Certain scholars like to write on Wittgenstein or Nietzsche by, essentially, constructing tissues of citations to their entire corpuses of published and unpublished works or notes. There are assumptions about Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, or about intellectual work or philosophical work in general, which can seem to validate this form of scholarly practice. Personality driving thought; continuity of preoccupations or style of thought; inherent stability of problems or their shaping effect on accurate or approximate solutions to them; organic conceptions of genius. That kind of thing. There are also all sorts of little scholarly norms whose satisfaction gives cover to work which would otherwise be better conceived and judged relative to the one who did it, but which because of its appearance of scholarly competence, 'has to be taken seriously' on impersonal or community terms. And, I suppose, less-little scholarly norms, or rather, maxims that characterize our practice. Like: if you can't see how to make something of it on its own terms, at least try to make something of it on 'our' terms, which I suppose is the sort of operating principle that gives rise to papers that pay lip service to the idea of 'Nietzsche's style' before quickly moving on to to state his 'views' or reconstruct his 'arguments' in ways that appear to deliberately neglect anything having to do with style. Small or large, these parts of our practice obviously play a big role in the attraction of scholarly writers and readers to work that mines Nietzsche or Wittgenstein for quotations. And something similar could probably be said of work with an aversion to this kind of citation-weaving in preference to cleanly stated views and arguments, attributed to Nietzsche or Wittgenstein with a kind of escape clause (think of Kripke's 'Wittgenstein's argument as it occurred to Kripke') that basically disclaims any interest in accuracy or fidelity of response.

When I think of the sorts of complaints or apologies made around these issues (they have to do with 'bad writing' or 'bad thinking' or 'bad philosophy' and their opposites), it occurs to me that the memorability of the original writing is rarely part of them. But from a reader's perspective (and thus that of a scholar whose work is supposed to result in writing), isn't the difficulty with remembering work by Wittgenstein or Nietzsche a leading source of our sense that they're so hard? By comparison, consider how hard it can be to keep in mind even one of Plato's shorter dialogues (and thus how astonishing it should be when they present themselves as recollections and recountings of entire conversations that would have lasted several hours).

Thomas' 'radical' idea about research practices and the writing process seems not so much radical as old to me (which is a fair way in which something might be radical)—remembering the stages of composition in rhetoric—but that may just be a reminder that advances in sophistication and complexity aren't necessarily correlated with progress. And a reminder of what the radicality of the writings of a Nietzsche or a Wittgenstein might really involve. What sort of an effort, what sorts of patience and commitment to dwelling on what one is really capable of holding in memory and thinking about, would be called for to work on and respond productively in writing to, Human, All Too Human or Philosophical Investigations in something like the manner Thomas describes? How much would it take in, considering the ways we usually have of dealing with texts?

Maxims on writing from Basbøll and Mayhew.

'I'm 20 feet tall', Erykah Badu sings. Which sort of response is better: 'She is!', or 'She's not really, but…'?

'I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras… You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows.'

You can get past it, rise above it, set it aside, forget about it, brush it off. The question is, when?

Lend a hand, that's an ethic.

'In particular, Nietzsche would have been very aware that inconsistencies can be explained away. Intellectuals are very good at this, partly because they're often trained in it; so when you try to insist on inconsistencies in their system of values, you get, not acknowledgement, but theologizing, and centuries of it.'

'It is a joke—and yet the voice that carries it remains something new in rock 'n' roll, which is to say something new in postwar popular culture: a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible.'

Woman, late forties, at the counter of a Taco Bell: 'I've never been inside one of these before'.