Composition of Philosophy. July 30.

A few days ago I broke my usual rule of “no reading philosophy while writing philosophy” to dig into Suárez a bit more. Today I’ve been breaking it to read Whitehead, and am glad I did so. Process and Reality is really one of the great books of recent philosophy. One of the things Whitehead does better than Heidegger is to interrupt his argument occasionally to offer general reflections on the nature of philosophy, and I’m always sympathetic to what he has to say.

Today was a bit slow on writing again. I revised two sections only, which means that 4D, 5C, and 5D all remain to be done. 5C and 5D aren’t too difficult, so I may be able to polish them off first thing in the morning and still have time to finalize the more difficult 4D.

The difficulty with 4D, in a nutshell, is that it’s a smaller piece of the puzzle than I realized a month or so ago… Instead of four key topics to discuss, there are exactly ten, and I need to figure out how to localize the four I had isolated previously (they do belong apart from the others, but now seem to be a variant of a more general problem rather than a fundamental solution in themselves). At points like this, one often lacks even the right terminology, and so you end up having to choose a few new terms.

There are a couple of possible dangers with that exercise. One is that terms are never entirely innocent, and the ones you choose suggest all sorts of resonances with other topics that might not actually be related to the one on which you want to focus.

Another problem is that you don’t want to proliferate terms past a certain point, because philosophy is about simplifying, and you don’t want the reader to see nothing but a laundry list in any given chapter; you want to show the simple elegance of a problem, and proliferating terms can sometimes be just a stopgap measure when you haven’t quite grasped a problem in its simple elegance yet.

I often think about the situation in particle physics before the Standard Model was finalized in the early 1970’s. There were hundreds of particles discovered by the end of the 1950’s, and physicists reportedly had to carry laminated cards to remember what all of them were. It’s certainly better than pretending that all those particles don’t exist, but it’s also not the sort of situation where any branch of human knowledge wants to remain for long. (The cataloguing of diversity is only a first step, it seems to me. Even if you are identifying thousands of new flowers in the mountains, you’ll want to group them into families to help manage the data. In philosophy that’s even more evident.)

There’s the additional danger that a small set of terms can feel like oversimplification for the sake of rigid manageability.

For all of these reasons, I often feel myself pausing a bit whenever confronted by diversity in need of organization. Organizing a chaotic diversity is one of the things I most enjoy doing, but you want to make sure you’re doing it the right way.