But what are you looking for?
This is the reaction of some of my friends to my habit of sending once in a while a mail where I try to clarify some subjects taken from the news.
Well, stubbornly I leave aside the slightly provocative aspect of the remark, and I give a serious answer to a probably not so serious question.
I think that, in our present day world, most of our supposedly rational thinking is indeed perverted or bugged by unsaid assumptions or beliefs and that these unsaid assumptions are, unfortunately, more important in our thinking than the clear arguments we are putting forward.
In many circles it is considered a sign of intelligence never to refer to the unsaid, but most human and relational problems derive from disagreements about unsaid assumptions.
This is probably the main serious foundation of psychoanalysis to try to unearth the unsaid assumptions that are bugging the behaviour or feelings or thinking of an individual person.
But unsaid assumptions are also perverting not only the individuals but also the global functioning of the society or even of some so called scientific areas.
Myself, as a professor, and an educator, I have the duty to clarify concepts. Pedagogy is one of the most important activities in this world where most problems come from ignorance and poor education.
Realizing that most concepts are polluted by unsaid assumptions, I just consider it as a sacred mission to revisit a number of the current concepts to try to brush out from them the unsaid assumptions.
This is a regular scientific approach, which has been used many times before to uncover the real underlying structures in many fields.
I have this weakness of considering you as a dear friend of mine with such intelligence that I will learn a lot from your reactions to my incomplete reasoning. It turns out to be indeed the case and so far many of your friendly remarks have uncovered many aspects of the concepts I was working on that I was not even aware of or that I had completely underestimated. Your involuntary participation is therefore very precious to me.
I sincerely thank you
Claude