No, the way out of the trench war is usually to adopt openly the “old-fashioned” side that is being critiqued, while finding some way to flip it completely into something strange. I think of Cézanne in painting, who amidst the impressionist revolution found a way to retrieve the solidity of objects without relapsing into academicism, and in doing so he paved the way for cubism. In philosophy I think of Leibniz, who amidst the general assault on substantial forms in the new physics, and the general assault on multiplicity in Spinoza (who has been a bit too much in vogue lately), revived substantial forms and the multiplicity of individuals. Instead of merely extrapolating from the general modern critique and pushing it a step further, Leibniz like Cézanne gave us an unexpected reversal. This is the only way to win a trench war, otherwise you’re simply locked in a war of annihilation with an enemy defined as the evil that must be crushed so that things can turn out happy in the end. Cézanne was really an impressionist, but he also understood what had been lost with the breakdown of three-dimensional pictorial space, and that forced him to discover an innovative way to render solidity simply because he had no other choice. Leibniz was really a modernist, but he had read Suárez like a fiend in his youth and understood how solid the Scholastics really were, and this led him to his strangely gorgeous retrieval of Aristotelo-Scholastic philosophy. These are my heroes: the people who look at first like throwbacks, but are actually more modern than the moderns, because instead of just tweaking daddy’s nose, they also preserve the ways in which daddy was right, and thus go further than the more overt radicals.