Composition of Philosophy. August 16.

The draft of the Manchester lecture is now finished. It is currently 22 pages, and took 4 hours, 23 minutes to write. (More on that in a second.)

The writing is sloppy and the transitions are bad, but you’ve heard this song from me before: that sort of thing is easy and even fun to fix, as long as all the material is already in place. And in this case, it is. I wouldn’t dream of reading it in public in its current state, but if someone glanced through it I wouldn’t be embarrassed. The key point, here as always, is that you should approach any writing project in a manner that keeps your morale high, because few things are more gruelling than writing when you don’t believe in what you’re doing anymore.

This draft needs a lot of work, but the lecture is basically finished. It just needs a lot of polish. And I’d much rather have a completed 22 pages in need of polish than 5 perfectly polished pages. There’s just no reason to work that slowly. It sucks energy to do it that way, and the result isn’t necessarily any better.

I was going to make another point about why I time these writing sessions. For me it is helpful to be reminded always that projects need a finite amount of time. I wish I had stopwatch statistics for the writing of my dissertation or the reading of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. It was amusing to me last summer to time my rereading of Husserl’s Logical Investigations and to find that, with notes, it took around 36 hours (if memory serves; too lazy to go look for the notebook again right now). Why? Because then it ceases to become a vaguely, infinitely large beast, and starts to look like the sort of thing you can do in one hard week or two easier ones.

And more generally, four and a half hours is not an intimidating amount of time, obviously. It makes you think: “If I just stop horsing around this afternoon and get right to it, I’ll be done with this essay by bedtime.”

I’m not sure yet if I want to revise this lecture tomorrow morning before my friends return from the Sinai. In one sense it would be nice to put a finish to it. But with lectures, as opposed to articles, there is a certain adrenaline factor. You want just a little bit of stress in order to aid in the performance. And more importantly, you want to know that you’ve written words that you’re actually willing to read in front of people. Sometimes I write a lecture, and while reading that lecture in front of actual people I suddenly find a sentence stupid or embarrassing, and either skip or modify it on the fly. But it might be good not to revise this lecture until a day or two before I depart, because then the audience will feel more real for me, whereas now, with a few weeks still to go, the audience is still something of an abstraction.

There could be some interesting news tomorrow, or soon thereafter, on the publication front. I’ll post here if it comes to that.