How I Read Philosophy

How I Read Philosophy

[This is a draft of a tutorial I'm working on to help my students feel more comfortable reading philosophy. Comments, critiques, and additional tips would be welcome!]

Reading philosophy is still difficult for me, despite having been at it for ten years. But it’s been doable since the beginning, and I believe it is doable for anyone who is capable of attending college. Throughout that time, I’ve learned an important lesson: reading philosophy is unlike reading most other materials.

When reading philosophy, there are two principals things that a reader needs to pay attention to: structure and claims. We are often habituated to read for claims: “what the author is saying.” But philosophy isn’t philosophy without structure. The hallmark of philosophy is not what is being said, but how. Most philosophy essays are in the process of literally building an argument. As the reader, that building must occur in my mind as it occurs in the text. The reader could jump to the main claims, or read a quick review on Wikipedia, and understand what the claim is, but that doesn’t mean the reader understands philosophy. As one is reading, one should always ask one’s self, “Do I clearly understand what was said before, and how this current section is building upon the old?”

This short paper is broken down into a few sections. First, there are what I consider some basic principles for reading philosophy. I cannot even imagine how someone can regularly read and benefit from philosophy without these principles. Second, I describe how I’ve put some of the principles into practice in my personal life. Third, I briefly discuss how one’s reading style sometimes must change depending on the author one is reading. It is as if one must take on entirely different psychologies for Plato’s casual dialogues, Spinoza’s geometrical postulates, Kant’s dry analysis, and Nietzsche’s thunderous aphorisms.

I. Basic Principles

1. Reserve time. Reading philosophy will take a lot of time. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you can understand 20 pages of Aristotle with one hour of reading. On my good days, I try to set aside three or four hours at a time for reading.
2. Concentrate on reading. Reading philosophy is almost a meditation. Complete concentration is critical. The reader is carefully building a thought-structure in her mind, and while it is being learned, it is delicate. Anything that averts the attention of the reader is like a puff of wind on a castle of cards.
3. Practice patience. Patience, especially in regard to reading, is a habit. And as a habit, every time you practice patience, your patience gets better. Don’t let anyone tell you that they sped-read through a philosophy book. Maybe they did: there are a few extraordinary minds out there, but in most cases they’re exaggerating or didn’t understand the text.
4. Review. One of the most valuable practices to engage in is the leisurely review. Whenever I’m taking a walk, riding the bus, waiting in line, etc., I try to recall a recent reading project. Can I construct the argument in my mind? Where are the holes? Frequently, when I’m reading in a coffee shop and need a reading break, I close my eyes, lean back, and simply play with the ideas. This seems to solidify the knowledge in my mind, and makes it easier to recall later on.
5. Discuss: Whenever possible, find an excuse to discuss what you’ve read. Be prepared for someone to criticize your interpretation of the text. Be humble enough to re-examine your interpretation, but confident enough to stand by your own reasoning. This is as close to a scientific experiment as the art of reading gets. Every time we read, we develop an interpretation of the text. This interpretation is essentially a hypothesis about what the text means. And as we all know, hypotheses must be tested in a laboratory of some kind. But the interpretations of others are also hypotheses, and may be wrong. If you’re in a discussion with someone with much more experience on the subject than yourself, for example, a senior student or a professor, it will be more tempting to abandon your interpretation for theirs. But if you do not understand why their interpretation is better, then adopting their interpretation doesn’t serve you at all. You are seeking understanding, not imitation. And after all, professors can be wrong too. Professors know this, because they spend much of their time arguing that other professors are wrong, and responding to arguments that they are wrong themselves. This is not a bad thing: they do it because it assists in their understanding and the growth of their knowledge.
6. Take notes. This takes extra work, and I don’t do it nearly as much as I should. But on some occasions, I will force myself to outline an argument while I’m reading it. The affect on my comprehension and memory is unbelievable.

II. My Own Practices: Everyone is different, and the best way to learn how to read is simply to practice. But my specific practices may be helpful to others in the short or long term.

First, I need a comfortable spot. My two favorite places are my bed, or a hard chair in a coffee shop. The bed is excellent because I can lie prone, comfortable, and completely forget about my body. But occasionally, the softness of the bed makes me lazy, and especially after I’ve read for a few hours. My reading becomes slow and inattentive. At times like this, I will take about a 30 minute walk to a coffee shop (picking something that’s suitably far away to ensure that I get my blood flowing)

Second, I set the timer on my stopwatch. I set it for one hour, at which time it beeps. I started doing this because I’ve noticed one of my biggest distractions is checking the time. This way, I know that I’m not losing track of time. Psychologically, it seems easier to let my mind absorb the reading and leave the world behind for a little while.

Third, sometimes, I use a notecard to guide my reading, scrolling the card down the page so it is easy to tell what line I’m supposed to be on. The physical movement of moving the card also (1) helps me keep a healthy pace, and (2) somehow alerts me to when I haven’t been paying attention. Which brings me to four:

Fourth, do not be afraid to return to an earlier passage again and again and again. If someone ever watched me reading, they might sometimes get the feeling that I am reading a book backwards, such is my habit to return to earlier pages. If I’m reading, and I realize I haven’t understood the previous page, or I realize that my mind has still been reflecting on something I read four paragraphs ago, I return to the last place where I was on solid footing.

III. Different Styles for Different Authors

I have noticed that different authors require different styles of reading. Often, if I apply the wrong style, I will get very little from the text. It is as if each philosophy essay is a padlock of some sort, and the lock-picker needs to use the right tool to get to the treasure inside.

Immanuel Kant is interesting to read. I find that when reading Kant, if I move too slowly, I never understand what is being said or the structure. It’s counter-intuitive, but this most immensely complex and logical philosopher requires an initial aggressive forced march through the text. Once I get a feel for the argument, I can go back and spend more time analyzing the structure.

Nietzsche is another interesting case. He says of himself that he needs to be read slowly. But frankly, that rarely gets me anywhere, especially when I was first starting my Nietzsche readings. Reading Nietzsche is like assembling a puzzle, and first, you need to ignore the pieces that don’t make sense, and hunt for the pieces that do make sense. When you hit upon a piece that seems to make sense, study it, think about it, then set it aside. You won’t know how it fits into the whole, and because of this, you won’t be able to get a complete understanding of the piece itself. But it’s a start. As you go further into Nietzsche, you’ll find more pieces that make some sense. You’ll put those different pieces together, and you’ll start to understand the structure of the whole. Then, the pieces that initially made no sense, will make more sense. Eventually you’ll be in a place where almost everything he writes makes some sense, because it clearly fits into a larger picture clearly.

This is far from a universal rule, but generally, more modern authors pay better attention to clarity and organization. Since Socrates, the logos of the philosophers had been set opposed to rhetoric of the sophists, and this was probably a mistake. The rule becomes especially true with authors like William James and Sigmund Freud at the turn of the 19^th/20^th century. Their writing is crisp, and it is easy to find the distinct claims in each paragraph and the relevant support. Plato is a brilliant author, but the dialogue format means that claims are often buried or rejected as the dialogue progresses. Many of the 17^th century authors, such as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, strived for organization, and you can see their very blatant but useful structures of organization guiding their work. David Hume in the 18^th century recognized the importance of rhetoric in philosophy Hegel, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to care about his reader at all. But like I said, this is far from a universal rule. Many contemporary philosophers are worse than just about everything that came before, and the best passages of Plato and Aristotle outshine almost everything that’s written today.

My three mile run this morning hurt more than the twelve mile runs I was making regularly in June. That’s what I get for sitting on my butt for a month.

Current Readings

I suppose it is long past due for another post. I have fallen out of the habit of writing over the past two months, which is a shame, but that sort of thing happens from time to time.

Comments are again enabled. They were disabled because of issues that I shouldn’t discuss here. But that’s a different story.

This morning, I started yet another book, which brings my total of current readings projects up to some uncountable number. This was is simply titled Aristotle, by Christopher Shields, a “Tutor” of Ancient Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. I am not exactly sure what the title of “Tutor” means, but a quick look at wikipedia states that it is comparable to American “Teaching Assistants,” ie, post-graduate students who assist a lecturing professor and frequently run lab-type study groups. But he’s a scholar, and it’s been refreshing to read a well-written and informative account of Aristotle’s life and philosophy. Aristotle, of course, wrote on nearly every subject under, over, and including the sun, and it is doubtful that any single individual in the history of Earth has had a comparable influence on intellectual pursuits. I have only read a small fraction of his works, namely Ethics, Poetics, and parts of Rhetoric, Categories, Metaphysics, Politics, and De Anima. Nevertheless, I have spent 10 years studying philosophy and 4 teaching it, and that has inevitably given me a basic understanding of his most important concepts, such as his four causes and the substance/attribute/accident divide. Philosophers throughout Western civilization have used and/or critiqued these concepts, and they are as familiar to most philosophers as Aristotle’s logic. Anyway, I’m excited about the book because it will help me quickly and efficiently fill in a lot of my gaps and refine the knowledge I already have. Hopefully someday I’ll have the time to read more of Aristotle’s gigantic corpus.

Getting Dressed in Identity

As I laid down to bed last night, exhausted and yearning to unconsciousness, my mind was occupied with the anxious thoughts of the last few hours: anxious that I had had an unproductive and distracted day and that I had to delay a trip by a day because of my sloth, among other things. They were pessimistic, self-deprecating thoughts, useless for making life better, and even contributing to more of the same the next day.

Fortunately, in my exhaustion, I sunk into sleep quickly and had a long, peaceful sleep.

When I awoke the next day, my mind was clear and empty. I felt pleased, lying in my soft bed with the sun creeping in, the heaviness of sleep quickly slipping away. But I don’t think I had an identity at this point: the memories of the previous night were not yet in my mind: I was not recognizing the failure of the previous day, or the bus that I was currently missing. There may not even have been a recognition that I was in Chicago, or even that I was Kamran. My conscious experience was almost empty of content.

However, a moment later, the same thoughts that accompanied me to sleep rushed back into my consciousness. And with the content, the pessimism followed. I noticed it was as though I was “becoming” a certain person, with a certain psychology, at the moment those thoughts came into my mind. Prior to that moment, I could have been anybody, or it could have been any day in my life, both the good days and the bad. That pre-content moment was identical to any other pre-content moment I’ve had on nearly every morning of my life.

The implication is that my mood is set, my identity is set, based on what thoughts came before: perhaps even those same thoughts that I had when I was going to bed the previous night. After a bad day, we often like to say that tomorrow is the beginning of a new day, but can that really be true? There is too much of the previous day’s thoughts that still occupy the new day’s thoughts, and if an individual’s identity and psychology is identical to the content of those thoughts, then there is no such thing as the “first day of the rest of your life.”

Semester’s End

The semester wrapped up about a week ago. With all the end-of-semester shenanigans, it seems I neglected this blog. I have also had nothing worthwhile to write. I write this with the hopes that it breaks the habit of not posting.

I will not make this long, but I wanted to quickly post about two books that I’ve started in the past few days. First is Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes. My dad gave this to me for Christmas, but at 550 pages, it wasn’t something I wanted to start in the middle of the semester. It’s a novel about a platoon of Marines in the Vietnam War. Unlike many war books I’ve read, this one carries some serious literary value. The characters are much more complex and evolving than I’m used to, and the issues it deals with are not just war issues. Racism, ambition, deceit, and politics have all been major themes. Perhaps I’ll have more to say about it later.

The other book is Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. Fish is a very controversial intellectual, but one that I admire. He gets me to think, and that’s all I really want. For a long time, I’ve wanted a re-education in writing well, and I ran across an article about Fish in “The Chronicle of Higher Education.” It referenced this book, it sounded perfect, and picked it up immediately. I anticipate I’ll get these wrapped up in the next couple days (maybe longer for Matterhorn).

I’m also working on another project, dealing with writing for my students. I’ve had some revelations from last semester that have inspired me to take a different approach to writing instruction: not a radically different approach, but a different way to teach what I’ve already been teaching.

An Experiment in Teaching the Essay: Lapse

Session 4 [Continuation from past three posts]

Well, I missed a day, and I’m not about to write an entry now. Such is life. When Chicago gets a beautiful, cloudless 82 degree Sunday in early April, my ethical obligations to take advantage of that day overrode my ethical obligation to stay inside and write. I’m sure you understand.

I did, however, bring my Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Marx, and spent a little time reading these things while taking advantage of the noonday sun, hoping that it will let me see some more truth. In reality, I opened up the Kierkegaard, read a few paragraphs, and my mind started racing. The very fact that I had started to construct a problem made me see things and think about things that I hadn’t thought before. Before, I was just reading it for the sake of “understanding,” but in a general, purposeless way. This time, I was reading with a purpose; I was hunting for something, and I was finding it.

I hope to have a full entry tonight and get this problem situated before I hit the sack so I can start on the problem tomorrow. Tomorrow, I would like to take a few of the Kierkegaard sections, analyze them, and digest them for the purpose of writing the paper.

An Experiment in Teaching the Essay: Brainstorming 2

[This is part three of a series of posts. Sorry for the delay: Spring break handily destroyed my motivation for doing work.]

Session 3

[Preface: Although the last two sessions do not clearly offer anything in the way of a constructive problem, today, I realize that it has had a positive affect on my mind. Many thoughts and anxieties that have been building up needed to get released before I could have a more clear mind.

Also, as I was nearing the end of page 2, something struck me as interesting: I was looking at the keyboard the entire time, and not getting distracted (see session 2). There are a few reasons for this, I suspect [this computer is not the same as the computer I had been typing on. The keyboard is much smaller and I am unaccustomed to it, and therefore make more mistakes, and therefore depend on looking at the screen more often. Also, this computer has been infested with a virus that makes web-surfing much more annoying than usual, and my drive for checking the internet is overcome by my extreme annoyance. Actually, when I first turned on the computer, I automatically checked a few sites, but became so frustrated that I closed the web browser down.

An Experiment in Teaching the Essay: Brainstorming I

[This post represents part of a project that I introduced in the previous blog post. There are plenty of spelling/grammatical errors in this paper. This is intentional: I wanted this exploration to be a representation of an actual brainstorming process, mistakes and all.]

…what to write about, what to write about? My brain is feeling quite sluggish this afternoon, and sadly, a lot of ideas are not coming to mind. But, after ten years of either being a student or professor, I have learned that my mind does not think well when it doesn’t have structure.

An Experiment in Teaching the Essay, Introduction

Recently, I have undertaken an experiment: I will write the essay along with my students. However, I am doing more than just writing an essay and presenting them with the finished product. Instead, I have been writing all of my brain-storming sessions, my process of figuring out what I want to say, and how I am going to incorporate the course texts into my essay.

Running Simulation

You might be able to run, but do you know how to run? To what extent do you command your legs, or do you command some kind of Sergeant who takes the orders from an incompetent Commander and passes them on to the troops? Check this out.

On my third try, I made it as far as 1.4 meters. Then I flopped around on the starting line (or behind the starting line) for another 10 attempts. Then I made 2.4 meters, thought I had it figured out, then again couldn’t make it past the starting line.