Removed from a letter to some friends:

The book I’m working on is about designing well-crafted, habitable delusions, and it is itself a well-crafted, habitable delusion.

Viewed from my angle, philosophy is a species of design. We are allowed to design truth.

Who’s going to stop us? Objectivity? God? Pretty much the only authority who can drop the hammer is the intellectual conscience of the individual reader, but this is where those qualifications “well-crafted” and “habitable” enter the picture.

I’m not saying reality is not meaningless as Rust says, but I am saying that if you put a good UI on reality, you can design a better experience “using” it. And that UI is what we call truth. Philosophy is the UI we interact with to make sense of and interact with the OS that is our daily lives, running on the overwhelmingly hopelessly complex platform called reality.

A philosophy can and should be run through the framework of Useful / Usable / Desirable: A badly-design interface might be useless (it will be buggy, conflict with daily experience, and will prevent us from interacting with reality and accomplishing what we need to accomplish). In other words, it can be FALSE. But it can also be unusable — just too complicated to actually use well. So we are confused or forced to muddle, or we just decide not to think because our philosophy makes thinking such an awful chore. Or undesirable.

Remind me later to connect all this with Leo Strauss and the neocons.