Where Do I Even Start...

I guess like 6 years after you subscribed to this newsletter

Competition

I’ve been debating with my dear friend Matthew for like 15 years at this point. Oceans rise, empires fall, and Matty is still sending me links to books and articles that he knows I will have THOUGHTS about. And we’ve been going back on forth on darn near every topic throughout. Religion, politics, philosophy, physics, what-have-you. We were making Facebook comment sections obnoxiously political years before politicians and grifters perfected the craft. Our chat history is enough wall-of-text to keep out an invading army. My bookshelf is full of books that he’s recommended, and only some of which I’ve liked.

Given that history, you might imagine that we surely have quite different points of view. Since politically minded Americans seem irrevocably polarized, one of us certainly has to be on Team Red and the other on Team Blue. And yet, we aren’t. As world politics around us bends and breaks, as new technology and media violently warp the collective psyche, and as he and I naturally age and evolve in our thinking, I’ve come to understand that we must just argue for the love of the game. Our politics are not as different as they perhaps once were, and there isn’t some hard ideological difference that animates our dialogue. We’re both just saddled with the philosopher’s curse, to have love for the big questions — even if we’re too small to adjudicate them.

There’s an important divergence in this story though. Matthew studied philosophy in college; I did not. Matthew reads philosophy deeply; I largely don’t. Matthew has a vocabulary for important ideas; I can only gesture. Matthew writes about the big ideas and publishes them; I don’t. Or, rather…I didn’t. 😏

Criticism

It’s all good and well to be a critic; you can even be a critic about things you aren’t an expert in. You don’t have to be a director to criticize a movie. You don’t have to be a ballplayer or coach to criticize an athlete’s performance. But as you would expect, athletes and directors don’t typically want to hear from Joes on the couch regardless of their feedback, for Joes have no idea what it takes. If they’re going to accept criticism, it better be from other directors and other ballplayers, or at least folks who have the tiniest sense of what is even involved in being on the field of play. It seems a natural instinct to me; I too bristle at criticism of my professional work if the critic proves themself to be insufficiently contextualized yet sufficiently cocky.

“You f**king do it then since you’re so clever.”

Matthew clearly has more patience than I do, for he has not uttered these words to me, even though I’m guilty of the same crime that has earned others this manner of my scorn. Being a non-reader and a non-writer, I am the proverbial Joe in Matt’s ballgame, launching my opinions his way without having a serious-enough basis for my criticism. How fair is it for my to have an opinion on Matthew’s well understood neo-Kantian moral philosophy when I’m operating at a skimmed-the-Wikipedia level of understanding?

There’s a bit of a sliding scale here. Someone who has played some recreational basketball is more able to properly criticize NBA game-play than somebody who has never dribbled a ball. Somebody who played in high school or college even more still. I don’t view it as an issue of having to meet some prescribed level of understanding before launching criticism. Rather, the criticism needs to be proportional to the understanding of the critic, and no higher, which takes a healthy dose of self awareness to get right. Given that I’m not making it to the league (pursuing philosophy professionally or in academia), I need to find another way to get the necessary reps in so that I might be able to argue and criticize from a position of a serious person, rather than being a Joe. So I’m gonna try writing stuff down.

Coherence

I think that I have a great understanding of what I think. I would think that. But as any writer will tell you, you don’t really know what you think until you’re forced to write it down and make it make sense on a page.

“I write to discover what I know.”

— Famous Author apparently, but who I only know for having said this quote

Having spent enough time debating with Matthew, I have a very scattered collection of thoughts, arguments, and counter arguments rattling around in my head that feel like they cohere into a tangible philosophy. But of course they don’t; they can’t. Coherence doesn’t come for free. It is so darn easy to jump from contradiction to contradiction in your head and think that it’s all pointing in the same direction. Absent interrogation, a web of ideas is likely more mess than structure.

How I think my brain is organized

How my brain is actually organized

So if nothing less, I’m hoping that by putting metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper, I can begin to start creating a coherent cache of ideas, capable of withstanding criticism, and giving me a concrete place from which I might continue my constant chatter with my dear friend for another 15 years.