Writing, researching, thinking.

I had mentioned on this LJ a few months ago that I was offered the chance to deliver OBOD’s “Mount Haemus Lecture” for professional research related to Druidry. This is my thesis:

In Druidry, both ancient and modern, ethical ideas are presented not in the form of rules and laws, nor in the form of a utilitarian calculus of benefits and harms, but rather in the form of character-values. This way of thinking about ethics is known in contemporary philosophy as ‘Areteology’, or ‘Virtue’. Furthermore, many of the most important Druidic virtues, such as honour, integrity, inspiration, strength, courage, and so on, are not only categories of ethics. They are also categories of aesthetics. We value them not just because they are right and good; we also value them because they are beautiful. I shall therefore also explore this overlap between the aesthetic and the ethical, and show how Celtic spirituality is particularly well positioned to embody a meeting place between the ethical and the aesthetic, the beautiful and the good.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But let me assure you it is not! But that kind of complexity is often a good sign. A good philosophical question is rarely as easy as it appears to be on the surface. And someone who thinks he has completely understood a philosophical text after only one reading has almost certainly tricked himself. As my doctoral supervisor used to say, “Good philosophical thought is subtle.”

For research resources, I’ve been shying away from Celtic sources. The essay may in the end have rather little to do with Druidry (except insofar as I, a modern-day Celt, doing the job of a philosopher-druid, am the one writing it!) I’ve been reading good ol’ Aristotle again, but finding him not very helpful. I moved on to Plotinus and a few others who inherited his tradition. Better – but not as useful as I had hoped. So I moved forward a few thousand years to Hegel. Better again. But I’m also running out of time to finish the essay. I wrote about 3,000 words, six weeks ago, and then got busy with other things: job-hunting, among them. Now I’ve about a month left, and I feel I’m only half way there.

I want to write the very best philosophical work here. Yet I don’t want to write something so esoteric that no one understands it. I am constantly reminding myself of a quote from one of my favourite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche. In Die Frolische Wissenschaft he gives aphorism 173 of the third book the heading, ‘To be deep and to seem deep:’

To be deep and to seem deep. — He who knows himself to be deep strives for clarity; he who would like to seem deep to the masses strives to achieve obscurity. For the masses regard as deep whatever they cannot see the reason for; the masses are so fearful and go so unwillingly into the water.

In other words: if you want to be popular, strive for obscurity and complexity. If you want to be right, strive for clarity.

And that’s not so easy to do.