Thinking

Oh such restlessness in my mind right now. I want to channel it into some kind of energy so that I can write. I want to write on Clausewitz and other related things. Like William James and Bergson.

Unfortunately that writing is wrapped up with a future that no longer seems accessible to me and thus causes me a kind of pain.

Doing scholarly work on Clausewitz was something that I wanted to do in graduate school. I wanted to really tackle On War and Chicago or Chapel Hill. Alas, I won't be going there this year. I'll continue to live my life this year.

It's interesting and difficult for me to acknowledge that doing academic work causes me pain.

I was doing some academic writing the other day and an acquaintance came into the room and told me he thought it was cool that I did that kind of stuff for pleasure. I unreflectively told him that it was causing me pain.

I've been struggling to have clear feelings this week or two. They've remained amorphous to me, covered in that generic blanket of anxiety and fear. I'm trying to peel back that blanket a little bit, get a clearer picture of what is really going on in my heart and mind.

It involves a lot of longing. A lot of pain at things I want that aren't present for me. Things like love, like a potential academic career.

An academic career? What a nightmare. I read so many articles online about how you shouldn't go to graduate school for the humanities. Just don't do it! It seems pretty obvious. Yet so many of us hold out hope that we are the tenured ones, we are the ones who will come out on the other side unscathed, thinking our beautiful thoughts.

It probably won't happen for me, and that is hard because it means the future is unimaginable.

For what the universities represent is not simply an institution that could give me a job. It is a way of thinking, a way of living.

How is philosophy to persist as an attitude when the institutions meant to house it are broken and the larger institutions are hostile to it? At the very least, the working world is not really conducive to philosophical thinking. But neither is being a university professor, Collingwood warned me.

I think my draw to the universities is really about love. I think that being in a university gives me the idea that I would be welcomed in a certain way by the people there. We would be brothers and sisters in thinking. We would think together, shelter ourselves from the world that did not nurture our minds.

So what is the point of doing this work in the present?

I see the Clausewitz scholarship as being so muddled. I look at my professors book and I read Clausewitz and I know he has it better than anyone else. Then I look at other writers, Strachan, Paret, and I just don't get where they are coming from.

Clausewitz is so much clearer than we think he is. We just have to spend a lot of time following him. It isn't until Book II Chapter II that he unveils his reform of the theory of war. It does not disappoint.

I wish I didn't know the things I know. I wish I could forget.

Institutions of the Heart and Mind

I recently read an article about my generation's anxiety with marriage.

We don't feel economically stable. We don't know how we are going to make our way in the world. Thus we don't feel comfortable thinking about marriage or children. How are we to think of these things unless we feel stable in our livelihoods? How are we to get married and live out this narrative unless we can buy a house and 2 cars?

I'm worried here about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm worried that we are forgetting about love because the institutional structures no longer support it. For marriage is but an institution meant to corral our experience of love, sex, and procreation.

The university system, like marriage, is an institution that structures the activity of thinking. Similarly, the universities are experiencing a bit of a crisis. They no longer have the means to fulfill the narrative that they have built themselves upon. They don't provide an appropriate or accessible outlet for thinking, just as marriage does not provide a strong framework for love.

My hope, my conviction (which I very much need to be correct), is that the experiences of love and thinking can exist in spite of the institutions that fail to facilitate them.

Love and thinking are self sustaining activities. The heart and the mind do not need institutional structure. Though it'd be awfully nice to have it.