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.