Philosophical Practicality
An attempt at old school blogging by replying to a comment with a post
In my essay The Practical Philosophy of F.M. Alexander I talked about the importance of converting your ideas into practical procedures.
I wasn’t happy with this essay because I wrote it in a day (for the 100 daily posts) and it feels like I need a week to develop all the ideas, add some caveats, and give more background.
So I’m not surprised Tólma – one of my favourite Substacks and Twitter friend – wrote a thread which adds a bit of nuance to what I said.
So I thought I’d try an old school blogging conversation and reply in the form of a post.
Here’s a screenshot of his thread, with my commentary underneath.
I agree with everything he says here, and would like to submit this as addendum to my original post!
I don’t think philosophy on its own is worthless, or that action is the only important thing. Always jumping into action without a thought is also stupid in its own way.
Changing your conceptions is often the essential FIRST step to expanding your range of possible actions – otherwise you’ll just do what you’ve always done, on autopilot, or you’ll have to rely on some random mutation coming to save you.
This is even true in the movement practice I teach – the pupil must first change their intellectual conceptions of their movements and body-mechanics, and to understand the logic of precise verbal instructions, before they can even begin to try and change postural habits.
And I can relate to feeling of doing philosophy is itself a ‘doing.’ This is more my natural behaviour and personality type anyway – I am far from the internet hustler type!
I chose the image from Good Will Hunting because I personally have let the pendulum swing far so far in one direction, that I needed to push it hard enough to make it swing back in the other direction – you could call my essay an exercise in Advice to Self.
Ok this was fun! I think I’ll start responding to tweets and other essays like this more often. “Confronting yourself with the deepest thinkers” who currently live can also speed up the process of getting to the truth.
Those old timers used to write those very long letters to each other for a reason I guess – and not just for lack of Twitter.
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