What Was the Question Again?

Jan 23rd, 2004 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

I’ve been thinking a good deal about focus lately. About relevance, subject matter, connections. The competing merits of breadth and intensity, range and depth. About how to think about such things, and how to decide between them – metaquestions again. I seem to think about metaquestions a lot – but then that’s not surprising, is it; B&W is essentially about metaquestions. At least I think it is. That’s one of the metaquestions I’ve been thinking about – what is B&W about.

Not that I don’t know, or don’t think I know, or think I don’t know. I do think I know. Or at least I know I have an opinion. But there could be other opinions – and in fact there is at least one other opinion. There are people – one or two at a minimum – who think B&W could have a narrower focus. Who would even prefer it to have a narrower focus – without necessarily going so far as to say it would be better with a narrower focus. Which leads us into some more metaquestions about such things as the difference (if any – that’s a further metaquestion – whether there is a difference) between preferences and moral or aesthetic or epistemological judgments. Between likes and dislikes on the one hand, and moral or cognitive evaluations on the other. Is saying ‘That’s good’ exactly the same as saying ‘I like that’? How do we distinguish between taste and judgment? Much-vexed questions, all of them.

And in a way part of B&W territory – in my view of the matter. But I can see why other views would differ. I think it is (in a way, as I said) because ‘how do we know?’ and ‘how do we distinguish’ questions are background questions for the more specific, local questions that are our brief. But then I take a broad view, and that’s not the only view possible.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I take a variety of broad views. Maybe I take a different one at any given moment – no, I’d better not follow that thought up, or we’ll be here all night, and I’ll never get around to saying what I was going to say. What was that, anyway? Something about what kinds of subjects I think are relevant enough to the concerns and interests of B&W that it makes sense to link to them. Something about epistemology, and what a lot of ground it covers – how hard it is to talk about almost anything without getting into it. Along with something about the interest inherent in the way apparently unrelated things actually fit together, and the thought that what B&W lacks in focus it makes up in range and breadth and interestingness. Or at least that it does to my taste, but that doesn’t mean it does to everyone’s.

But you see the problem. Once I start talking about metaquestions I can’t stop, I start following them as they zip around the room, and pretty soon I’ve got myself tangled up in a horrible knitting-wool snarl of them. Of course that’s not true really – it’s just rhetoric. I could delete and re-write. Leaving the digressions there is part of the point (I have a point? No not really what you’d call a point, just an endlessly-deferred series of approaches to points) – the point being that the subject matter of B&W seems to me to be so large and complicated and branching that a narrower focus would simply leave most of the subject out. But then that depends on how you define the subject.

In fact even the subject of this N&C is too large and branching for one N&C, so I’ll have to do a chapter 2 later.

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