Sometimes I like to details what I’ve done. It’s empirical, a bottom-up affair. It could be replaced by a numbered or bullet-point list (the chronology being implied by implicit order of the points) … or even a definition list, a definition term being in this case a time or range or `then’ or ‘later,’ even.<\/p>\n
\nOther times, perhaps far too frequently, I work top-down in a couple of different ways. There’s always the “I have a topic already” top-down approach into which I fit digressions and arguments and evidence. Points to be made, and the like. Nobody mistakes these for accurate portrayals of reality; they are rhetorical. But other times I prefer a one-two-three (three being my favorite number for these sorts of things), three separate `topics’ as `organizing principles,’ occasionally or even often merely metaphorical.<\/p>\n
While a bottom-up list is often listless, the top-down approach can be needlessly exclusive, for what does not fit the topic (or topics) must be excluded; a playful counterpart is to include intentionally the incongruous and inspire myself as well as other readers to contemplate the connections.<\/p>\n
There are the obvious one, the puns, for example, such as talking about slugs for headlines or titles (or bullets) under a topic entitled `At a snail’s pace’ (or the latter formatted as a slug, but I digress). In the past I’ve been too witty for my own good; on occasion I’ve come back months later to a post only to read a quote or similar provided without source or context, only to wonder what I was thinking, wonder what it was all about.<\/p>\n
A reader might interject here and complain along the lines, “pick the format that best fits the content!” That is, treating the topic as similar to `pick the right tool to the task.’ But there are unspoken assumptions here, for when a nail is given, a hammer is used, and when you have a screw you use a screwdriver or drill (with the proper attachment). When you need to puree something, there are numerous appliances at your disposal. But while there are conventions to diaries there is no a priori appropriate format, and there is no reason to assume that a blog post is merely a 21st-century diary, etc.<\/p>\n
But this is needless rationalization and sophistry to most. What it made me think of, though, is a common problem in philosophy and elsewhere: the empirical-rational divide, that between the analytic and synthetic, between the necessary and the contingent. That is to say: Kant’s project in the 1st Critique and beyond.<\/p>\n
It does not follow that if ‘A’ and ‘B’ are (a) wrong, (b) partially right and partially wrong, and\/or (c) seemingly equally right yet in contradiction, that “the truth” lies “somewhere in the middle” or similar. First it implies that there is a scale containing both A and B, that they correspond somehow to and within the same system, which is clearly the case if B = -A or !A (depending on your system of symbols and intention). While it is a fallacy to exclude the mean, it is likewise a corollary to a fallacy (question begging in this case) to assume that such a mean exists. Kant’s answer, and the pragmatic if not always theoretically sound answer to plenty of other discourses, is in a way a matter of arguing from consequences: a purely rule-based, top-down approach does not necessarily match reality, and a naively `reality-based’ (empirical) approach makes unwarranted assumptions and cannot on its own provide generalizations that we can be certain of … so if we want rules that correspond to reality, we need another way, one that is `somewhere in between.’<\/p>\n
It’s Kant’s answer to knowledge\/epistemology … how can we know anything with certainty (and it is a `what if’ sort of situation, not *that* we know with certainty, but that *if we do,* then certain (pre-)conditions must be met), part of his answer to aesthetics, and so on. And that answer is, broadly speaking, `the schema,’ something like a template or outline, something that is not a logical concept, but has its generality, and not a mere (sense) experience, but has its intuitive wholeness and immediacy.<\/p>\n
It’s something I keep in mind not because it is the answer to every problem — after all, without metaphors and some extensions it is not `obvious’ that this … schema … is the solution to blog posts –, but because Kant’s framework is less a solution than a meta-solution, and itself a schema. That is, a problem-solving heuristic.<\/p>\n
Everything in moderation … even moderation. Potential paradoxes are the price we pay for putting too much faith in rules. If there were a rule I’d use — remembering that every rule is meant to be broken (including the rule to break rules?) –, it might be (regarding blogs) that every empirical, bottom-up, descriptive account needs a generalization (not the same as a ‘lesson’ or ‘moral’), and that every logical, top-down, orderly narrative or report needs to be made intuitive and holistic.<\/p>\n
Of course: not every.<\/p>\n
And not necessarily this one.<\/p>\n
P.S.:<\/strong> This post is not a letter, even if I post like like one. But without signature or salutation, or even a stamp (postage or of approval), but here is my postscript (not the postfix notation kind). This Sunday, though not necessarily every such Sunday, is a nice day not only to break free of the rules of the week and just do and experience, but a nice day and way to reflect — not only recycle and regurgitate –, that is: sort and select, not so much put into preexisting boxes or think outside the box, but make new boxes, even boxes within boxes.<\/p>\n P.P.S.:<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometimes I like to details what I’ve done. It’s empirical, a bottom-up affair. It could be replaced by a numbered or bullet-point list (the chronology being implied by implicit order of the points) … or even a definition list, a … Continue reading \n