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paul, as a continued apology to anne, and in an effort to continue our own conversations, i've written a sort of response to our now months old encounter over another table, trying at least to recall my sentiments from california - i feel a sort of 'choose your own adventure' type of thing is in order - for our continuing amusement? i won't really provide much choice... so go to --B--. or don't.

--B-- let's begin by assuming that the words one writes are not independent of the concepts one is trying to develop and express by writing. if this isn't acceptable, go to --H--. otherwise, we'll just keep going here: now, where do the words - and, by the extension of this teleology, the concepts so expressed and developed - end? do words depend upon their juxtaposition with other words, their arrangement in sentences and in metaphors, in lists and introductory paragraphs and their functioning in an argument or inclusion in an example? if "yes, the concepts one might be trying to express depend upon these things, and how we word them", go to --S--. if no, --L--.

--H-- when i die, i'll directly realize your Ideas in Heaven ... till then, you needn't bother writing, as your words have no relation to your ideas. so please, so that you might keep sharing ideas with us while we're still alive, please go back to --B--.

--L-- i'll keep these counter-examples short: presumably the word use of 'left' in a lover telling you 'i've left you' and 'i'm to your left' express rather different sentiments; or, similarly and to choose a far less exciting stock-example, 'the cat is on the mat' and 'the mat is on the cat' correspond to different situations (one, i imagine, kind of cute). why call to mind the metaphor of gardening with the word 'pruning,' when 'discarding' would serve just as well? the choice of our words and of our arrangement of them clearly marks different expressions. so let's go back to --B-- and start over. or just skip to --S--.

--S-- we are thus in this position: what you say is all knotted up in how you say it. and so, by changing one, the other is not left unaffected; you might untie the knot a little, or complicate things: either way, you'll end up with a different knot. so, keeping in mind that how we write philosophy and what we write about will never be independent, how can we write philosophy? go to --W-- to explore this - or, to find out how we might read it, go to --R--.

--R-- this will be a brief tangent in which i misuse todorov's work on 'poetics' - because clearly for me at this point, there is no difference between OUR READING a poem and a work of philosophy - our approach, our care, textual-tactics, ... todorov suggests (disclaimer: i don't have this work here, my abuse of todorov will be based on months-old notes) the interpretive work of poetics should be brought to bear on whatever is created having language both as its substance and instrument. insofar as philosophical concepts are never independent of language, philosophy - at least to a degree - is created as having language as its substance; the instrumentality of language in our writing philosophy seems clear enough. but then, this could be tremendously generative! what novel thoughts might we find asking questions like: why is so little attention paid to descartes' use of metaphor in his letters (re: jean-luc marion)? or to kant's style in the critique of judgement (re: jean-luc nancy)? why did lucretius write poetry, or wittgenstein, in aphorisms? with eyes of poetry, who knows what we'd make of old thoughts? (this goes the otherway too, of course - what will we find approaching 'alice in wonderland' with the same care and rigor we might bring to a reading of hegel (re: deleuze)?) but enough about reading, please go to --W--.

--W-- paul, i'll use what i remember from our last talk to ground this: suppose that you want to develop and express the concept of 'less-wrong' in a piece of writing (or a discussion with a philosophy student). what is a tactical or rhetorical disparity between us comes to make all the difference: so long as you write or speak AS IF YOU ARE RIGHT, and, demurring, i use words like 'love' and 'disturb', address my reader in the second person, or employ cumbersome phrasing and obscure citations in an effort to complicate my writing - so long as we write in vastly different ways, our positions will remain vastly different. (of course, this difference is clearly very productive - so we'll agree to perpetuate it, i hope) (and, by the way, the 'choose your own adventure' is over; you can keep reading or not.) so, what disturbs me, paul - this being the sentiment i remember from our last conversation - what disturbs me about what you're saying is HOW YOU SAY IT, with the accompanying assumption that rhetoric does NOT completely change whatever it is one is saying. clearly, i think it does; so an abyss opens - a productive one, i'll repeat - in the space of our rhetorical difference.

~davey