilism formula ("given the nihilistic tedium of the post-nietzschean vision..."). plus, there's the review's tendency to play off Nietzsche/Nihilism and Kauffman's thesis, as when it says "Mr. Kauffman makes god of men when he stipulates that by tracking these 'laws of complexity' we can discern the workings of the universe we exist in. We need not feel random and insignificant, we may be bequeathed an antidote to our modern alienation and nihilism." But this is naive. Why assume that there's no meaning if there's no bedrock foundation, like god or laws of complexity? the pope is also always harping on this, which just goes to show he doesn't get it. Just look at how art operates: We invest enormous meaning into completely arbitrary objects (Duchamp's lesson). Does that make art pointless, meaniningless? Hardly. Yes, we give ourselves meaning, we are "interpretation all the way down," as Hubert Dreyfus, one of the leading Heidegger scholars put it, but rather than lead to nihilism, it highlights the beauty of human existence. This is why Nietzsche's always talking
about the paramount importance of life. The oft-quoted "god is dead" is followed by the not so frequently mentioned, "and we have killed him", i.e. we human beings give meaning and values to ourselves and the world, not some supra-external being who we cannot possibly have any access to. (See next entry)