a mess.

I presented a paper at our small seminar. One comment made me think about stuff. The comment concerned a biographic description of Simone Weil's years in the Renault car factory. I wrote: "the work exhausted her." I was told that this is a slight understatement. It is. A big one. The work did not "exhaust her". She was almost killed by the machines. Weil was clumsy. She worked anyway. The machines were dangerous. But in the hustle & bustle of philosophical writing, I did not really pay any attention to my description. I just wrote something that would somehow "bring out the point".

My small mistake reveals a tendency in my thinking that I am worried about.

What felt so bad about this realization is how immensly dulled my mind can be with respect to giving a true description of something. "Well, something along those lines will do...." "I just have to muddle through."
I don't blame "philosophy". It's just a failure of attention that might seem insignificent but it is not. It's not just "getting the facts wrong". It's more an inability to care about details.
Exhaustion can be many things. Excercise can be exhausting but that does not necessarily mean it is harmful. A conversation sometimes exhausts me but that need not be harmful, either. (I know there are more "clinical" uses of the word, though.)
Weil writes somewhere (I think) that factory work work killed something of her youth.
Exhaustion doesn't kill youth and it doesn't kill the soul either.
It's these kinds of things that make my texts a mess and make me despair over writing.
Weil herself acknowledges the difficulty of depicting the hardship & misery of (factory) work in a truthful manner that defies banality.
My "slight understatement" is an example of that problem.
(But realizing that my description was irresponsible and thoughtless only shows why I think philosophy is not always a stupid academic excercise: sometimes you realize that you can't just say whatever you like, "if it brings home the point". "Muddling through" is not good enough.)