I’ve kind of shifted gears (swapping lanes might be a more apt metaphor) with writing this week. I finished up the first draft for the little essay I was writing on everyday ethics and have started to redraft it, but I’ve also decided that I should be spending more time engaging directly with/reviewing/recounting what I’m reading. So shorter pieces for the most part. Hopefully there will be more that I feel comfortable sharing. And, hopefully, it doesn’t distract me from working on some of my real weaknesses: outlining, structure, etc.

It strikes me that at some point this blog is mostly just me listing what I think of as my weaknesses.

My reading is probably also going to take a bit of a turn. I’ll probably be wrapping up with the emotions research for a little bit, though I find it very interesting and will likely look for ways to pull it into what I’m working on. That’s not an entirely capricious decision… I do have reasons for believing that it’s related.

But anyways, I finished up with Carla Bagnoli’s Morality and the Emotions, an edited volume from 2011. Like most of these volumes it’s a mixed bag. There’s some really good, really interesting essays in there. There are also a handful of really bad ones. I was very unimpressed with one in particular, I might try to reflect on it at more length this week.

Otherwise, I read a little Wittgenstein this week. He is a constant draw for me. I often struggle with how to make sense of him and the meaning of his work for philosophy, and that intellectual (and emotional, frankly) struggle is one of the things that made me want to study it. Anyway, in some lectures in the early 1930s he made some interesting comments about Freud and psychoanalysis. He drew an analogy between psychoanalytic and aesthetic explanation, and claimed that both work not by finding causes but by placing things “side by side so as to exhibit certain features” in a way that causes us to recognise and enrich our understanding of some experience.

I have some problems with the complete distinction between reason and cause in Wittgenstein. I buy the argument that rational and causal explanations are different, though related, language games, but think that rational explanation itself isn’t confined to a single language game. I think that this is important when it comes to understanding the role of rational explanation, and the ascription of reason, in discussions of politics and ethics. Some of these ascriptions fail in these practices if they don’t carry some causal force. Maybe…

Otherwise, I finished up with Edmund White’s loosely connected autobiographical trilogy last week. I think he’s brilliant, and I plan on reading more of his work this year. Reading his work makes me more confident. It shows me that it’s entirely possible to write long, complicated, and digressive sentences that still read easily. I need to do a lot of work, a hell of a lot of work, before I can write in the way that he could, but it’s a goal for me.

I’ve returned to the Cambridge History of Australia for now. Once I’ve finished that up I’ll probably finish the Marx collection that I was reading. Then, more White? Maybe a break from planned leisure reading…

I haven’t found any really interesting articles to share this week. A recent episode from the Foreign Policy Live podcast with a former Indonesian politician is worth listening to, though. There were a few comments made that I found notable:

1. He notes that while the Asia-Pacific region is called a global ‘flashpoint’, it’s a much calmer region than most so-called flashpoints! It’s also an area where there seems to be much more ongoing diplomacy, whether that’s successful or not is another question.
2. He doesn’t mention Australia at all as a major player/figure in Indonesian political thinking. This is very interesting to me, particularly as there’s growing attention in Australia to the fact that we have done very poorly with treating our neighbours as genuine political partners. There’s still a noxious (sub-)imperial chauvinism hanging around here and it’s beginning to show backfire. From some perspectives, this might be a good thing.

Anyway, the episode is here, if you would like to listen to it.

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