Dr. J. Budziszewski

One can hope.

One can hope.

Younger students take that away from it.

Older students take away much more radical versions of incoherency, although they tame them down.

You know, for example, postmodernism, which is supposed to be an outgrowth of Nietzscheanism.

Postmodernism is really, although it's crazy, it is a lot tamer than Nietzsche.

Nietzsche, I think, to his credit, I think he understood that he was wrestling with incoherencies.

He doesn't.

That's my point.

The postmodernists, though, will say things like, oh, you say, well, what is postmodernism?

And he says, suspicion of metanarratives.

What do you mean by suspicion of metanarratives?

What it means is everybody's got a big story and none of them has got it right.

All of the big stories are wrong.

Well, what about the postmodernist big story?

His big story is that nobody gets the big story right except him.

Yeah.

The metanarrative is that there's metanarrative, and he's got it right.

So there's something wrong here.

If it's possible for that to be true, why couldn't something else be true?