[MD] To Matt from A Short History of Decay a repost

[Matt Kundert]

I'm guessing it was this post that led you to say this on Aug. 5:

Marsha said:
Matt, you've already admitted that you do not write for me as a 
reader, but for yourself.  I should have special consideration for you?  
I think not.  My statements were clear enough.  Take them or leave 
them.

At that time, I said this:

Matt said:
I'm sorry you feel that I've been abnormally unfair to you personally.  
Dialogical questioning is the root of Socrates's Sophistic relativism, 
something I thought you had an appreciation for.  I wasn't asking for 
special consideration, just regular consideration, but as you attribute 
to me a gross negligence on the part of my consideration for you, 
you've chosen to abdicate further discussion.

That's fair enough.  Good luck.

Matt:
Reading again my monologue on amateur philosophy, I again don't 
understand your bitter attitude of "special consideration" or "take 
them or leave them."  I can understand why you might feel that way 
about other people, or about me generally (I feel bitter generally 
about some people), but not from this post specifically in relationship 
to me, where you took me to be admitting something damning about 
my relationship to you.  I still don't read the bit where I mistreated 
you.  All I read is an attempt to extrapolate from the part we both 
agree to be a useful mantra: "it is not always safe to care."

It isn't.  When I respond to people's posts, it is because I'm letting 
down my guard to extend some caring.  The extent to which a person 
is sincerely trying to understand another person's point of view and is 
truly open to it is a function of care.  I don't care about everybody's 
viewpoint anymore: people who seem to me more concerned about 
rhetorical grandstanding than a mutual conversation with me are 
people I've decided to systematically avoid, because in opening 
myself up by caring about them enough to try and understand them, 
I've regularly been slapped across the face.  The people I talk _to_ 
now are people I think it is worth talking to.  (And if I don't talk 
regularly _to_ you, that doesn't mean you are a person I perceive 
as a slapper: sometimes it just means I can't think of anything to say.)

The ability to sense sincerity and openness in writing is difficult.  The 
history of the MD is a record of people misreading other people's level 
of sincerity and openness.  It is also a history of misunderstanding, 
and a history of people being open only to be slapped and then slapping 
another who was trying to be open, and--most tragic of all--a history of 
pairs of individuals who are open and get slapped, and then trade 
places, with the slapper now ready to be open, but getting slapped by 
the other whose face still stings.

I try, nowadays, to treat people with respect by not wasting their 
time.  When I started quoting back your lines to you, I was wasting 
your time, but it was because it was unclear to me how you weren't 
wasting time by constantly just repeating those lines.  At a certain 
point, it seemed to me that you'd moved from precision to closing 
down dialogue, which is your prerogative, but the manner seemed 
wasteful and disrespectful.  I tried treating those lines in a sincere, 
open manner by calling them "theses," but then you jumped on this.  
I have no clear understanding why you took offense intellectually to 
that characterization.  But it seemed to me that any explication on 
my part of what I meant would be a waste of my time because you 
did not, in your query, seem to me to posing a sincere question, 
one you actually wanted to read a sincere answer from me about.  
So I quoted the lines because it seemed like those were the only 
words you've lately found acceptable.

Matt

> Marsha said:
> I thought all along that you were not writing for a caring 
> reader.  That's been my frustration, but I understand it 
> completely.  It is not always safe to care on this list.
> 
> Matt:
> That's a good way of putting it.  Over the last ten years 
> I've come to think more and more about the specific topic 
> of "amateur philosophy," what it's supposed to be and do, 
> what it's relationship is to other fields (especially 
> "professional philosophy"), how one should or might do it, 
> what one should or might get out of it, how I should or 
> might do or figure out any of these.  One reason that 
> particular topic has come to the fore for me has been my 
> experience on this list alongside my experience in the 
> university--pretty near simultaneous--and the very 
> different kinds of audiences that make up either, in 
> addition to the different kinds of books I find nourishing 
> and who _they_ were written for (the differences in 
> audience between Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day, 
> Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, Baldwin's The Fire Next 
> Time, Stout's The Flight from Authority, Faulkner's As I 
> Lay Dying, and Franken's Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat 
> Idiot), despite the fact that the nuggets of wisdom and 
> nourishment that float to the surface between all of 
> them for me do not seem to me dissimilar.
> 
> So how should I compose myself?
> 
> I've decided that the best way to avoid being completely 
> disappointed in my experience as a writer is to balance 
> pleasing others and pleasing myself (to varying degrees at 
> different times).  We say that those who only please 
> others are "sell outs" (or boring, mechanical didactic types), 
> but I have enough experience with my sister to be 
> amazingly bored with people who spout the outsider-rhetoric 
> that most of the time excuses their inability to be 
> appreciated by anybody else (and I don't care if you're the 
> angsty hipster down the street or Melville, the rhetoric is 
> tiring, even if Melville was in the end right that he was an 
> unappreciated genius and not both unappreciated and 
> _not_ a genius, as the hipster is likely).
> 
> I know that most of the time nobody understands or 
> appreciates, or other kinds of audience-epithets, what I 
> write, but particularly when you write amateur philosophy 
> for the particular kinds of audience that might make up a 
> listserve or travel to a blog, I've come to think that if at 
> the very least I'm not growing by my writing, then it might 
> not be worth it because I cannot count on anybody else 
> even reading it, let alone anything else.
> 
> Much of the time I don't think about what I'm doing, but at 
> least some of the time I try to cater to an actual audience 
> I'm aware of existing.  I may not always make the right 
> choices in how I think I'm catering to them (Plato's word 
> was "pandering"--and his outsider-rhetoric led to an entire, 
> democratically-acidic political philosophy, recently come to 
> be known as Straussianism and an ethos that populated 
> the Bush administration), but with such a diverse 
> population of interlocutors with different backgrounds, 
> attitudes, and perspectives, I've given up worrying, and 
> just go by my gut.  That's where facts come from 
> anyways, so I hear.
> 
> Matt