A Transcendental Tractate of Caustic Casuistry

Recently was I in receipt of a castigatory epistle from Bentley, something to the effect that my posts are too recondite, or else that they demand of their audience a certain savoir faire which they seem, inscrutably, to lack. "Too high brow" he said; "nobody likes to feel stupid when they read our blog" he said; "most people just don't know who Jacques Derrida is". Suffice it to note that I became both splenetic and dyspeptic as a result of this reproof. Nevertheless, I found myself reconnoitering through my recent posts in an effort to, if you'll forgive the colloquialism, catechize the veracity of his averments.

Alas, my analysis, though prosecuted with all fealty and ardor, produced little in the way of punctilious proof. It seems to me that nothing to which I affix my appellation approaches the bravura or frippery for which I am vituperated. A fortiori, I would deign say that nothing of my oeuvre is beyond the reach of the paradigmatic abecedarian or catechumen. One most certainly need not be of the ranks of the cognoscenti or learned mavens of acroamatic, orphic discourses (most of whom, to be completely laconic, I find more often associated with a kind of specious chicanery than with unalloyed erudition) to make immanent within one's ken precisely that which I try, with all obsequiousness and self-abnegation, to so guilelessly rehearse.

What would Bentley have me do? Reduce my already meager belletristic fruitage yet further still, to the point where it consists in nothing but apophthegmatic bon mot or badinage? Would he have me, for instance, affect the phraseology of so many of the nescient Rationalists? Does he have some baser velleity to see me, compunctious and chagrined, reduced to contriving a précis on Liebniz's dubious theodicy or, worse still, his monadology? Am I to be relegated to producing disquisitions on the immaterialist metaphysics of Berkeley's Alciphron or, God forbid, Ockham's ontological nominalism? Surely not.

Thus, I can only implore Bentley to osculate my fundament.

--D. Richard Foster IV, Esq.