Swimming Lessons

Photo by Phil Shaw / Barcroft Media 

londonbabyswim.co.uk 

Sometimes, one pulls oneself up short, and asks: What am I doing this for? Three years of blogging, over 540 posts published, and then : What on earth am I doing it for? 

Some bloggers, of course, are writing to earn an income and establish an online reputation. I wouldn't mind a little fame and fortune myself, if I'm honest. Nevertheless, if I were writing for money and a large following of readers I should doubtless write differently, and with far more success.

What, then, am I writing for? There must be some imperative. Is it for the sake of humanity? Hardly. Like Lawrence, the very thought of such makes ones sick: for the sake of humanity as such, I wouldn't lift a little finger, much less write a blog.

But Torpedo the Ark isn't written either just for fun or personal amusement (nor even for spite). So what then?

I suppose I see it as a space of philosophical adventure and an escape from all forms of idealism that promise safety from the elements and end by becoming prisons. I don't want to be part of Noah's menagerie; just another coordinated specimen preserved thanks to the grace of God. I'd rather take my chances swirling about in the flood waters and in the midst of chaos.

Again, to paraphrase Lawrence, the elderly and the cowardly can stay aboard the boat if they wish, or sit tight on heavy posteriors in some crevice upon Pisgah, babbling about salvation and hoping to view the Promised Land. But I encourage my readers to climb down the mountain or abandon ship and ask themselves the critical question that remains at the heart of modern and contemporary philosophy: the question of Aufklärung.

Actually, this is a series of questions concerning not just past experience, but present reality and future possibility. What's at stake is not merely an analysis of the truth, but what Foucault describes as an ontology of ourselves and of the world not as something divinely ordered and full of love and reason, but as a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; "a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back ..."

Ultimately, Torpedo the Ark is an invitation to go swimming ...  


Notes:

See D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223-229, which partly inspired this post and which I paraphrase throughout.   

The lines quoted from Nietzsche are from section 1067 of The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 549-50.