We studious types are not about to abandon study. It is is just too richly satisfying. Now if you read, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game.
What’s the good of it? It is self-evidently good in and of itself. Ghostly culture, geistige Kultur, is the highest culture, and everything else exists to serve it. Vita activa ancilla philosophiae. The active life, the life of hustling and hassling, of getting and making, is the handmaiden of philosophy. The worldy hustle is for the sake of contemplative repose.
Blogging is an excellent tool for the assembly, preliminary refinement, and presentation of one’s thoughts on any topic that turns one’s crank. One e-jaculates them into the 'sphere, and on an auspicious day one snags a worthwile comment or stimulating e-mail response. Fellow mortals can hinder, but they can also help. This medium allows one to interact with them without having them in one’s face. Some of us like that. It is community without physical proximity, a disembodied community, a meeting of minds without a collision of bodies. "Hell is other people" said Sartre famously, but he was thinking of them all assembled in one physical place. Heaven is having your interlocutor at a safe distance, like Thoreau and his vis-à-vis at opposite ends of his Walden pond cabin.
Blogging is a learning tool. Sure, there is hereabouts a bit of pontificatory rant, and ranting pontification, not to mention some necessary smiting of ideological enemies who are sorely in need of smiting; but mainly I blog to learn, and I learn because I don’t know. Nescio ergo blogo, with apologies to those who want Latin to stay good and dead. I do not know, so I blog.
I blog for the same reason that I write: to know my mind, to actualize my mind, and to hook a few like-minded people to myself. When mind-actualization becomes a chore, then it will be time to pack it in. But when that time comes, it will be time to pack it in all the way.
Many are the reasons to blog. To develop a thicker skin is another of them. A thick skin is an attribute conducive to negotiating this world with equanimity. Since I've taken up blogging, I have noticed a definite uptick in the fitness of my psycho-armor. Nasty e-mails and the like roll off me. The scum of humanity offend me less. And one day, to cop a line from Nietzsche, "my only negation shall be to look away."
It is one of the arts of life to know how to live with zest and engagement, yet with a certain detachment. To borrow an old Hindu figure, the lotus blossom floats on the water but without getting wet. In contact with life but unsullied by it. It's an ideal, but we need ideals to live well.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Four and a Half Years Into It: Why Blog?
- Blogging Exhaustion
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.