I try to practice philosophy on myself, but my attempts are met with failure; I meet myself, with failure; throw myself back out of subjectivity into a faux-objectivity: that is often what the feeling and I effect my writing produces; that is the influence I have upon myself. Academia, my brief stint in academia, has marked my voice; there are traces, really, a desire, for jargon in my language. I feel confused about the right course of my writing; about the right instrument for sounding out my thoughts. Philosophy always contains jargon, I accept that; thinking must take risks, go down new paths; bend syntax to its will. Philosophy is the coining of concepts, and to coin concepts, you must melt down words. The shell of language is familiar, the core is unfamiliar, alien. Take a word, break it open. This is a reasonable philosophical technique. Ordinary language — the highly cliched language of media-speak — is the ethical enemy; it is likewise reasonable to invoke other modes of speech, to try to rinse the pop rhetoric off of language. We use words all day — with our mouths, our phones, our laptops — and we listen to words, receive them, supposedly process them, understand them; we use words perhaps more than at any other time in the history of civilization. The result is that words are diluted, mean less than ever before; the result is a deadening of soul, a depression and reduction of the intelligent expression. I am not the first person (Karl Kraus, Hannah Arendt) to remark that banalization underwrites political tragedy; that ethical life is in many ways a function of how we use words — but I am not trying to be original, merely accurate. When I write I want to simultaneously express and sharpen my consciousness — ideally; the reality is, that in writing, in philosophizing, I confront conceptual detritus, verbal decay; lazy intuitions. Writing towards (rather than about) the Good — I often feel like a bad person; a person whose language fails to capture truth.
