I’m not sure exactly why I’m doing this, but here we go. The blog’s title, by the way, is supposed to recall Leszek Kołakowski’s remark, in his 1982 Tanner Lecture “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered”, that philosophers “neither sow nor harvest, they only move the soil”:
The cultural role of philosophy is not to deliver truth but to build the spirit of truth and this means: never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense, always to suspect that there might be “another side” in what we take for granted, and never to allow us to forget that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science
and are nonetheless crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know it. All the most traditional worries of philosophers … boil down to the quest for meaning; and they presuppose that in dissecting such questions we may employ the instruments of Reason, even if the ultimate outcome is the dismissal of Reason or its defeat. Philosophers neither sow nor harvest, they only move the soil. They do not discover truth; but they are needed to keep the energy of mind alive, to confront various possibilities of answering our questions.
The project of achieving this clarity and energy of thought is, as Orwell points out, not a merely academic pursuit, for “to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” And since clarity of writing is a necessity for clarity of thought, using this little corner of the web to work on those skills seems worthwhile even if I’m the only one reading it. Hopefully that won’t be the case, though …
Filed under: personal, philosophy
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