Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/Der Streit der Fakultäten, tr. Gregor (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 177:
To want to entertain others with the inner history of the play of my thoughts, which has subjective importance (for me) but no objective importance (valid for everyone), would be presumptuous, and I could justly be blamed for it.
There is no doubt about it: we bloggers are a presumptuous and vain lot. We report daily on the twists and turns of our paltry minds. In mitigation, a couple of points.
First, I don’t force my posts on anyone. If you are here, it is of your own free will. Second, there is something fascinating to me about the origin of my own and others' ideas and how they in their abtractness percolate up out of the concretion of their authors' Existenz. The blogs of most interest to me combine the existential with the theoretical, the autobiographical with the impersonal. The question of the origin of ideas must not be confused with the question of their validity or lack thereof. But both questions are fascinating, and how exactly they connect is even more so. Now if I find the intertwinement of the existential and the theoretical interesting, then perhaps you do as well; herein may reside some justification for reports on "the inner history of the play of my thoughts."
I oppose the nomenclature whereby individual weblogs (as opposed to group weblogs) are referred to as ‘personal’ weblogs. This blog is more impersonal than personal and I fret over the ratio. Objektive Wichtigkeit should predominate over subjektive. But by how much?
By the way, Streit der Fakultäten is a fascinating book. I’m an old Kant man; I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of the transcendental unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason. That was back in 1978. But it was only in 2008 that I cracked my copy of The Conflict of the Faculties. This is a nice edition: German Fraktur on the left, good English translation on the right.
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