A Blog of Ideas

A good friend of mine, Chrysthynee, suggested that I write my posts in English, instead of Romanian, so that many more people could access what I have to say. I felt most thankful for her suggestion and I sought to immediately comply. Therefore, in what follows, I shall offer an English version of my blog's "starting argument", its very "theoretical foundation", if one were to concede such a potentially pompous term.

In one of his recent articles, Alex Leo Şerban (the acclaimed Romanian film critic) spoke of the "poisoned freedom of blogs". For quite a long while I had shared his perspective. It may have been because, of the entire blogosphere, I had only come in contact with self-worshiping daily logs, whose authors were ineptly bemoaning their existence's emptiness and were seeking to fill it with formulae of tasteless sentimentalism. Perhaps an intimate diary, whose content one would confide and confine to paper alone, would be far more adequate for such lyrical debouches (although, if we were to maintain sanitary rigor in what our mind begets, we would stifle such thoughts from their ideatic infancy). A blog, however, is a public diary, and, if one is to expose oneself so leisurely for the sake of vane popularity, one verges on indecency. Thus, treading on the footsteps of Mr. Şerban, I had gotten to consider that blogs could only flash their authors' juicy intimacy towards an often exceedingly eager audience.

I was, nevertheless, wrong, and I incline to believe that Mr. Şerban, himself, when he condemns blogs irrevocably and unequivocally, does so in an excessively severe manner. Although one can easily find a host of web specimens like those described above, these do not represent the norm within the blogosphere, nor do they fully probe what a blog, as an informational resource, could best offer. On the contrary, there are countless blogs which seriously (although not without humour) dedicate themselves to a richly varied array of subjects, ranging from science and technology to the humanities and arts. These often prove to be not just helpful, but also delectable, as they allow internauts to exchange most useful information (as I discovered that they can guide a neophyte such as myself through the tortuous world of software). Still, what I consider most important for the blogs' format is that they can occasion free, vivacious debates between their editors and their readers, persons who, although animated by converging interests, perhaps would never have fruitfully crossed their minds on other planes than those of the Internet.

As a consequence, I have come to realize that, if you keep it in proper check, a blog may turn into a virtual agora, where the ideas that people encounter and discuss may remain just as real and valid as in the world from our side of the pixels. This is why I have proceeded to construct my own online journal as a blog of ideas. I even dare to hope that barely this format could aspire to achieve the model of school that Constantin Noica (possibly the most significant Romanian philosopher of the XXth century) described in his own Philosophical Diary, that is, a school "where one cannot tell in advance who learns from whom". I shall strive that what I post on this blog may sustain such an intellectual environment, where everyone could help the others into "midwifing" fortunate, liberating ideas, into advancing each other.