Philosophy
Tags: Philosophy, Creativity, Writing, Creative Writing, Art

Image: Philosophy by mjboyce 10 April 2019

I’ve been writing philosophy for a long time. I’ve been writing it online and elsewhere in a way that does not identify itself strictly as philosophy in the traditional sense. At least, I don’t believe so.

As a student, I wrote my papers, including my PhD thesis in a creatively atypical way (for example, my PhD thesis had no footnotes, and the bibliography was structured like an autobiography). Yet I did very well as a student and had very close relationships with my teachers, some of whom I consider among the greatest intellectuals of the 20th Century. I would say the same about my peers, who were incredibly smart and inspiring scholars, many of whom are now the star teachers in the Universities they are employed by.

I have never been interested in the academic convention that informs the departments of philosophy. All three of my degrees were done in inter-disciplinary programs—even my bachelor’s, which was a 4-year program with a thesis supervisor. I have never been interested in mastering the canon in such a way that I could then teach classes that recycled commentary about certain key figures (Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, etc.).

I was not particularly interested in teaching, although I very much enjoyed running seminars—which are much more conversive than the traditional lecture model. And it was conversation that I was interested in, not filling students heads with the thoughts of others. So, I didn’t take the graduate route to stream myself into a teaching job. Instead, I took the route of an artist. I wrote novels, poetry, art reviews, I created video works, photographs and musical works— and produced them all as though I were writing philosophy.

None of that made me much money, so I’ve always had to have a job on the side. These days, it seems, that the idea of getting a“job” as opposed to realizing a career, is tantamount to a moral failure. Employers seem to expect office workers to dedicate themselves with the devotion of a surgeon and the utter fealty of a knight to banal administrative tasks. I am not invested in such an identification, and yet, I’m still able to do a good job—imagine that! It is possible to have a passion and still provide good value to an employer doing work that is not part of one’s personal passion.

Perhaps I have been pretending to be more artistically inclined than philosophically inclined. Perhaps I have been more apt to present myself as a writer of fiction, than as a writer of philosophy. This is because, on the surface, it may more readily look like fiction or poetry writing than philosophy. There are expectations about what these different kinds of productions look like. And there are also expectations about how these productions preferably register on us, reach us or resonate with us.

There is a mental (psychological, perceptual and emotional) frame we may put upon a piece of writing (or any creative production), which defines our wants and needs, and puts our interest in realizing them before any desire to discover something else, to engage (read, watch, look, listen) without foreknowledge of what to expect. My work probably does not satisfy such expectations often. But, if I frame the work as experimental creative writing, whether as poetry or long form fiction, then I believe I have alerted the reader that they will likely be engaging with something that will be unusual, that they may have to work a bit to get.

I do not often refer to what I’m doing, however, as philosophy. Art, as defined by how I understand my culture to define it, seems to have been granted more license to be strange. Therefore, I tend to frame my work as art. But to me truly, it is philosophy before it is art in the way I believe my culture typically defines art — in the sense that the important thing is not its form or its style (although that is part of it), but rather its subject matter, what it’s thinking about.

I have discovered through a long history of writing about things that the style I use to write with makes a difference to the quality of the thinking and the understanding. Which is to say that the oblique style I often use allows me to uncover greater insights (for myself, if not for others). This may not be popular but I do find it effective, particularly for the way that the form and meaning conspire to reflect one another.

As an example, I think about how some people have complained to me about the writing of Jacques Derrida, who is a writer I have enjoyed as much as I have enjoyed the work of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. I have also heard people complain about the writing style of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Many people simply cannot read a good deal of Gertrude Stein’s work—other than the autobiographies.

But with Joyce and Stein, there is a tolerance of their difficulty, I think partly because of the social recognition that they are important creative artists. Whereas with Derrida, perhaps because he is framed as a thinker, I think there is an expectation that clarity should be a defining characteristic of his writing. I don’t share this conviction. Or rather, what passes as a popular definition of clarity is different from what passes as clarity for me.

I think Derrida’s work is crystal clear, and inspiringly so. But there is an idea about clear, simple writing, which some readers who are required to read him in school or who believe they are required to read him in order “to be on top of things” don’t see in his writing, and it angers them that they cannot understand his writing.

Clarity, I think, is not just about style, or about expression in the superficial sense, it is about communication (communion) of idea—that is, the ability to impart to someone, to inspire them with a way of looking at things. This way of looking can be as much or more about the process of looking, of thinking, of analysis—like the process of thinking through a mathematical argument—as it is about the declarative definition, resolution or solution to a “problem.” It can be as much about the way (action, verb) of thinking as it is about the what (name, noun) of thinking.

So, I have used an oblique, creative, artistic approach to writing philosophy because I have found that it gets better results for me as a writer and thinking, but I recognize that this has limited the number of readers I reach. Is this important? Apparently, it is to some degree. And thus, recognizing this, I am electing to write some philosophy is a less oblique manner, to see what happens—both with respect to my getting at what I am making an inquiry about, and with respect to communicating (communing) well (better?) with others.

To this end, I was going to start another publication and simply title it Philosophy. But I really do like the title of this publication —Writing Thinking Saying—because it is itself a philosophical signifier with respect to communication, which I am still sorting out. The style, therefore, may be shifting for this publication, but I won’t abandon the antecedent writing by annexing it, or separate it as though there isn’t a relationship between them.