I had an interesting but short conversation today in Facebook that I'm going to use as sort of a launching point for thinking about some bigger picture issues having to do with how you study philosophy, particularly if you're doing it on your own, if you're somebody who can't do it full time in a school with the guidance of professors (which, by the way, is probably a bit overrated. It's kind of a grab bag. But that's a conversation for another time.)
So this person was commenting on a post that I made, where I was linking to the piece that I wrote last night about Alasdair MacIntyre and some of my memories of interactions with him that, to me, revealed a kind of character that I've talked about before in this podcast, specifically with MacIntyre. So I don't need to go over any of that again.
The person probably expressed themselves poorly because what they were asking for is something that I'm asked for an awful lot in comments and emails and AMAs. Which is: tell me what works of a philosopher are most important or essential for me to begin with.
But what this person added to it that kind of set me thinking in a certain line (perhaps wrongly) was: “I don't want to waste time or effort.” And I thought, you know, there's a couple things wrong with this.
One is that if you're just beginning in philosophy or really in any field, you don't know enough to be able to say where you're wasting time or effort. As a matter of fact, this is something that MacIntyre has drawn upon an awful lot in his work as an analogy for moral theory, to learning how to play an instrument, or learning how to work with a crew on a fishing boat, or learning how to do some sort of handicraft like pottery, and anything along those lines,
You don't know enough at the start, even though you may feel that you do, to be able to say what's a waste of your time or effort and what isn't. It's up to people who know a bit better than you, if you're lucky enough to have them there personally. who can say: Well, here's what you need to do. I understand that you don't really like playing scales and doing these drills on the flute or the piano or whatever it is, but you really do need to do this if you want to progress.
If you want to be able to fish with us, first you've got to learn how to stand on a boat and not fall over when the waves hit, and then you've got to learn how to work with the netting, and how to tell certain signs about the water, and we could go on and on and on. You get the point. I don't need to belabor that any further.
So there's that part going on, the you don't know enough to know what you don't know, which I may talk about somewhere else, because I think that's actually very important. People get themselves into all sorts of trouble and predicaments and emotional conundrums because they're working off of insufficient information. And they draw conclusions from it about what they ought to do.
And this is where you actually do waste time and effort going down blind alleys, so to speak, or getting yourself stuck in a cul-de-sac somewhere. And then you got to come out and redo it.
The other thing that I was perhaps wrongly reading into it, because I said to the person, you know, that's not the sort of attitude that you want to bring to philosophical works, is this notion that you can divide works up into those that are actually worth your time and effort and those which are a waste of it.
Now, there are definitely some books out there that either in general for most people or for a particular person, given where they currently are, would be kind of a waste of their time and effort relative to something else. I don't suggest that people dive right away in the beginning of their philosophical studies into Hegel's Phenomenology or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Spinoza's Ethics or any of these other texts that people take as kind of pinnacles and must-reads. Again, another topic for another time.
And it would be kind of a waste of time, relatively speaking again, to say: Well, I'm going to plow my way through Kant's first critique, and I'll just do that rather than reading other things where you might make a little bit more progress. I can certainly understand that notion.
But the idea that philosophical texts in general, particularly with somebody like MacIntyre, where his writing is pretty accessible, deliberately so, and he touches on many interesting and important topics, weaving them together well, there really isn't anything that would be a waste of your time to read or to study or to reread and go back to.
And I think we can say that for a lot of philosophers, even if you're reading something that's very challenging and makes reference to a lot of other thinkers that you haven't probably studied before, like say Aristotle's Metaphysics, it's not a waste of your time for you to be reading that, particularly given all the other things that we do that, at least in comparison to reading philosophy, do turn out to be kind of wastes of time.
You know, scrolling on our phones, watching television shows that we probably won't remember a year from now, composing emails about all sorts of topics to people who probably aren't going to read them. You know, we could compare those things and say, yeah, that's kind of a waste of time. You know, maybe not. Again, who's to say what actually constitutes a waste of time? It's always going to be in comparison to something else that you could be spending your time upon.
So as we went back and forth in conversation, it emerged that this person was probably underrating their own capacities for reading and understanding and study, which is a very common set of ideas that people impose on themselves and labor under when it comes to philosophy and not just philosophy, but other fields as well.
They say, oh, I'm just not very good at this. I'm not intellectual. I'm not very smart. And, you know, if you approach things with that attitude, you create could then say: Well, I don't want to waste my time studying something that's far beyond me that I'm just not ready for. And that would actually make some sense.
But again, with McIntyre, I don't think there's an awful lot where a decently educated and well-motivated person who does want to understand what he's saying would pick up a book and just not be able to make any sense of it whatsoever, and wouldn't be able to make some progress, any more than I think that's the case with reading Plato's dialogues (granted some are much more difficult than others, and you might be a little confused at first with all the variety of perspectives going on). But it's worth plowing away at
And so here is the broader general point. I'm not saying that nobody ever wastes their time or effort studying particular works of philosophy, but I will say, and here's a claim that I'm making, that for nearly all of us, our default should not be heading in with this attitude of, “I don't want to waste my time and effort.”
It should be rather, well, I've got some time and effort to spare, and I could be wasting it on things that are very trivial, but I'm choosing to devote it to something that I think is going to have a better yield, a better payoff. a better return on investment. And I don't really know that that's the case, but I've seen that it has been the case for other people.
And not just in the last five years, like some fly-by-night personal development program. “If it worked for me, it can work for you. Sign up for my coaching package” kind of nonsense. It's been working for people studying philosophy for thousands of years with some of these texts.
Now, granted, MacIntyre's stuff is much more recent, since the guy just finished up with his life last week. But when hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people have read somebody and said, Hey, there's something here worth studying. Maybe that can be a sign that, since you're talking not just about bestseller lists or beach reading or things that make it on to daytime talk shows, but actual intellectual work that you can take that as an index. There's really something there, that if you don't hold yourself back and act as if it's up to the text to show to you that it's worth your time and effort, but you actually invest the time and effort, you will likely (not guaranteed, but likely) see it pay off.
And so I think that this worried attitude that some people bring to their studies, what am I going to get out of this? That's the wrong question early on. First, you actually have to do the “out of this”. Well, you've got to go in first, and then you can figure out what is going to happen when you come out.
So those are a few reflections about an interesting exchange that perhaps I misinterpreted, but I certainly got some mileage out of thinking about it. Maybe it's helpful for you to hear these words yourself, and if it steers anybody away from a counterproductive attitude towards studying philosophical text, then it did a decent job at what it was supposed to do.
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