it’s not enough to be right

This may sound strange, but it’s relatively rare when reading intellectual work that I encounter outright errors. (I think Deleuze said this too, probably at the beginning of Difference and Repetition, and Whitehead said something similar as well.) Mistakes actually aren’t that big a deal. In most cases they are easily fixed (which is why I loathe people who get all aggressive about typographical mistakes, since they can be fixed in a matter of seconds).

What happens more often is that a piece of writing is boring.

What happens even more often, and to all of us, is that we write something that’s not boring, but that somehow misses the point. This is what I lose sleep over whenever writing… not making mistakes (that’s inevitable within certain limits), not boring readers (I never do), but missing the larger point at issue.

The great philosophers are not the ones who made the fewest mistakes, but the ones who missed the point less than anyone else. Of all debates currently underway in philosophy, 98% will turn out to be wastepaper of no relevance 50 years from now; it is focused on transient, inadequate formulations of philosophical problems and missing a deeper framing of the problem that would be worth chewing on for decades.

It’s very difficult not to miss the point, but that should be our aim in everything we write. But even the best philosophers sometimes only got right to the point in 10 or 20 pages over the course of a career. Many misfires may be needed.

Truth does not mean accurate content. But neither does truth mean “originality,” assuming that originality is defined in the usual manner as “unheard-of content”. Truth is, quite simply, not a content of any sort. You cannot put truth in a proposition (as Whitehead saw), not because there is no truth and everything is a language game, but because propositions are too abstract to do justice to the truth.

Truth means: getting the point. It means focusing on what is decisive.

One of the most repellent strategies, in my mind, is to debunk exisiting philosophical problems as “false problems.” If many people have done batttle for centuries over a specific problem, then there is probably something to it. False dissolution of problems is a far bigger danger than false problems. We need ways to maximize or “nectarize” traditional problems to make them even more cutting, rather than looking for facile ways to dissolve them altogether.