Why I Wrote a Long “About” Essay Examining My Life: an Exercise in Philosophy
When sailing, you don’t simply catch the wind. You can tack against it by zig-zagging. When writing a long essay, flow—like wind—carries material forward, but ultimately, the revision process is a deeply involved complexity of examination that may yield no less than a stunning result.
On the About Page
Socrates is made famous by Plato for saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and I’ve been examining mine by writing philosophy in notebooks since I was 17. Now I’ve exercised the opportunity to make my website’s “About” page a house with a deep foundation. Having broken with the convention of keeping it short and without substance, I’ve put what equal to some 27 pages or more at the bottom, which is accessible in the main menu, above.
I haven’t engaged the exercise because I take Socrates's advice. Nor do I write by hand in journals for that reason, but because it gives me results. When uncertainty crops up in my life, I can solve the problem in minutes.
That uncertainly usually amounts to deep thought with the quality of being universal, just as Immanuel Kant spoke of acting on “that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
I read somewhere, decades ago, that philosophers often are not the best of writers. Kant’s quote is wanting that way. You might think of it as follows: By journaling, if you solve a problem in a way that would be useful for others, you’ve done more than address your own need.
But why I wrote the long essay for the About page of my website is a little different. I spent months working on it. When I write a blog post, it might take me a couple of hours. I always go back and read a blog post later, and usually, I have to do a little tweaking. But it’s never anything like spending months to develop a vision.
I also read and re-read that About essay to make sure every word and punctuation mark is right. I believe I’ve made it perfect.
Not Only Philosophy
I would mislead you if I claimed my essay is only a philosophical examination. I name it “A Life in and Out of Time,” but it opens under bold heading beneath that title, “Morning Melody and Salt on the Air,” which flavors the literary quality of the essay as what you might call “being there,” if you insist on a piece of philosophical jargon I find particularly apt for writing that puts the reader into the place evoked. The quote is from Martin Heidegger’s tome Being and Time.
Literary writers also use jargon to describe what they do. How many times have I heard “show don’t tell,” as if it’s a panacea for otherwise bad writing? If you’re a bad writer, “showing” it won’t save you! Nothing less than daily practice, as committed to as a concert pianist is committed to his art, might do.
Even that is no guarantee, but if a writer devotes himself, it’s likely he’ll succeed. Those who do have a certain temperament that not only makes it possible but a need.
Why the Essay Anchors the Purpose of My Website
The post you’re reading is the 27th I’ve published on the new website, which has been operational for about seven weeks. I’m not only interested in using the website to promote my books. (I’m planning on publishing more than The Microlight Quest.) And though I’m committed to delivering blog posts I hope do well in organic searches, I’m deeply grateful for having inherited a following from my former blog Litton’s Fishing Lines.
That assures us that while some posts will never do well in searches, they’ll get read by people for whom they make a difference. I’ll get to some of the gist of why my philosophy matters, but for a moment, I want to tell you about something I didn’t see coming.
I expected my audience from the former blog would find the new website, and I believed visitors would check out the website page by page. They did. (I simply view Squarespace Analytics to find out.) But what’s come as a surprise is the interest among them—the interest you take if you’re a regular reader—in my posts from the Literature and Philosophy category. They view posts from the Photography category less than half as much. I think it’s important you know, if you’re reading the philosophy posts and wondering who else does. A couple dozen or so of you are. Not as many as read the fishing posts but definitely a turn out.
I understand my readers better now: They’re interested in philosophy and literature coming from someone who writes well on fishing, and that makes sense, because we’re interested in the “why” of life. By absorbing ourselves, not only in fishing itself, but by reading about it (I have a library of books on fishing), we want to know more about life as it’s related to that absorption of attention.
To get back to the meaning of the first paragraph under the “Purpose” heading, above, as I was both learning about how to create the website, and creating the About essay, I felt that more than anything else, my website might be about reaching the few people who will read that essay and find value in it.
Now I think the blog posts have perhaps the potential of being as important, not to leave out that memoir is work revised at length to create a refined vision. Like my About essay does, memoir goes beyond examining one particular life to universalizing the truth so the reader is included. I believe my long essay anchors the website’s purpose because it’s meant to be read. As long as it is.
Again, not only does the About essay make it possible for me to reach readers on the subject of philosophy; obviously the blog does, too. It’s just that, as I said earlier, a blog post is not the same commitment. “A Life in and Out of Time,” is more like a 27-page book.
At any rate, besides in memoir form, I might never have had the opportunity to publish on philosophy. It’s true that Eric Hoffer, a social philosopher of the 20th century who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, got books of philosophy published without a college education, though he earned honorary doctorates. But besides Ryan Holiday’s, I don’t see works of philosophy being published today by college dropouts.
Most of My Work’s in Notebooks
I’ve said before that I do serious journaling. Most of what amounts to philosophy from me is handwritten. Often inspired by energy and intelligence quite beyond the everyday self my fishing buddies know. Pen and paper is more conducive to the free, wild, divine quality of that intelligence than are complicated electronic devices, although computer screens do have their place in the revision process.
The Purpose
You would ask, I’m sure, about the purpose of my philosophy, and I have at least a provisional answer: What I want to do is help move philosophy from sociocultural postmodernism and any of its variants to the participatory objectivity of nature.
What I mean by “participatory objectivity” is that I’m little interested in the “dead” quality of an objective world we don’t take part in. That philosophy—of objectivity—did lead, if especially from Rene Descartes, to the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, but while we need to keep the scientific method, we ourselves need a larger world in which to relate and be active than merely a sociocultural world. A world that exists as a given, not merely as our construct.