a little slice of the intro to entanglements, trying to say a bit about the sense in which it does and does not constitute a 'system':
Now if ‘philosophy’ gives some people, especially some philosophers, the willies, the idea of ‘system’ gives me them to me. It is true, I think, that the great systems of philosophy - above all those of the German idealists - Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and Schopenhauer, for instance - are among the most impressive achievements in the history of the human intellect. If my project were to do what Hegel did, or thought he did - explain all of the universe and the human relation to it from the ground up in a way that led to perfect self-consciousness - then I would have regarded the project as too intimidating to set out on. The project is intimidating enough conceived as I conceive it.
Impressive as these systems are, they are, I believe, fantastic. Even if each hangs together within itself (which seems unlikely), it has abandoned what I might term the weirdness of the real: its recalcitrance to our categories; its unpredictability; its contingency; its arbitrariness; its excess to human experience. And each such system, to the extent it is successful in achieving its own goals, leaves behind also our strangeness to ourselves, our excess to ourselves, the ways we elude our own grasp. Fortunately and necessarily, there is deep obscurity at their heart; the unplumbed mystery that comes from trying to parse the syntax.
I will construct a system in the sense that I will try to take up the outstanding issues - many of them, at any rate - in the history of philosophy, and formulate a set of answers that will, I hope, hang together fairly well with one another. But I will not seek certainty at the foundations, or I will deny that it is forthcoming. I will argue that at the heart of any picture of the universe is a faith, a commitment, that is ultimately personal: any philosophical system must rest on an inchoate and ultimately unjustified sense of where and what one is. There is no escaping this situation, I believe, and it is not entirely unsatisfactory. So the status of the claims I put forward is to try to capture and make compelling my own fundamental commitments, my own fundamental sense of where and what I am. Whether the stuff is true or not is, I believe, a genuine question. But for me it is of equal importance - and connected to the question of truth - that it be an honest representation of my real experience and thinking.
So if what follows is a system of philosophy, it is an anti-systematic system: the goal is to open up to a world around and outside and running through us, not to constrain the world to the conditions of human reason or even consciousness. It is not a system that could give you the assurance that you now understand all that was before concealed in shadow. Even with these qualifications, however, I must remark that the idea of system remains problematic, and one is constantly in danger of being seduced away from the world by the niftiness of some notion or of the way a whole bunch of stuff hangs together. That is a danger to which philosophy has succumbed again and again, and though I cannot claim to have avoided it, I can at least say that I have been alert to the problem.
I am not sure there has ever been a more ponderous, less human, or more humorless discourse than systematic philosophy, though the first great systematizer - Plato, of course - had various semi-comic and ironic moves at his disposal. Now humorlessness is, I believe, a problem. It’s a failure of character. But it is also a symptom of the real problems of systematic philosophy: its lack of a sense of the limitations of the mind of the thinker. Even a Kant or Schelling made mistakes, harbored prejudices, had to start where he actually was, however he portrayed himself, or whatever authorial voice he took up. The groping, confusion, doubt are erased. There is not a hint of the actual comedy continually being enacted: a finite, merely human intellect, suffering as it may be from a head cold, speaking in a voice and with a knowledge the model of which is God, slipping continuously on banana peels that it is itself strewing around itself. The ambition is to be God; we might call it Satanic. It is an infinite ambition, carried on by a finite creature, like a little boy who’s sure that if he flaps his arms hard enough he will ascend into the sky. In its incredible ambition, systematic philosophy is touching, noble, and redolent of tragic, excessive pride and comical inability to pay off on it.
