Brett Veinotte interviewed me on postmodernism and its implications and impact on education. After some significant context-setting, the interview portion with me starts around the 28-minute mark.
The book discussed is here in various editions and translations.
My lecture on philosophy of education and postmodernism is here.
At about the 1:05:00 mark the interviewer asks about the psychology of Modern Nihilist’s. This is the very question that sparked my interest in philosophy. The best I can come up with after trying pretty extensively to understand this issue is the Mind-Body split that Rand talks about in a couple of her Return to the Primitive essays.
I have come to believe that the Mind-Body split is the most important issue of mankind and that poor philosophy of education has put us in a pretty bad spot over the past few decades. If the conceptual faculty is not properly engaged with what is real very early on you can get a bad case of desire to destroy the “enemy”, the outside world. You have to become oriented to reality, not whim, or you’re doomed. The primacy of existence has to be fully accepted, or you are going to have some Mind-Body split generated Nihilism in you.
Have you written in the Mind-Body split?
Yes, mind-body dualism sets one up for a huge number of problems, metaphysically and epistemologically. I haven’t written on the mind/body issue specifically, but I think some sort of integrationism/emergentism is on the right track.