ego cogito, ego sum
BY ALP RODOPLU (HIST/V)
[Preliminary. One feels more in control when writing as opposed to speaking, because for the writing process, the presence of an audience is only hypothetical. When you have an actual person right there in front of you, things work quite differently. You cannot take as long as you want to formulate in the most precise and comprehensive manner what it is that you wish to say. The ability to observe reactions very often leads to a compromise in the content you are offering, or in the way, the style in which you are presenting this material; and perhaps you end up abstaining from claims you initially believed it necessary to voice. One feels more exposed and unsafe, perhaps too involved with an audience, when speaking. But when writing (oh my!), one is empowered by a feeling of control lacking during speech. For an audience is not even a certainty at this stage, but only a potential; and there is time -- precious time to contemplate details, to cover up bits and pieces of one's self, and to decide what to show, what to imply and what to hide.
But mind you: this feeling is misleading. Writing is, in the final analysis, a form of exhibitionism. Unlike speaking, during which involuntary lapses of nudity might come to pass, writing is more an act of self-presentation than one of self-creation: it is a claiming of the contours of one's self, an act of coming forth, coming out. A text discloses much about its creator, especially through the manner in which a writer enjoys the comforts of absolute command over what he/she does or does not say. All masks are temporary; all veils are impermanent. In its true form, the written, as an event, entails -- and is intended to entail -- the absence of a fig leaf, or any possible substitute for one. Questioning whether such intent is deliberate all of the time is a legitimate point: one might claim involuntary exhibitionism to be a contradiction in terms. I say, "If the king is naked, the king is naked."]
The Point. When the philosopher Johannes Climacus pronounced, "Out of love for mankind … and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere," his intent was not a sadistic one -- irony, nonetheless, was indisputably intended. Had he ever existed (gasp!), Climacus would have been convinced about not only the nobleness of such an undertaking, but also its necessity. Whether being misinterpreted would have been a concern or a desire, I cannot say. But we know that death could bring no end to his Danish editor's sufferings induced by much misunderstanding and misjudgment. The editor did exist.
At any rate, that philosophical sensibility is altogether another thing is the point one must recognize here. For I wish to ask: is philosophical sensibility compromised when one is forced to read the works in which the varieties of such are found? For instance, one Chinaman of Königsberg argues, "It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think." He claims that the lack of determination and daring to think for oneself without the guidance of another is self-imposed immaturity or tutelage, from which humankind must free itself in order to fulfill its potential. It would be, for this thinker, a "crime against human nature" if an age were to claim to decide what the extent and limits of human knowledge were to be, and "the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees as having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner." The pressing question is whether this very criterion applies to the Chinaman of Königsberg -- not in this case personally to him, but to those who make his writings mandatory reading.
However, a more urgent matter seems to have arisen. Let us put this "sensibility" business aside for a moment and ask: Do we live in an age that is under the tutelage, the tyranny of previous ages or the mindset of preceding epochs? Is our age one in which we are being fed what to think, what to say, what to believe and what to wish? Do today's most esteemed and free institutions of learning and intellectual endeavor serve to break this tutelage (given its reality), to assist their pupils to gather the perseverance and willpower to use their own reason and understanding, and to overcome the immaturity of dependence on another's guidance? Most importantly, have we stopped asking what it is that we compromise when we choose "not to trouble ourselves," particularly when countless others have troubled themselves regarding a shortage of self-troubling?
But that's the thing, you see: we encounter all these questions that appear most pressing, inescapably relevant, and imperative to answer, and all I can think is, "But I thought we had put aside that so-called sensibility?"
[Afterword. Thought and its textual formulation may, and often do, suffer from a certain kind of tonal discrepancy, because often, the two tend toward different keys.]