Sunday, July 04, 2004

I Can Do a Great Exegesis of Myself

It suddenly occurred to me what I see myself as doing in Siris. I tend to think of weblogs, at their best, as exercises of wit in the old sense, i.e., ingenium, the faculty of discovery and invention. This is what I tend to look for when I look at other weblogs; if I don't find it I'm disappointed. So what I do here is pull together resources, link diverse ideas together, combine poetry and philosophy and anecdote, cover the universe and back again piecemealwise, all to the service of wit (my own, primarily, but you're all welcome to what you can get out of it). Posts are like brainstorming, or, to borrow an image from Novalis, pollen. In blogging, at least, I am a Romantic philosopher. For evidence see here and here, among other places. The last time I read any of the Romantics was in undergrad; if I remember correctly Novalis intrigued me, but Schlegel bored me. Perhaps I will have to go back and look at them more closely.