I’ve posted somewhere between three and five texts this week, but if you asked me what I said, or even which feeds I posted them on, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Memory is a strange and fascinating thing, especially when it comes to the kind of sprawling systematic philosophy that I’m attempting here. I simply do not, and cannot, have the entire system in my head all at once, and I am frequently negotiating the relationship between its parts - the species and genii, the connections and disjunctions between different aspects. Part of what I love about having precisely dated posts, which I return to from time to time, is that I discover - quite often - that what feels like a new insight this month is something I conceived of and elaborated thoroughly a year or two ago. At times as though I feel I am tending to a garden that is growing according to principles I don’t really understand into something I’m unable to conceive and may well hardly want. I make sense of what I’m expressing after the fact, ascribing intentions or motives to phenomena I am emitting, if I’m being honest with myself, for reasons that are totally obscure to me - or perhaps for no “reason” at all.
Someone pointed out to me recently - a kindred spirit - how rare it is for a philosopher (I don’t entirely want to actually call myself by that name, but it’s a decent placeholder) to actually try to be making sense of things from the ground up, to really be wrestling with the nature of knowledge, being, truth, history, subjectivity, creation and politics all at once while being unwilling or unable to accept a firm foundation for conceptual creation in terms of any of them - to not be speaking in anyone else’s name, and to not be limiting one’s self to a topic that has built-in presuppositions. I was touched and inspired upon hearing this - which is in itself a fascinating phenomenon, the way threads of mutual transference braid together as an engine of heterogeneous creation.
At the end of the day, though, it takes effort to remind myself that a cloudy memory is not a deficiency, and that perfect consistency between the various moving parts of a system and even the various expressions related to the same topics is a somewhat illusory ideal, given that we don’t really know what consistency is or what value it really has.