That’s been one of those creeping thoughts lately, the kind that nags you until you’re forced to find some answer that will sufficiently hush up your Unconscious long enough to let you get on with it. We’re not talking about an existential crisis here, nor some deep soul-searching psychoanalysis, but simply about knowing that “all this” is going somewhere. You see, I’m the type that really has a distaste for things like using good ideas — deep, thoughtful insights — to erect facades for bad ideas…or no ideas. Houses of cards, one should know, have a tendency to collapse. Where am I going with this? I haven’t the foggiest idea.
Thing is, I work for a company that builds stuff, and that quite well, I’m told. I say “I’m told” because I haven’t the first clue about engineering. In fact, it’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I’ve spent the last decade doing, nor is it a field for which I have the mind, patience, or calling. I’m a political theorist, a student of philosophy, which is as precise as I can be while avoiding pronouncing myself a generalist, driven by anything I find right, just, and concerned with betterment in our brief time. On that note, I’m reminded of the opening pages of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, in which the philosopher is concerned with the concept of Bildung, or, as he quotes Herder, the “rising up to humanity through culture”. Regarding this cultivation of one’s humanity, “that by which and through which one is formed becomes completely one’s own. To some extent, everything that is received is absorbed, but in Bildung what is absorbed is not like a means that has lost its function. Rather, in acquired Bildung nothing disappears, but everything is preserved.”
I toil over ideas. I cannot take lightly Lakatos’ arguments on science; I cringe in admiration at the dexterity of Marx; I marvel at the Greeks. What I’m capable of building may be fleeting or may endure — yet it will have as its end what ought to be. If ideas can shape the spaces amongst people, and differences can be bridged by that which is held in common, then there may be something here after all.
Well then, how much does this matter? The answer with which I’ve been able to subdue my doubts: Ideas matter precisely as much as they are made to.
