A Resource for Civil Bloggers

A blog that might seem strangely familiar to some but under a different monicker than in those rushed times of yore, has resurrected a post of mine, which once appeared on the predecessor to this iteration of IMproPRieTies, long since deceased.

Upon a re-read under the conditions of this recent era of civil enforcement, or forced civility, it seemed timely enough to set here now Ynotes's rendering of those old notes.

The "content" is not mine, I was simply channelling a loopy fellow writing 210 years ago.

A Resource for Bloggers

Source: Tom Matrullo's New Commonplace Book

Recently the question has arisen as to what help is there for those who wish to improve their blogging. As our small contribution to this immense, serious, and fully urgent problem, we offer the following nuggets gleaned from a faulty edition of some mad Germans:

1. It is equally deadly for the mind to have a system or to have none. Therefore it will have to decide to combine both.
2. Publication is to thinking as confinement is to the first kiss.
3. Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
4. The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader’s eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.
5. What one usually calls reason is only one kind of the same, namely the thin and watered-down kind. There is also a thick, fiery reason that makes wit truly wit and lends to the terse style buoyancy and magnetism.
6. Not art and works of art make an artist, but sense and enthusiasm and instinct.
7. Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Liepzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the church.
8. To polemicize against individuals shows the pettiness of a retailer.
9. What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
10. Even a friendly conversation that cannot at any given moment be broken off voluntarily with complete arbitrariness has something illiberal about it.

~ F. von Schlegel, Aphorisms, (1797)

nod: ufo