Why a website? A short reflection on the method of a muddling tinkerer

Why a website? That’s simple: books are static creatures; at the moment they are published they are cast in their final shape. I have published two books in my life and on reflection I regret the publication of both of them. Both were premature, or rather, momentary. Websites grow and change and are merely left fallow or abandoned. They are peculiarly well-suited to the kind of writerly-thinking that developed in parallel with word-processing software in the eighties and nineties of the last century. That revolution happened to coincide with the start of my intellectual biography, just as the introduction of artificial intelligence coincides with the end of it. That writerly thinking that the word-processor encouraged, we now take more or less for granted. It made thinking through writing accessible to people who muddle along, stumbling and stuttering towards their ambitions. I am, for my sins, a person who has had to grow much and change intellectual shape consistently over time and will probably continue to do so until the inevitable moment.

Philosophical research, the way I have found a way to do it that suits me, requires much and wide heterogeneous reading, whereby an academic article has no greater claim to my serious attention than a novel, a poem, or a piece of hack journalism that despite itself happens to bring up an interesting insight or thought. I get my inspiration from anywhere and everywhere and most of all from students, family and friends. And that brings me to the fact that my approach requires much heterogeneous interaction with other learners, such as those colleagues, students, friends and family I just mentioned. Most of all I need interaction with my self as my steadfast alter ego, thinking requires quiet and lengthy reflection. I am a very slow thinker and, as if that isn’t enough, find it very hard to stick to one thing. I crisscross over everything and, as the cliché goes, know nothing very much about anything. So be warned.

Being a dialectical thinker, constantly correcting myself, I see distinctions as practically motivated conceptual acts which must never be allowed transcend their conditional existence and hypostatize. With the word ‘hypostatize’ I mean that a conceptual construction is thought of as not just an effective and useful idea that gets reasonably good results in helping me interact with the world, but one that is supposed to somehow twin or capture the world as it is. I cannot know the world as it is. I find it hard to untangle my perceptual and cognitive involvement with the world and cannot imagine what is left on the world-side of things after having extracted myself from my physiologically intimate engagement with it. I can only know the world through my perceptual and conceptual framework and the inferential paths that allow me to explore and evaluate the relations formed between my world of thought and the world I think about. That imposes restrictive conditions on what I feel I can safely say and what I must at all cost refrain from saying. For example, I can tell you what conditions need to be met to judge something true, good and/or beautiful, but as those conditions are exacting and tricky, most of what I believe to be true, good and beautiful, does not meet them.

This has to do with the complexities involved in untangling the relationships between my world of thought and the world I think about. The world I think about I must assume to be one, whereas my world of thought is plethora. A distinction, though of great practical use for the purposes of thought, must never be allowed to come to assume a separation. The universe forms the only true single whole by definition, in which everything must, in line with that definition, be able to affect everything else. As such everything is relevant or can be relevant to everything else. And if a person exercising some discipline myopically cannot cope with that holism, it does not make it less true and fundamental to thought. Both of these things are at least my starting assumptions. As a result my holism is rigorously maintained and eschews any political, judicial or economic compartmentalization of human endeavor, or rather sees each such attempt as being exclusively of practical use, without ontological justification other than to help us acquire control over ourselves and our environment. Whether that is a good thing is not easily decided. To make things more concrete: I have enjoyed analytical philosophy easily as much as critical or continental philosophy and seen their haughty exclusion of each other just as another instance of sadness that gets in the way of having fun. There is good thinking and bad thinking. Bad thinking should be ignored and good thinking should be celebrated. There is good philosophy to be had in rigorous analysis and there is good philosophy to be had in the critical construction of concepts or the phenomenological description of appearances. The biggest mistakes I have made in thought have always involved turning up my nose only to be shown up for my stupid arrogance.

To conclude then I lay this finely and carefully wrought, strangely patterned carpet of very personal but rigorous thought before you. You do not need to read it. The world will not be much affected either way. It is possible that if you persist you will find some treasure you may cherish for a while. If not, no worries. But at least this way allows me to avoid the disastrous double bind academia has got itself into where research has come to be a bothersome means to the desired end of acquiring funding and the unfortunate capitalization of academic publishing which has made financial means metamorphose into higher ends, turning the purpose of academia upside down, putting concerns of status and profit above the wish for knowledge, affecting much of its own credibility for which it has only itself to blame. This last jibe is not as a result of a feeling of bitterness, I did well by it, but as a result of a feeling of sadness. This project has only its argumentation to account for itself. It has relied on the review of my peers over the many years that I have engaged with people and books. You shall have to make up your own mind whether it is worth your while. No one else will do it for your

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