The Philosophy Of Writing
Writing according to the Philosopher Derrida is: to write is to have the passion of origin. In this article I would like to focus on the Philosophy of writing.
Writing is the music of sounds and the painting of words. Writing is the dance of metaphors, the flirtation of similes, the cacophony of metonymy, the exuberance of hyperbole, the music of oxymoron and the life of onomatopoeia.
What is writing in the experiential context? Writing is an inward journey of experiential aesthetics. Writing is an aesthetic Sisyphus dancing with Nietzsche’s theory of art. For Nietzsche, writing occurs as an art with the synthesis of the Dionysian and Apollonian elements. The Dionysian elements are rhythm and beat and the Apollonian elements are melody and harmony. The Dionysian elements of writing are art words sculpted into figures of speech and the Apollonian elements are the aesthetic experience of the work.
Now why do I write? I write because of the love of writing and also the pleasure of the pen. Writing is the marvel of thought and happens when the experience of life becomes synthesized into nuances of feeling. How does feeling occur? For feeling the transformative experiences of nature become surrendered to the memory of thought. Such feelings accumulate in the brain and become fuel for the aesthetics of art. Writing is the figuration of being. Writing is an existential frenzy of the transfiguration of the soul. Writing is the paradox of art. Writing is the soul of literature.
Writing is the streams of consciousness of the soul. Seasons of gratification become the font of joy.
Now where does the Philosophy of writing come from? It comes from the life of living experience. It also comes from the reading of texts on literature, Philosophy, Art, and autobiographies. There is a dialogic encounter with the pen and it becomes a pinion for the fonts to exert themselves.
It is the enjoy-ability of the text. The text is a narcissistic entity caught up in the fetish of desire. The body of writing is the ego and the text of writing is the ethos of passion. It is the sublimation of the ID, the deification of the ego and the subversion of the super-ego.
Now what is the space occupied by Philosophy? There is a generation of ideas. Let is consider some examples. For example there is Plato’s allegory of the cave. There is a dark cave and in it there are folks and there is a beam of light emanating from the outside and people are groping for the light. What Plato meant was, beyond the sensible world there is a beautified world of forms. Now let’s consider another example from the Philosopher Julia Kristeva. She said there two types of texts and they are the semiotic and the symbolic texts. The semiotic texts are those where there is lack of grammar and punctuation. Such texts can be found in dance, poetry, music and streams of consciousness. The symbolic texts are those which have proper rules of grammar and such texts are found as legal and medicinal texts. There are some texts which merge the semiotic and the symbolic elements. Let’s also consider Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida has introduced through his Philosophy of deconstruction texts occupy the space of the binary divide. Texts privilege and marginalize discourses and dialogues. From Derrida, I have developed the philosophy of Binary Fusion. In binary fusion, texts don’t privilege or marginalize anyone. A classic example is Jazz which has come from black culture and had become universalized and popularized as world art form. Another example is Mahatma Gandhi’s Philosophy of non-violence. Gandhi used non-violence to free India from colonial yoke. Non-violence as a Philosophy is a text of binary fusion.
To sum I would like to say, writing is an art and it’s a philosophy and it is summation of experiences, the generation of ideas, the transformation of life into a paradise of art.