Tag: meta-blog

entry 14

I’ve recently been considering my criteria for selecting which notes I transcribe from my notebook to here:

Should I practice more restrictive selection leading to a low post frequency and high average quality or should I practice less restrictive selection, posting many notes that are more random, speculative, imperfect and that I am less certain about and are subject to probable revision? This question has been particularly current as I have been thinking a lot about politics, an area that a) I have spent relatively little time studying, especially and b) arguably contains especially complex questions.

In the last few days I’ve decided to practice looser selection, here are a few reasons:

1) Simply producing more has certain brute-force practical advantages regardless of content or quality.

2) In transcribing notes that are less clear/perfect, I am re-ordering and tidying them up in a way that makes them easier to work with later.

3) If I post many of the notes that are more unfinished, temporary and speculative, this can produce a visible record of my meandering philosophical journey, which could be interesting. In particular, maybe a Hegelian *Bewegung der Begriffe* will become observable in the way that – as I have sometimes noticed – after gradually thinking through a topic and reaching a feeling of understanding and conclusions, I tend to then later go back and explore a direction that opposes those conclusions – i.e. I continue to move conceptually instead of accepting reached understandings/conclusions as given, in the faith that if my originally perceived understanding was indeed an understanding, that then I will eventually return to it anyway, finding and seeing it again.

4) It should help me to avoid counter-productive levels of inhibition/self-doubt/self-censorship – I don’t want to consider each post so carefully that doubt is multiplied counter-productively. Plus I anyway only write things in my notebook if I feel the thing is important enough to need to be written down – I’m a lazy person – and ultimately I trust my own judgement in this regard and shouldn’t be second-guessing judgement of potential readers.

entry 5

I’ve found that this is naturally a 2 step or 2 level process – in transferring my hand-written notes to here, I naturally look at them and re-consider and then re-formulate them. I had originally wanted to re-produce the hand-written notes as exactly as possible without any further thought, without any 2nd, later thinking layered over the original and interfering with it – I wanted to be natural and authentic. However, I now think that forcing myself to keep to the exact original note would in fact also be unnatural and inauthentic…

I’ve already found that this blog is useful for my process: Re-reading and considering notes – lingering on them longer than I otherwise would and maybe re-formulating them – so far seems to have positive effects.

entry 2

some long introductory remarks

  • (on why someone may want to read my writings) Philosophy is very important for the world – and one major part of my overall project is to explain what I understand as ‘philosophy’ and why this thing is important. And over the years it has gradually become clear to me that I have a [- Surprisingly to me -] relatively unique philosophy or perspective on the world. And I know – from my experience – that this perspective is one that can facilitate and organically produce thoughts or ideas that feel colourful, meaningful, useful, relevant, enjoyable, bright, vivid, mind-opening, fresh, etc… And maybe I can communicate some parts of my philosophy, maybe leading to a reader at some moment also feeling something positive.
  • (on why writing this may more directly be useful to me) At the same time, I am open to the possibility that an idea I have is in some way trivial – in particular that someone else has already had the same idea and expressed it better… or that the idea is already well known and well understood – just under a different name – and that I just haven’t made the connection for whatever reason. Here it’s obviously of great value to me to get outside feedback…
  • (on understanding my writing and commenting) When I write notes for myself, I of course just use whichever terms and syntax seem most comprehensible and useful to me at the time.  Preliminarily, I’ve decided to maintain this practice for notes I make public instead of trying to estimate which terms will or won’t be familiar to readers or of trying to assume some standard terminology and syntax of some particular contemporary tradition. To make this work, I want readers to just comment whenever a word/phrase/term or some way I [syntactically] use and arrange words or other symbols or whatever isn’t completely clear.
  • (on things that I write that seem or are trivial) Whilst some things I write will indeed turn out to be trivial, others will only seem trivial –  And therefore I ask of you to try to not let the first impression of triviality make you disengage! In a way, one main aim I have for my ideas is to be as obvious as possible whilst in fact being nontrivial – more specifically, non-trivial relative to the ideas, theories, ideologies etc that are already familiar to the reader. Sometimes, if something is very obvious, one has to take a step back in order to see that it was never really understood until now. Maybe one thing is explicitly known whilst some of its consequences are only implicitly or intuitively known or felt – and thus if one reads an explicit statement of those consequences, it may feel familiar and obvious, suggestive of triviality or uselessness, while in fact the explicit statement constitutes a new step forward in understanding.
  • (on how the set of these entries may differ from my personal notes) I may write notes here that I wouldn’t write as personal notes due to not being new to me and therefore not being necessary/helpful to my own understanding of my writing.
  • (on putting philosophy in writing) I’m starting this in awareness of some of downsides* of using writing as the tool for expressing and sharing philosophy – aware that writing, especially rational writing and permanent writing, is regarded too highly over other possible means of expressing philosophy, e.g. poetry, music, art, dance, etc… that forcing ideas into particular language elements has various questionable consequences, as does the making-permanent and making-easily-readable/reachable of an idea. At the same time, since we do historically have writing and rational abstract thought – and existing philosophy and ideology is influenced by this history – a huge part of philosophy must engage with writing in order to be effective.

 

*a topic that I have only recently become aware of and want to learn much more about.