Blog Thoughts

Blog Thoughts

I sometimes search this blog in order to remind myself of what I have written on such-and-such a topic. I am always surprised. I have completely forgotten about this paper or that, and I read the paper with genuine interest, as if written by someone else. I find myself entering an old-new world. The coverage is enormous, obscenely so. I am always trying to get to the bottom of things, rethinking everything. I write with a kind of horrible fluency, like a philosophical Nabokov (he has his nymphet; I have my syllogism). The poetry of ideas. And very scientific: reports from the field (Voyages of the Philosophical Beagle). It seems unending. I question everything I was ever taught. Audacity is not an issue. I insult the reader. I am arrogantly humble. I view myself clinically. Someone once described me as a stickler: I accept the label. But am I not kind to the reader? I try to make it easy for him or her: I try to spare the reader pain. Yet I stir up disquiet, distrust, distress. Is it a journey? No, it’s a party, a seminar—thrown by me. It has no destination. It is ideology-free. It is egotistical in the purest sense—self-assertive, candid. I mean it to be like no other philosophical writing. Philosophy in the Garden of Eden. Not Socratic, or even pre-Socratic; more Socratic-Socratic—as if I have collared him in the market-place. I strive for naivete, innocence—but armed to the teeth. A knife-like penetration. Modesty is beside the point. There is no time for that, or place. It is easy to interpret—there are no obstacles. It is a rebuke to Wittgenstein. It is a thank-you to Russell (but goodbye Bertie). It beckons to Sherlock Holmes. It is light, like Oscar Wilde or P.G. Wodehouse. I find it funny when I skim through those old pieces, though I never laugh. It has a teasing phenomenology. Is it stream of consciousness? Not at all. That stream is murky; this is more like little blocks of ice.