Reader M.L.P. inquires,
I was wondering what habits one should acquire to study philosophy profitably. I read philosophy books but I tend to forget most of what I read. I also find it hard to come up with my own ideas.
Roughly how many books or articles should one read in a day? Or is this the wrong way to approach the issue?
Should one start by reading ancient philosophy or by familiarizing oneself with current philosophical debates?
And finally, how crucial is it to study philosophy with a mentor? Is it possible to be a good philosopher by studying alone?
A great deal could be said on this topic. Here are a few thoughts that may be helpful. Test them against your own experience. First some general points, then to your specific questions.
1) Make good use of the morning, which is an excellent time for such activities as reading, writing, study, and meditation. But to put the morning to good use, one must arise early. I get up at 1:30, but you needn't be so monkish. Try arising one or two hours earlier than you presently do. That will provide you with a block of quiet time. Fruitful mornings are of course impossible if one's evenings are spent dissipating. You won't be able to spend the early morning thinking and trancing if you spent the night before drinking and dancing. The quality of the morning is directly affected by the quality of the previous evening.
2) Abstain from all mass media dreck in the early morning. Read no newspapers. "Read not The Times, read the eternities." (Thoreau) No electronics. No computer use, telephony, TV, e-mail, etc. Just as you wouldn't pollute your body with whisky and cigarettes upon arising, so too you ought not pollute your pristine morning mind with the irritant dust of useless facts, the palaver of groundless opinions, and every manner of distraction. There is time for that stuff later in the day if you must have it. (And it is a good idea to keep an eye on the passing scene.) The mornings should be kept free and clear for study that promises long-term profit.
3) Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan. Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them. I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading. Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a fine cigar . . . .
4) If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad?
The forming of the mind is the name of the game. This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material. The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it. Here is where blogging can be useful. Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.
5) You say that you forget what you read.
Well, there is little point in learning something that you will forget. The partial cure for this is to read in an active way, with pen in hand. I use pens of different colors for underlining and note-taking. Write key words on the top of the page. Isolate and mark the key passages. Make a glossary on the book's fly leaves. When a book arrives, I note the date of its arrival so that I an track my intellectual biography. At the end of a chapter I note the time and date of my first and subsequent readings of it. Reconstruct the author's arguments in a notebook in your own words. Look up reviews online, print them out, then insert them into the book. A properly annotated book is easy to review, and of course review is essential. Review fixes the material in your mind.
You ask how many books or articles should one read in a day.
I'll use myself as an example. Yesterday, N. Rescher's Aporetics arrived. I read and annotated the first chapter this morning slowly and carefully. Then I sketched a blog post in my handwritten journal that was inspired by Rescher's chapter. Then I went back to Palle Yourgrau's Death and Nonexistence which I am working through and mulled over a few pages of that. These activities took me from 2:00 am to 3:35. Then 45 minutes of formal meditation. Then I logged on and put up a couple or three Facebook posts. Around 5:20 I was out the door for an hour on the mountain bike. The main thing is to read and write every single day.
You ask whether one should start by reading the ancients or by studying current debates.
You could do either, as long as you do the other. You need to have some issue, problem, or question that you need to get clear about. Perhaps you want to understand knowledge in its relation to truth, belief, and justification. Contemporary sources will give you some idea of the relevant questions. Armed with these, you can profitably read Plato's Theaetetus.
You ask whether you need a mentor.
No, but it helps to find one or more intelligent individuals with whom you can interact productively. But even this is not necessary, and in any case, these individuals may be hard to find. To exaggerate somewhat, all real learning is via autodidacticism.
If possible, avoid the near occasion of armed confrontation, assuming that such avoidance is consistent with manly virtue. But with hot civil war nigh, manly avoidance may not be possible. If push comes to shove, and shove to shoot, you had better be prepared both for the shooting and its aftermath.
Intellectually, though, it is exciting to be an owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk to survey the collapse of civilization. This old man is more intellectually and spiritually alive than he has ever been. The waning of sexual appetite definitely helps. What a curse is concupiscence; what a drag on intellectual and spiritual development! What a time waster! How sick a society that keeps one in heat for no good purpose.
As the end approaches, salutary Besinnung sets in. I am glad I am 70 and not 7. It is the having done, not the doing, that is often the most enjoyable and the most profitable. The serious philosopher should essay to live as long as he can so as to view life from every temporal perspective, and to squeeze from the grapes of experience the wine of many a vintage. But he should also rejoice that he is not condemned to live in this world forever. He sets his sights beyond time's horizon in the company of the immortals, Plato at their head.
I tried to post the following at my Facebook page, but it wouldn't fit. So here it is.
Seize the day, my friends, the hour of death is near for young and old alike. How would you like death to find you? In what condition, and immersed in which activity? Contemplating the eternal or stuck in the mud of the mundane or lost in the diaspora of sensuous indulgence?
The clock is running, and in the game of life it is sudden death with no way of knowing when the flag will fall.
For some of us the harvest years come late and we hope for many such years in which to reap what we have sown, but we dare not count on them. For another and greater Reaper is gaining on us and we cannot stay the hand that wields the scythe that will cut us down.
In contemporary Internet lingo, a gray man is typically a prepper who seeks to be unobtrusive and to blend in. He is 'gray' in that he tries not to call attention to himself, his beliefs, and his stock of guns, ammo, food, and other survival supplies that he hopes will see him and his family through a collapse of the social order. His 'bug-out bag' is at the ready should he need to split for his hideaway. He worries whether he can make his escape without drawing attention to himself.
It is the old Aesop tale of the Ant and Grasshopper revived and updated. The Grasshopper spends the summer in the pleasures of the moment, dancing and singing, giving no thought to the future. Comes the winter he must beg the Ant for provender, whereupon the And delivers a stern rebuke, telling the Grasshopper to dance the winter away.
The latter-day Grasshopper does not beg; he demands, in concert with others of his shiftless ilk. He cannot be reached by any rebukes or sermonizing. He is a dangerous hombre who poses a lethal threat. The latter-day Ant appreciates the threat and seeks to meet it by being both armed and unobtrusive.
He who provokes an evil-doer bears some responsibility for his evil-doing.
The gray man is the opposite of the 'tacti-cool' dude who foolishly flaunts his preparedness and advertises his tools. His truck sports NRA, Sig Sauer, and other decals. A bumpersticker reads, "I'm your huckleberry." The 'tacti-cool' dude carries open or with inadequate concealment. His T-shirt is tight so that you can admire his marvellous pectorals, but he 'prints' like crazy. If questioned, he insists on his Second Amendment rights. He is right to do so, but nonetheless imprudent. 'Liberals' have no respect for the rights he invokes, and there is no reaching them by any appeal to reason.
Imprudent advertising leads to pointless conversations and worse. Years ago, a man questioned my open carry deep in the Superstition Wilderness, claiming that guns are illegal in a National Park. I pointed out that we were in a National Forest. I don't think I got through to the idiot. But I did marvel at his foolishness in arguing with an armed man in the middle of nowhere.
There are foolish people who don't know what 'brandish' means. They see a man with a gun strapped to his belt and they call the cops claiming that some guy is 'brandishing' a firearm. This can lead to an unpleasant encounter with law enforcement. The wise man, understanding human nature, avoids contacts with cops, knowing full well their propensity for arrogance and overreach. Power corrupts. Power suborns moral sense. I say this as a hard-assed law and order conservative who believes in the death penalty. I believe that said penalty is not only morally permissible, but also in some cases morally obligatory.
And then there are the bad guys who, seeing an armed man, will calculate whether they can take his weapon from him. Or they may be planning an attack of some sort. The armed citizen, seen to be armed, will be the first target.
So I advise a certain grayness in these and related matters. Exercise your rights, but do not flaunt them. Stand on principles, but don't sacrifice prudence to principles.
Wikipedia, The Ant and the Grasshopper:
Because of the influence of La Fontaine's Fables, in which La cigale et la fourmi stands at the beginning, the cicada then became the proverbial example of improvidence in France: so much so that Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911) could paint a picture of a female nude biting one of her nails among the falling leaves and be sure viewers would understand the point by giving it the title La Cigale. The painting was exhibited at the 1872 Salon with a quotation from La Fontaine, Quand la bise fut venue (When the north wind blew), and was seen as a critique of the lately deposed Napoleon III, who had led the nation into a disastrous war with Prussia.
Reader Josh E. asks for tips on how to get a dissertation done. Here is how I did it.
..........................................
I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. I got off and hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my apartment mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78 every single day holidays included.
That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up at 2 AM. I've become a slacker.
One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.
Addendum. An excerpt from Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday:
So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.
For perspective, consider that in recent years 30,000 to 40,000 Americans each year have been killed in car crashes, and that thousands and thousands die each year of various strains of influenza the names of which are not bandied-about by the 24/7/366 media. The Maverick advises: resist group-think and mass hysteria. While taking reasonable precautions, live your life and consider what really matters. This is not to say that the COVID-19 virus is not a serious threat. It is, and it is being dealt with by a serious president who gets called a 'racist' and a 'xenophobe' for his eminently sensible travel bans. People such as Joe Biden who hurl these epithets are moral scum and need to be denounced as such.
There are things about which people should be panicked [or at least seriously concerned].
For example, the contempt for America and capitalism taught to a generation of young Americans from elementary school through college is worthy of panic. The extreme levels of economy-collapsing debt we are irresponsibly piling onto the backs of future generations to maintain “entitlements” is worthy of panic.
So is the premature sexualization of children—encouraging them to choose their own gender and taking 5-year-olds to public libraries for “Drag Queen Story Hour.”
But such things hardly register with most Americans.
I feel awful for kids today. They are relentlessly told that global warming poses an “existential threat” to life on earth. They are relentlessly told that President Donald Trump poses an “existential threat to America”—the words used, for example, a few weeks ago by Frank Rich in New York magazine, and used by the “moderate” Michael Bloomberg repeatedly in his speeches.
And now they are told their families had better stock up on toilet paper because only God knows when they will be unable to leave their homes.
It was a Democratic president who told Americans, during World War II no less, that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” He is a liberal idol, in part for saying that.
That is more or less exactly what Trump has been saying. Yet he’s an “existential threat” to our country.
Now chill out and have a beer. May I recommend a
Few preach self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. (Principles of Psychology, vol. 1)
At James' door we receive bread. At Quine's a stone. How American philosophy has fallen off since the Golden Age of James, Royce, and Peirce!
The evil event will either occur or it will not. If it occurs, and one worries beforehand, then one suffers twice, from the event and from the worry. If the evil event does not occur, and one worries beforehand, one suffers once, but needlessly. If the event does not occur, and one does not worry beforehand, then one suffers not at all. Therefore, worry is irrational. Don't worry, be happy.
Am I saying that that one ought not take reasonable precautions and exercise what is pleonastically called 'due diligence'? Of course not. Rational concern is not worry. I never drive without my seat belt fastened. Never! But I have never been in an accident and I never worry about it. And if one day it happens, I will suffer only once: from the accident.
Worry is a worthless emotion, a wastebasket emotion. So self-apply some cognitive therapy and send it packing. You say you can't help but worry? Then I say you are making no attempt to get your mind under control. It's your mind, control it! It's within your power. Suppose what I have just said is false. No matter: it is useful to believe it. The proof is in the pragmatics.
Recent Comments