29th
If it’s all the same to you
I remember it clearly: sitting in an uncomfortable desk chair in a makeshift office cubicle anxiously staring at Joseph Barnes, my Metaphysics T.A. I was, as was usual, struggling to write a paper with a looming due date, and I decided to voice my concerns to the person who was going to grade what I was going to write. After an extended pause, he said one of those sentences that just stick with you: ‘It’s very difficult to write something both interesting and true.’
I was recently reminded of this occasion and these words when I read something that Russell reports Wittgenstein to have said: ‘[N]othing is tolerable except producing great works or enjoying those of others.’ The two had just watched a boat race together and Wittgenstein, with his usual intensity, thought that the whole affair was vile and that they both ought to die because of how they had squandered their time.
There was to follow a long discussion of what interestingness amounted to from a logical as well as a pragmatic position, the virtue of truth and truthfulness, the necessity behind all great works, why we cannot all be anything we want to be despite current popular democratic ideals, the effect the internet and widespread technology in general has had on forms of art (esp. writing), the consequences of the democratization of information from an epistemological perspective, and the pitfalls of the desire for maintaining others’ privacy (when we talk about not knowing what others are experiencing when they have ordinary human experiences (e.g. seeing a color, having a toothache, feeling anxious about writing, etc.)). But I decided against it, in light of Wittgenstein’s criticism.
