the role of experience in writing

The role of experience in writing is a large topic worth a long essay, but I’m not going to give a lengthy discussion of it here. I’ll just make a quick observation.

Schopenhauer says somewhere that you should never turn down a social invitation for the sake of reading. His point was that your own original thoughts are more stimulated by getting out of the house and becoming involved in a real situation than by reading someone else’s thoughts as set down in a book.

And he has some truth on his side here. Every new situation in which we become involved, whether it be “social” in the narrow sense or not, throws a few minor or major surprises our way. There is something slightly distinct about the emotional tonality with which we react to every new person, place, or thing.

And this suggests the already fairly obvious point that building up a stock of experiences is the best stimulus to your writing. It is quite conceivable in some cases that writing nothing at all for 2 or 3 years might be exactly what someone needs to do for the purposes of better work later on. (But not if you’re a graduate student, that’s all.)

I often find myself thinking things like this: “This is the first time I’ve ever written a philosophical essay having seen Bulgaria rather than never having seen it.” This may sound silly, but it shouldn’t. Bulgaria, like any other place, did leave certain distinct impressions on me that I would never have had if I had never gone, or if I had gone for the first time at a younger or older age (I went for the first and so far only time in 2006).

And why should it not be the case that whatever small pieces of wisdom I picked up just from soaking in the atmosphere of Sofia (nice place, by the way) would leave some faint trace on my philosophical work? Yes, it would probably be something so minor that no reader would ever notice, but that’s not the point. The point is that such experiences can keep you fresh and interested when it comes to your work.

This is on my mind because today I booked a very interesting trip for the next Eid in November. Perhaps this time I’ll say nothing about where I’m going until after returning and posting some photos on this blog; or maybe I’ll be in the mood to talk about it soon. But it’s the sort of place where one could definitely say, with a straight face, “this is the first time I’ve tried to write a philosophical essay since visiting X and seeing Y.”

if you’re in Provence and like Fichte…

Unfortunately, I can’t tell from the announcement below whether the conference is in Aix or Marseille; the university seems to be located in both places.

It is often the case that European conferences are different from those in North America (with plenty of exceptions, of course). It is much more common in Europe to have conferences consisting of just a few dozen specialists, but with incredibly long daily schedules and unusually intense debate. That’s somewhat more rare in the U.S. A more typical American academic conference is very large, held in a hotel, and you find that you can sort of drift in and out of sessions anonymously, hang out in the lobby and chat with acquaintances you find there, blow off a whole half-day for tourism, and so forth.

By contrast, these small European conferences can be exhausting the first few times if you come from the American system and are shocked to end up in 10 hours of daily debate with intense people in small conference sessions, and then even more at dinner, over a period of half a week or more. (Cerisy is the most intense version of this phenomenon, of course, since there you are actually living with everyone on the same grounds for a whole week. I greatly enjoyed Cerisy, but as a gifted Canadian I know once put it: “Cerisy is part rural idyll, part feudal hell,” and though I wouldn’t go as far as the “feudal hell” part, there is enough truth there to make the remark funny.)

Le Département de philosophie de l’Université de Provence, l’Institut d’histoire de la philosophie de l’Université de Provence (EA 3276), l’ANR « subjectivite et alienation »

organisent :

Colloque Fichte
La Doctrine de la science de 1813.

Salle Noizet, 6ème étage, Université de Provence, Centre Schuman,
29, avenue Robert Schuman

Vendredi 8 octobre 2010

Matin
9 h Accueil
9 h 30 h Mário Jorge de Almeida Carvalho « Sein und Verstandensein de l’image »
10 h 15 Discussion
10 h 30 Alessandro Bertinetto « Die absolute Kraft des Bildens »
11 h 15 Discussion
11 h 30 Marco Ivaldo « L’‘image imageante’ : Sur la doctrine de l’image chez le dernier Fichte »
12 h 15 Discussion
12 h 30 repas

Après midi
14 h Jean-Christophe Goddard « Qu’est-ce qu’une doctrine de la science. La doctrine de la science de 1813 ».
14 h 45 Discussion
15 h M. Jiménez « Une image au-delà de l´existence »
15 h 45 Discussion
16 h Jacinto Rivera de Rosales « L’être du monde »
16 h 45 Discussion
17 h pause café
17 h 30 Discussion générale sur la journée

Samedi 9 octobre 2010

Matin
9 h Alexander Schnell « Savoir, conscience, image dans la WL 1813 »
9 h 45 Discussion
10 h Charles Theret : “L’objet sans objet”
10 h 45 Discussion
11 h Max Marcuzzi « Nous, la Doctrine de la science »
11 h 45 Discussion
12 h Discussion générale sur la matinée
12 h 30 Repas

bluntest passage I’ve read all day

Hippolyte Taine:

“Naturally, there are varieties of men as there are varieties of cattle and horses, some brave and intelligent, and others timid and of limited capacity; some capable of superior conceptions and creations, and others reduced to rudimentary ideas and contrivances; some specially fitted for certain works, and more richly furnished with certain instincts, as we see in the better endowed species of dogs, some for running and others for fighting, some for hunting and others for guarding houses and flocks.”

embezzling Dean also forced students to work as servants

This gets weirder all the time:

“A former administrator at St. John’s University accused of embezzling about $1 million from the college in Queens has now been charged with far more lurid crimes: forcing students to clean, cook and act as her personal servants to keep their scholarships…

After the arraignment, Ron Rubenstein, one of Ms. Chang’s lawyers, said that the students’ duties, which never totaled more than 20 hours a week, were a normal part of the St. John’s work-study program.”

Ralon interviews Taylor Carman

FIND IT HERE. I just woke up and haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but surely it will be of some interest.