[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.

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.

For lighter reading, I’ve started reading George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I read the “Song of Ice and Fire” series’s first four books six years ago, but with the recent release of the fifth book, A Dance of Dragons, and the new HBO series, I thought it was time to start again. I remember when I first read these, though the going was initially slow, I was eventually reading for 16 hours straight, occasionally staying up until 4am. It brought me back to my high school days when my true introduction to obsessive reading began by reading Dungeons & Dragons inspired “Dragonlance” novels. Though a fantasy series, ” A Song of Ice and Fire” is quite subtle in its fantasy elements. Although from the very first chapter, the reader knows there is a supernatural presence in the world, from the perspective of the vast majority of its world’s inhabitants, the supernatural is not confirmed. In other words, the lived experience of most of its characters, at least initially, is very realistic, perhaps even exactly what it would have been like to live in Europe in the 14th century. Then, there was so much about the world that was unexplainable, and so many myths and fears about supernatural powers, that pragmatically speaking, the supernatural was as real for 14th century Europeans as it is for the overwhelming majority of ASOIAF inhabitants. The world is gritty, some people are horrid and others heroic, but usually in a very believable way. I remember reading this and loving it because although I knew there was some supernatural force in that world, I didn’t know to what extent it was real, where the truth ends and the myth begins, and I felt some measure of the fear that the characters also felt.

I picked up A Dance of Dragons today, even though I won’t get to it for a while. I was going to wait for the softcover, since the hardcover is huge and expensive at $37! But I saw the book in my favorite bookstore, “Unabridged Books,” it was so beautiful, and at a 20% discount my resolve failed.

Here’s a quicker list of the other books I’m currently working on:

The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Steven Nadler. Nadler is one of my favorite current Spinoza/17th century philosophy scholars, currently teaching at UW-Madison. Possible Worlds is a historical/scholarly book is ostensibly about the metaphysical and theological debates between Leibniz, Malebranche, and Arnaud. However, it is much more than that, introducing the reader to a large panoply of figures, as well as the world of Paris and Europe in the late 17th century. I am thoroughly loving it thus far, though lately I’ve been reading a mere few pages per week and even decided to start over.

Pensees, by Pascal. I read this last fall, but it has such tremendously profound sections that it has been a constant companion for months. With few lengthy and no technical arguments, it is a great book to pick at casually.

The Essays, by Michel de’Montaigne. This is a massive collection of essays written by the grandfather of essays himself. I have been very slow-going at this. I started by reading one essay every morning, but then I hit some much larger ones and haven’t forced the time. Supposedly, Pascal said, after reading this, that it granted him 30 years worth of experience and wisdom. High praise, indeed. I have loved the Essays thus far, and believe I have grown in my wisdom because of it, but thus far, only by a year or two.

Nichomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, though I am reading this for my class. It makes me happy.

A number of essays about Spinoza, picking at them, not completing them.

The Seven Ages of Paris, by Alistair Horne. Inspired by reading the Nadler book, I decided I wanted to remedy by ignorance about this personally under-appreciated city by reading this highly acclaimed history. Did you know that Paris was legendarily founded by that very same son of King Priam, the man who basically started the Trojan-Greek war and killed Achilles? I guess I should have guessed.

The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer and A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. Both books on education, they both deliver a good message. I’m nearly done with Courage, but haven’t touched it in a couple weeks, and have only just started A New Culture. Courage‘s basic message is that a teacher needs to get in touch with their inner-selves and channel that to influence guide their teaching and connect with their students in an authentic and beneficial way. That’s a great message, but one that I’ve fortunately learned from my teaching mentors, as well as from philosophers like Nietzsche, Socrates, and Dewey. It’s probably a lesson that a lot of teachers could use. But I’m just hoping to pick up a couple of good lessons and finish this book as soon as possible. It feels like a lot of fluff.

Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, by Robert Pippin. Pippin is best known as a Hegel scholar at the University of Chicago, but this examination of Nietzsche is excellent and interesting. Not since Kaufman’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ has a book about Nietzsche been so eye-opening. I started this book last September, and it was Pippin stating early on that Nietzsche was more influenced by the French moralists than by traditional sources that turned me on to Pascal and Montaigne. I put it down for a few months because I lack discipline (there is much of that in my life) but have been back at it, though I started over.

So, that’s basically it. Most of my reading time is actually taken up by whatever class readings we are doing, so this list is quite incomplete, but it’s hard to list because they are so frequently changing.

I guess my version of “light summer reading” is “light reading of many heavy books,” though there are admittedly a few light ones in there as well.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

I say all this because it reminds me of something very important: the importance of writing down thoughts and beliefs as detailed hypotheses. Yesterday, I knew from observing my own experience that I often get distracted while typing on my computer, and also observed that staring at the ceiling allowed me to concentrate. I built an explanation around this using Hume and the association of certain ideas and impressions. My hypothesis eventually included the idea that I cannot look at the keyboard without getting distracted.  But today, I am concentrating without staring at the ceiling. Therefore, my explanation could not be exactly as I constructed it yesterday. If I did not delve into the detail, I would not have been in a position where I could have corrected myself. Thus, by the very act of writing, stamping ideas into solid form, reviewing them, thinking about them, and paying attention to how I behave, I realize that I actually ran a simple experiment within my mind.]

I woke up around 8am this Saturday morning. After deliberating what I should do, and resisting the temptation to play some video games (there is reason to wish I was immortal so I could play video games without sacrificing more worthwhile activities, but because my days are numbered, everything comes at a cost: usually, I forget this). I sit at my desk and take pleasure at the view out my window. My apartment is near the lake, 10^th floor, facing east. Generally, I can see the lake, lakeshore park, lake shore drive, people running on the path, a harbor, and the house of worship that sits between myself and the lake. I say generally, because today there is a light fog (not nearly as fierce as yesterday’s fog, which seemed to consume three quarters of the Trump Tower, and the color of the sky and lake are nearly identical, a soupy white. At the bottom of this soup, there are the changing dark spots, that I know to be waves. But as I look higher, the dark spots are harder to see, and I cannot perceive where the lake ends and the sky begins.   Because I do not go out much, this view has been an important reminder that I am in Chicago, that I should walk through the park, that there is a world outside of my room, that it is exhilarating to run along that path with my fellow Chicagoans. When I live on the other side of the building, my view was directly into a brick wall. It was the opposite of inspiring. The light was poor, the room was crammed, and I felt crammed and sick in that place. Here, in this new apartment, I can feel at ease.

To feel at ease: it is something I have always craved. For whatever reason, I am the opposite of that sort of person who can lie down on the couch and while away hours of time. I have lost days to this. I am not actually happy about this, but the drive is too strong. I am naturally a soft person. When I was growing up, I would much rather stay inside and watch television than play outside or read a book. Not always, but usually. The books I read were not sophisticated or literary. I would generally read fantasy novels, with dragons, warriors, and wizards doing battle with one another. I am sad about this now: I recognize that many of my academic peers used their time much better than I did in terms of cultivating their mind and character. School bored me to tears, and I did what I had to in order to get by. But although I recognize the disadvantages of this, I can’t quite feel regret. I was only a kid, and I didn’t know any better. I had never been exposed to the mental contours of being excited, of feeling competitive, of feeling the thrill of overcoming who I am. Why would I devote myself to a work for which I felt no reward? I remember occasionally  telling myself, especially at the beginning of the new school year: “this time will be  different. I shall change my ways. A fresh slate. I will remake myself.” But I never did, not entirely.

This youthful anxiousness, however, did allow me to do one thing: one day, it gave me the impetus to drive down to the Marine Corps recruiter and sign my life away. If I wasn’t going to remake myself, then I needed something that would….but I have lost my focused. This is the third day of playing with ideas without direction. It is now time to constrain my thoughts, to give some structure, some good soil from which my ideas can grow.

But there is one last thing to say: one lesson that I have learned from all of this that I realize I want to explore, that I have explored many times before, but generally only in the nebulous cloud of my thoughts, without language, without the solid, unchanging stamp of the written word. When it is only in my mind, I can only see a few steps of logic before the first steps and propositions shift and fade like the stream of smoke that the fighter planes leave in the sky outside my window during the air and water show every year. That idea is born from the following propositions:

1. It is the nature of my mind and body to crave rest and inactivity. This is my most stable drive.

2. It is also the nature of my mind and body to desire excellence: a strong, capable, active, self-created process of thinking, and process of movement and physical force.

3. However, the desire for these things does not seem to be a drive. Or, the drive has a long-term goal. When I possess it, that drive seems accentuated. [But all this is cloudy: let me try and first be direct, if unclear, and later be more clear…perhaps this is the problem I wish to attempt to solve]

4. That because of 2 and 1, I generally feel anxious. I want to do something active, but I cannot bring myself to do it.

5. That I am most comfortable when the [drive of 2 is at its weakest, if there is a drive] or [I am forgetting the want of 2, if it is a want]. (What is the difference between a want and a drive? I think I could describe it, or get close to a description, but not immediately, so I will leave it behind).

6. I feel most fulfilled when 2 is so strong that it overcomes the drive in 1, and I am pushed to action, self-creation, and excellence.

7. This is best said as an addendum of 2, but because, at this moment, I am trying to illustrate the thinking process, not the presentation process, I will include it here: it is of secondary importance where this the strength of this drive comes from. I felt fulfilled in the Marines, even though the Marine Corps was pushing me like a stubborn mule to achieve excellence. But I feel more fulfilled in my civilian life where I pushed myself like a stubborn mule.

I am getting tired now. I think my mind needs a rest. I do, in fact, feel fulfilled this morning, and if my claims thus far are true, it is because I overcame my original desire to play video games while eating bacon and drinking Bloody Mary’s and coffee, and instead gave voice to my ideas, and a voice that will not dissipate throughout the day. But I am also feeling anxious. Because my body is right now actually crying, demanding that it too enjoys some strain and exercise. I have been neglecting my body for the past two months, and it has been begging to be taken out for a walk. Like a dog, I suppose.

But I need to actually wrap this up. If I leave it without some direction for next time, I may very well begin yet a fourth session scrambling in the dark. This session, however, I have the startings of some problem: some first statements that I want to explore. I do not yet have specific questions, but I have the beginnings of a framework within which I can ask questions: play the game of problem-solving, because I have the beginnings of a problem, so to speak.

My hypothesis, then, is going to be something that I have been thinking for a long time: my fulfillment and the easy pleasure of my life are two mutually exclusive things. I cannot have both, and therefore must learn how to navigate through them. This is not specific enough, but it is something. There are more questions, or a refinement of this question, that needs to be constructed before I go any further.

But what use is this for others? Why would others be interested in this idea? Is it just my narcissism that makes it so? I do not think so. I will admit that perhaps it is a narcissism that drives me to share my thoughts, in the hopes that they will be read and understood. But I do think there is something here of importance to many people, although I need to understand what that is: I will not expect my audience to indulge in this essay if it is truly about my own thoughts and no one else’s.

I am reminded of what Thomas Hobbes wrote at the beginning of his Leviathan:

“Concerning [the  inquiry into “what is man?”], there is a saying much forgotten of late. That wisdom is acquired, not by the reading of books, but of reading people. Consequently and however, those persons, that for the most part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to show what they think they have read in other people, by speaking nastily behind one another’s backs.

But there is a another saying not of late understood, by which they might learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is, Nosce teipsum: READ THYSELF, which was [meant]…to teach, that for the similitude of the thoughts, andPassionsof one man,to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looks upon himself, and considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, fear, and upon what grounds, he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, andPassions of all  other men, upon the like occasions.”

In short, by understanding myself, I open the door to understanding others. Yes, the contours of my mind are different than the contours of most people’s minds. How my life has grown is quite different than how most people’s life has grown. But the laws are the same. Under the same conditions, I will presume that the effects will be similar as well.

I do not know this for certain, but this is true: if it is not true, then we are incapable of learning about how the mind works. If it is true, then we have some foothold, we have the potential for learning something new. And in fact, it seems that humanity has indeed made great progress in learning about how the mind works, thanks to philosophers, psychologists, certain novelists, computer scientists, and many others. If we were truly different, these advances would not be possible: what we learn about one mind would not be applicable to another in any way. We can certainly go too far in our claims, but claims that are made, can be critiqued. Claims that are not made, cannot be critiqued.

Therefore, I shall be brave in my assertions, but cautious in my convictions. I will shift my inquiry from the purely subjective inquiry of how my own mind works, to a more general inquiry to how minds work in general. I will remember that many of the things that I am discussing are not universal, but I am also unsure which are the universal, and which are more conditional and subjective. And so I depend on my reader: I will make the claims. When my reader agrees, that helps me to understand what may be universal. When my reader disagrees, then either we have found something that is purely conditional and subjective, or that my reader in fact is in denial. I therefore understand that the inquiry, even if done well, will have numerous questions left open when I am finished, and I shall be careful in paying attention where those questions lie when I am engaging in the essay itself.

But for now, I shall lay this “pen”> down, and go walk my dog.

…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. My mind needs something to think ABOUT before it can think at all. So, my mind needs some kind of structure. I am not really sure where this structure is going to come from. I am just writing, typing away, expressing whatever comes to mind in words. I am sitting in my chair, reclined, staring at the ceiling, and letting my fingers dance around the keyboard. I think that I’m hitting the right keys, but I’m not even looking at the keyboard, so I am not sure. Is this an effective method of writing an essay? Or, no, wait, that’s not what I mean. I mean, is this an effective way of brainstorming for an essay? Because obviously, this style in which I am currently writing would make for a horrible essay. Or, no, wait, that’s not what I mean either. This might make for a good essay, but not a good essay for my reader. This mt to answer my question:: is this effective brainstorming? I don’t know. Not yet. We’ll see what comes out of it.
Hmm. So, I am no closer to learning what my essay will be about, but I do want it to be good. I hope that it will be interesting to write, interesting to see how I delve into my mind, find concepts that I have been thinking about for some time, and see if I can express them clearly and ideally learn something from it. To be honest, it has been a long time since I’ve written an essay for a class. Literally years. Five years perhaps? So, despite teaching essays frequently, and frequently writing essays on my own for myself or my blog, the last time I have written an essay for a class was when I was in graduate school, in 2006. Five years. Oh my! Will I be up for the task? A small part of me is worried that I will prove myself to be a charlatan, and that I’ll do that right in front of my students.

Strangely, this act suddenly seems to me obscene. I am revealing my inner thought processes to my students. Wihat will this reveal? Will it reveal that I am in fact a fool inside? Perhaps, I suppose. Nietzsche says in one place…I can’t remember where right now…but that “A teacher only takes himself seriously in regard to his students.” That actually feels comforting. I am, in fact, serious about teaching, serious about helping other people ubnlock new worlds of thought within themselves, serious about showing others how to think well, serious about helping my students help themselves. If being ridiculous helps, then this is what I must do.

But perhaps what I am doing here is the best thing I could do? Writing essays is actually a very private affair, isn’t it? We get the assignment in class, the final product is graded, but in order to write a good essay, the writer often holes themslef up by themself (at least mentally) nd wields their ideas, stamps them into words, without anyone observing this mental life.And so, is it the same thing as this? Suppose you were in class about the construction of motors. The teacher assigned the construction of the motor, and inspected the final product, but expects the student to figure out how to build the motor on their own. that would be ridiculous. The teacher would do a better job if she built a motor in front of the students, and said, “students, don’t build a motor exactly like this, but I want you to see what it is to build a motor, to make decisions about things during the building process, so you can create a motor  of your own. There are certain rules and principles that will apply for all motors, but once you understand these, you will also understand that you can and should be creative in how you build your motor.”

Sadly, I realize that I will need to close this to go to a very fun and awesome meeting. But I will leave this with a closing thought: I know that it will be to my benefit if I choose a topic that seems interesting to ME, that I am curious about and that I feel I will gain something by writing it. In these above paragraphs, I was writing from the gut, without fore-thought. I was letting my will drive my thoughts, and my rational mind’s only task was taking the nebulous ideas, uncritically translating them into words, and immediately sending the appropriate signals to my fingers, which blindy dance across the keyboard. What does this tell me? That the above things are on my mind, and that pershaps the things I wrote about should be the beginning of my subject matter for my essay. I would not have known this if I didn’t just sit down and write. My ideas would never have been reflected upon, my mind would never have recorded what occurred in my mind. Now it is here, ready for the next phase. I will leave this now, but as I am walking to the meeting, I will think about what I have written, and even pay attention to the way people at the meeting talk, because now I will be hunting for specific ideas, anything that will help me write this essay. As I read and re-read Kierkegaard and Marx, I will think about these ideas and hunt amongst their words anything that could assist me. What I have done thus far may not seem productive, but it is the raw material of thought, refined into language, ready for the next stage of thinking. Good bye for now.

I am going to post these entries on this blog, every day for the next few days. I started this project last Thursday, so I already have a backlog of things to post. Some of them are quite long, and so readers will need to click on blog post title to view the entire entry.

Before this makes much sense, you would need to know something about my approach to teaching and understanding the essay. In my view, an “essay” is not merely a paper. It is certainly not a statement of one’s beliefs, or arguing for the beliefs that one already has. That sort of paper is not enlightening: it does not teach the writer or the reader anything interesting, new, or useful. This is especially true in philosophy, where the subjects of our inquiry are often nebulous, and which, if they are to be useful, need to strike at the heart of the writer’s own assumptions and prejudices. An essay is an attempt to overturn old thoughts, and to see old beliefs under new lights. The “essay” is, literally, “an attempt,” and it is an attempt to find some new truth, or at least some new way of understanding. Much, if not most, of the project here is to construct a problem. That is, to take what one has normally thought, examine it, and find some way of looking at it that shows the necessity of thinking about it in a new way. I pulled much of this from the University of Chicago’s writing program, but also from the philosophy and writing styles of Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche. If you have a copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, read section 45 and 46, and you will get the basic idea (make sure to read Kaufmann’s footnote for 45 too). It may also be useful to read my “Teaching Philosophy,” which I will post as a permanent page soon (hopefully immediately after I post this).

I have two classes that I am doing this for: “Enlightenment to the Present,” and “Ethics.” The subject matter in the former is currently the epistemological theories (loosely) of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Marx. I count Hegel’s master-slave dialectic (Phenomoenology of Spirit), Kierkegaard’s objective-subjective dialectic (Concluding Unscientific Postscript), and Marx’s alienated labor (Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844) as epistemological works, because they all deal with how we conceive the self and/or our relation with truth.

The essay questions are probably annoyingly broad, but I intended them to be this way because I believe so much of the valuable project here is in constructing one’s own problem, rather than letting the teacher provide you with one. Independent thinking has more to do with defining one’s own questions rather than answering them.

The basic questions are these:

Enlightenment: Consider something that you believe, examine it, and utilize the philosophies of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Marx to help this examination. (choose 1 or 2 authors: do not overburden yourself)

Ethics: What does it mean to be noble: not in the sense of rank or caste, but in the sense of an excellent character. Use Nietzsche to help examine your ideas.

The first part of the task is to narrow the question. It would be impossible to write a good essay simply responding to the question “what is noble,” especially in 5-pages. Both of these essay questions are exactly what they were asked in their first paper, but all the essays came back with theses that were too broad and unmanagable. That is expected on the first paper, and so we take a second and third attempt at it. There are usually some pretty amazing essays by the end of the semester.

The last thing I’ll note is that I sincerely attempted to enter into this without excessive seriousness, or without any agenda as to what I would write about. I tried to wipe my mind clean, and to start by simply asking the question, “what should I write about?” From there, I work to something more specific.

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.