23 August 2006

My Garden = This Blog

I keep this blog as a hobby. It's like my garden; I'm cultivating my own garden. It just so happens that the fertilizer, which I use in my garden, (by the way, I know so-called real authors don't give a shit about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, and this concerns only hardcore dork grammarians, but come on: using 'which' and 'that' correctly makes writing much more clear. So-called real writers are already good enough with language to make language clear. I hate it when people misuse which and that) that fertilizer happens to be the lives and thoughts of other people. So in an ironic, somewhat paradoxical sense, my blog takes up the moral of Candide and then turns it on its head. Cultivating my personal garden means digging up other people's detritus.

So, as I was saying, my hobby... Yesterday I commented on a Wall Street Journal article and I got a lot of hits. It was a good article, yes. Today I tried the same thing, and I've gotten almost no hits. Everyone busy? I hate commenting on the WSJ because most people can't read the relevant article. So, with that said, I'm putting a moratorium on WSJ-commenting. I'm sticking to the Gray Lady.

I haven't done any philosophy lately. I'm going home tonight and I'm going to work through the rest of the instances of "comes to an end", which I found using Amazon's handy Look Inside feature, all instances in On Certainty. I.e., "But explanations come to an end." What does that mean? It means, actually, quite a few things. Coming to an end is in a way reducible to acting or action, but attendant to coming to an end is a whole intellectual outlook that remains, unfortunately, quite foreign to most people. Coming to an end hinges on a coherence epistemological model; it hinges on language-games; it hinges on certainty and knowledge; it hinges on a long perspective regarding all the preceding. It's an infinitely interesting phenomenon to me. To say that explanations come to an end (therefore, do, don't think) seems out of hand to preclude innovations in explanation. Maybe. But who really is doing the (real/pertinent/exciting/edifying/good) explaining? Not the philosophers.