Composition of Philosophy. August 15.

My unconscious doesn’t seem in the mood to start on Chapter 7 of L’objet quadruple, and it doesn’t feel like the procrastinating unconscious. It feels like the Fermi unconscious, when he was hesitating to use lead in his experiment, and randomly chose a piece of paraffin instead, leading to unexpected results. There are certain kinds of hesitation that are sending you a vague message that “something isn’t quite right yet.”

In those sorts of cases, I often find that direct thinking about the problem doesn’t give you the solution. You need to turn your mind elsewhere for a little while, and when you come back with fresh eyes things look different, like a landscape at dusk as opposed to noon.

So, I’m turning my attention today and tomorrow to writing my Manchester lecture instead. It will be delivered 18 days from now, so this will be a good time to polish it off.

The main reason I always say yes to lecture invitations, barring schedule conflict, is not only the inherent pleasure of sharing ideas and hearing what people have to say. Frequent lectures and publications also create a good pressure to innovate. A certain amount of repetition in philosophy is not only unavoidable, but even desirable. But you also don’t want to just say the exact same thing over and over again, every time. You’ll want to add a few new twists to your developing position, to keep both yourself and others interested.

Sometimes these twists come unexpectedly in the very act of writing. But other times, they come from directly addressing problems that have been lingering in your mind for awhile without ever having been openly confronted. Everyone has a certain stock of such inchoate problems in their mind, and it’s always possible to pull one down and start working on it. I’ve already chosen one for Manchester, and just now on the Cairo Metro was starting to put it in words to myself.

The title of the Manchester lecture is: “Objects Are the Root of All Philosophy.”

The audience will not be primarily professors of philosophy, which I also enjoy, because it creates additional “intelligibility pressure”. That’s also the main reason I agreed to write Heidegger Explained. The audience I had in mind for that book was my intelligent and alert 90-year-old grandmother.

Have you ever heard that tip, by the way? “Whenever writing a lecture, article, or book, imagine one particular person as your audience.” I wouldn’t say that I swear by this advice and do it every time, but it’s another interesting compositional tool.

My own variant of this rule, especially useful for blocked dissertation writers, is to say: “Imagine that you’re explaining your dissertation in an email to a friend.” Not only does this take the pressure off, it also brings out your communicator side. We all know how to communicate when speaking to friends. We simply sometimes slip out of that mode and go into “objective academic” mode and thereby lose the ability to connect with our audience. This is probably why the “imagine one particular person as your audience” rule works well.

And to repeat another anecdote told here a few months ago… I once had an acquaintance who was a powerful and vivid writer in emails, as well as very funny. But whenever he wrote academic work, it was boring. And whenever he tried to write fiction, it was affected and overwrought. All he really needed to do was capture his emailing tone and translate it into these other genres, but for some reason he had trouble doing so.

Occasionally I meet actors like this as well. When they are doing small, subtle, funny things in groups, you can see their theatrical talent shine. But as soon as they consciously enter “theater mode”, it becomes pretty awful.

Lots of parodies are ruined by the same flaw. They go overboard. They start becoming too self-conscious of their parodic character, when previously they were dead-on mimicries.