I read Charles Taylor's latest, on the Romantic poets et al. (finishing with Miloscz, which was appreciated) in Belgrade a couple weeks ago; the first half was valuable, but the second half seemed to peter out in a flurry of grace notes. The point of the first half, the defense of conceptual realism, seems important. If I can say that of two incorporeal notions, one is more important than the other, not just for me, but always and everywhere, much of the speculative reductionism that has enabled so much intellectual (and otherwise) corruption instantly loses its legitimacy. If there is an enduring map to the spirit, then we simply don't have the utter freedom of meaninglessness and devised games. It's as if there's an expedition, lost in the wilds, and half want to have a final extravant feast, as there's no hope of rescue or finding one's bearings, and the other half is trying to point out to them the fact that they actually do presently have a map in their hands.
-----
There is something quixotic about this shift that I've made in the last few months to putting more text out there. Anyone who was conditioned by the usual forms of of social life and television workplace dramas, and who stumbled upon a notebook of someone who is actually trying to do real thinking grounded in more secure notions of the past, is going to think the author a loon, and additionally (for reasons unclear to him), think that his opinion about that should be shared with others. And the trend in online writing is clearly away from such things; witness the close censorship and highly mediated social language on the twitmachine, or the fact that AI is routinely used to revise CVs to make them more like the sort of CV that one should write. Imagine a 1950's television character happening on a notebook of Heidegger, or one of the Monkees stumbling upon some writings of Derrida. It simply doesn't compute. I don't claim to be identical with such folks, but we are all playing, with greater or lesser skill, the same sport that the stranger would find baffling.
------
Onward.