comp. of phil. last for the day

Looks like 51 pages written so far, whereas I’d hoped to be at around page 65 by now, but 51 is approaching the sort of critical mass where the book has a distinctive “voice,” and once you have that, you have all the momentum you need to finish. By 24 hours from now there’s a chance of being pretty close to finished with the draft of the first half of the book.

Calling it a night. That Herzberg was a perfect wind-down, reading about what a psychological mess philosophers have been. Consider the case of Schelling, philosophy’s all-time golden boy in his youth:

“Ten years later [the book] was again announced, but, although the matter had by then become a public scandal, Schelling never allowed the book to appear, any more than the Ages of the World, of which in any case only the first book had ever existed. In fact, after the age of 40, Schelling published practically nothing. He attributed this insurmountable diffidence, this ‘undue anxiety,’ in the matter of publication to dissatisfaction with the products of his mind; they did not reach the standard which he laid down for himself: the inhibitive effect of this dissatisfaction in any case was far above normal intensity. Schelling’s own conjecture was that this anxiety rose out of the states of depression which he repeatedly experienced; the first was connected with the death of Caroline Schlegel’s daughter whom he dearly loved, and it clouded his mind –weighed down already with worry and reproach– to the point of causing him to contemplate suicide. He was then 25 years old.”