it is sent

An e-mail came today saying the translator was ready for the book, and so it has been sent. There are few better feelings than having worked very hard on something for a long period of time, wrestled with its difficulties, and to have finally made it as good as one possibly can.

“For now,” of course. After a certain amount of time has passed on any completed project, there will be a few things that are no longer satisfying, and addressing that dissatisfaction is how one makes progress. And here again, it’s not so much a matter of “mistakes.” I’ve tried to keep count of how many sentences in my published writings are ones that I now consider simply “wrong,” and I think I came up with three, though I only remember two of them at the moment.

What usually happens instead is that one has a feeling, when reflecting on one’s past work, of “that’s too abstract,” or “that’s oversimplified,” or even “that feels like a word doing the work of a genuine thought,” followed by a struggle to dig back down to the thought that was replaced insufficiently by a word.

All of these problems require a struggle to detect and to fix, and much of that is simply the work of time. (And I mean time on the calendar more than hours on a stopwatch.) But I’m also a big believer in the principle that much of our “mental development” takes place outside our minds– and this is yet another reason not to fall into the perfectionism trap, since perfectionism is essentially an alibi for withholding written work from public scrutiny. You don’t want to dump half-baked drafts on the planet, of course, but if you’re daydreaming of a faultless masterwork, then forget it. No such work exists. Any work of philosophy or anything else can be picked apart if someone wants to do it badly enough.

You can’t always predict which of your ideas are stronger and which are weaker, which ones might take surprising turns once they are unleashed into discussion, and so forth. And this is why I think it’s important simply to do a certain critical mass of completed work. Giving public lectures and fielding objections, receiving published feedback, and testing your models of the world against new and surprising cases are in my opinion all more fruitful than patting oneself on the back for superior rigor and conscientiousness while retiring into silence (there are times for this too, but only as pauses for refreshment).

I don’t have Hegel’s Phenomenology at hand at the moment, but there he says something against “the unique truth of vanity: that of being at any rate cleverer than any thoughts that one gets from others or from oneself.” And that is why it is better to put together a model and commit oneself provisionally to it, knowing full well that it will fall short in a number of respects. Whitehead says this early in Process and Reality as well. Sitting back and trying to cook up “knockdown arguments” to clobber all comers is not, in my experience, how philosophical progress is made.

To end on a more detailed note… I also think it’s important to be moving onto a new project as soon as the previous one is finished. In this case I have no choice, since there is a lecture to give in Maastricht just 15 days from now. It is always a pleasure to speak warmly of Leibniz, and that is what I’ll be doing in Maastricht, home of the extinct MOSASAURUS (seen here eating a sort of primeval turtle).

Also back on tap is Circus Philosophicus, an absolute pleasure to write, and on target for completion before the New Year.

As for tomorrow, there is a Senate Committee meeting to chair. It’s useful to stay active. Schopenhauer was definitely right to say that more thinking is triggered by this sort of activity than by sitting at home reading.