The Project. The Reading.

I have chosen to truncate my current writing project on Collingwood and Bergson. Initially I had hoped to pursue a series of questions that I now intend to confine to a separate project. The questions concerning friendship, duty, and concrete relations to not-selfs cannot be contained within the framework of the Collingwood-Bergson project.

I generally have a problem with limited statements. I have found myself several times trying to pursue such a variety of questions within one piece of writing that I jeopardize the coherence of the project. In this instance I have decided to let the comparative study of Collingwood and Bergson stand on its own. The work I did has been invaluable in helping me move towards a fuller understanding of their work, but it can't be everything. There is time yet for more projects.

I also made this decision because it has become clear to me that my grasp on the extant literature on friendship is inadequate. I began reading A.C. Grayling's Friendship and enjoyed my jaunt through his cursory history of the philosophical writing on friendship. His writing on Plato's Lysis was just downright weak, however. His takeaway basically being: 'this is an early dialogue of Plato's that is inconclusive and advocates a simple utilitarian view of friendship'. I've spent a bit of time with the Lysis in the last year, and I'm astounded that he could read it in such a way. In any case, I will continue to learn to read the ancients seriously. I'm less confident about my ability to speak intelligently of Aristotle's account of friendship in his ethics. I did the ethics last year with some friends and feel like I have a solid starting point with that work.

In any case, I'll be editing and revising the Collingwood-Bergson project over the coming weeks and will make the entire thing available at some point.

I also want to start working on something new. I have some new reading, for example, that needs examination. The most serious things I've encountered have been Wittgenstein's On Certainty and Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I'm quite please with what it felt like to touch these authors. I don't yet know how to breath with them, and I am hoping that some writing will help clarify what I've learned from them.

In particular, I wanted to do a bit of reflection on Wittgenstein and Hume's approaches to the problem of experience, or the bedrock of practices that underlies all thought and activity. This would line up well with an inquiry into Leo Strauss' analysis of Collingwood, and the problem of establishing with clarity Collingwood's approach to relativism.

In any case, the project is 'done'. The reading is happening. The thinking is happening. It's unclear to me what I'll be working on next. But, to be frank, I just made myself the first pair of cutoffs of the season and I'm itching to wear them around. I know there are quieter parts of myself, parts that like dancing and throwing frisbees in the park, and I need to cultivate those as well.