Some Days

Some days, posting on this blog is difficult for me. I too often write about matters that I have no business writing about. My thinking is incomplete and my scholarship is shoddy. I should rightly fear to publish anything about what occupies my thoughts. I cannot stop though.

We all try to make sense of our common experience. We attempt to communicate the categories and concepts we have created or learned that organize common experience. Out of basic experience, our imaginations create, through pastiche, concepts that are ever more complex. To me this is philosophy. To me philosophy belongs to anyone who wants to embrace the activity.

Plato is as much my possession as anyone else’s. If I am interested in philosophy at all, how can I not react to Plato’s Ion.? How can I not try my hand at showing how Plato’s attempt to build mutually exclusive boundaries around poetry and philosophy is doomed to failure even if someone such as Derrida has traversed that territory?

The problem amounts to a matter of discipline. What must one do to avoid sloppy and lazy thinking and writing? You may give me a big fat F, but I am not in school. I cannot flunk in any measurable way. All I can do is feel the sting of your rebuke and my humiliation once I realize you are right, and I have made errors I could have easily avoided if I had but taken more time and care.

Sometimes, writing comes down to the courage to risk appearing the fool. Saying something as simple as this is foolish. Thus, it comes down to not caring, or hoping something valuable may yet come of it.

I intended this to be an apology. I changed my mind somewhere along the way.