Ezzes of Estis | Airman

Some say I'm an air person. An air person is everywhere and nowhere, an air person puts down no roots, an air person pursues no consistent activity, an air person is more wind than he is a being.

So some say I'm a man of the air. But that's only partially true. I always keep my feet firmly on the ground, my statements are always well-founded, my expertise is my firm, unshakable foundation, my works are my pillars, my method is a concrete road.

But this much is true: My work operates at an extraordinarily abstract, more than abstract, level. My field is the methodology of formalizing theories. I'm currently writing a book in which I'm trying to find a model for how epistemological models of science are changing.

And here, it is essential to overcome all obstructive concreteness, to tear oneself free from the grip of the singular, to free oneself from the perfidy of specificity. For example, I could now report in great detail that the wider blade of the beard scissors I purchased from Kohn on October 10th has an inexplicable notch about 13 millimeters below the tip, which caused a sensitive tear in a hair while trimming my mustache yesterday. Even the fact that I wear a mustache, indeed that I possess any hair at all or any other attributes, is shamefully accidental and downright shockingly irrelevant.

All the concrete things that surround us obscure our view of the underlying categories. One is supposed to pick out the categorical cherries from the doughy mass of the accidental. This, too, is, incidentally, a model of theory formation, albeit a completely mundane one, and thus, albeit indirectly, the subject of my research.

One can also choose a different model. All attributes are then ballast, all predications, all qualifications, all quiddities—ballast that one must shed in order to ascend to the necessary heights, that is, in order to be able to abstract to the necessary degree. And I must abstract, even to an extreme degree.

So it's not entirely wrong if I'm sometimes described as aloof. That certainly shouldn't be taken too literally. And yet, since I've been working on my book, I've increasingly had the feeling when I walk, as if I'm staying in the air a little longer, as if between steps.

Which, of course, doesn't necessarily mean anything. But one can certainly also understand it as a – albeit still minor – development toward the overcoming of gravity, toward the triumphant victory of theory over matter. And so I won't object to it; on the contrary, I'll consider it an acknowledgement of my achievement if I'm called an airman in this regard.