I really love the idea of philosophy as a therapeutic practice which untangles us from the confusions we naturally fall into as contemplative beings [1]. This resonates with what I think I’ve gotten out of philosophy, but I think it also gets at something important about why “tending”/“organizing” is so valuable and pleasurable.
Organization, as Are.na’s ethos has reflected [2], is a kind of grounding practice that we revisit over time, making sense of our lives by ordering our physical and virtual surroundings.
1: This is commonly associated with Wittgenstein and the quietists, but I think you can also draw connections to how Kant approached philosophy, as well as contemporary “deflationists” like Daniel Dennett.
2: for example, consider this quote from Cab in his interview in the Creative Independent:
“Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize patterns in your own thinking.”
