It is Sunday. I have recently started to consider Sunday to be a particularly unpleasant day of the week. It’s a day that doesn’t know what to do with itself.
A sensible thing to do would be to go and read some Kant. Or perhaps a nice gentle book about Kant. But it looks sort of grey and miserable outside. I find this makes the whole proposition untenable.
Studying philosophy is a strange pursuit. It’s like trying to watch a stage show where you have to animate the puppets yourself. These dense books do not read themselves, in other words. Before getting swept up in the drama, there is a lot of grunt work done in a room by yourself. Rather plodding grunt work. Usually done while feeling snoozy and distracted.
Another strange thing about writing a thesis. It’s as though I have made a commitment: ‘by 2011, I will have an opinion about [x]’. And so you start writing, in the hope that by the end, you will have an argument. This seems counter-intuitive. Usually one has an opinion before one opens one’s mouth. Whereas in the land of thesis writing, it is verbiage that comes first, and a point of view second.
Or perhaps it all feels this way because I don’t yet know enough. Should probably remedy that by reading a book. But which one?
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