Studiousness – Maverick Philosopher

Do I Repeat Myself?

Repetitio est mater studiorum.

Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

Top of the Stack.

Reader Asks: What Should I Read?

Nathaniel T. writes,

In the new year, I'm committing to some more regular reading habits.

What serious books would you recommend to someone outside academia who has about half an hour uninterrupted in the morning to read, three times a week? How about a list that would last that person a year?

Here are some additional parameters that might aid in your selection:

I went to St. John's College in Annapolis, so I've read many of the "greats" in whole or in part, at least once. I have kept up some serious reading since my graduation in 2012, just irregularly.

I already pray and read the New Testament and spiritual reading daily.

Thanks for your insight and writing!

The best advice I could give anyone with your background who is committed to the life of the mind is to buy and study a copy of A. G. Sertillanges, O. P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. He explains how to proceed. It is a classic. He draws upon Aquinas and upon Alphonse Gratry, of whom C. S. Peirce had a very high opinion. So I also recommend Gratry's Logic if you can find a copy. Reference here.

I hesitate to offer a list of books on particular topics given the constraints on your time. But here are a couple that are short, very clear, and unusually thought-provoking: Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation (make sure to get the Sea Harp Press edition which contains an introduction by C. S. Lewis); Romano Guardini, Jesus Christus (anything by Guardini is worth reading).

If perchance you are interested mystical theology, and have already read the great Spanish mystics, Juan de la Cruz and Teresa de Avila, and have the stamina for a long slog, then I recommend Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology. Reference and notes here.

For more suggestions see my Bibliophilia category.

Combox open if anyone has any recommendations.

By the way, has St. John's College, Annapolis gone 'woke'?

On Profitable Study of Philosophy

One needs to work through a text slowly, pondering, comparing, re-reading, reconstructing and evaluating the arguments, raising objections, imagining possible replies and all of this while animated by a burning need to get to the bottom of some pressing existential question. You must bring to your reading questions if you expect study to be profitable.

If one fails to enter into the dialectic of the problems and issues one will come away with little more than a vague literary impression. But real study is hard work demanding aptitude, time, peace, and quiet, a commodity in short supply in these hyperkinetic and cacaphonous times. Back in the day, Arthur Schopenhauer was much exercised by "the infernal cracking of whips" as he he complained in his classic "On Noise." What would he say today? Could he survive in the contemporary crapstorm of cacaphony?

So turn off that cell phone before I smash it to pieces!

Advice on Study and the Improvement of the Mind

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.

The Ability to Write and to Comprehend a Good, Long Sentence . . .

. . . is one mark of an educated mind. You won't learn this in the English Department of Rutgers, however. Example:

If you value the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, high culture and its transmission, in short, the classical values of the university as set forth in such great works as John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University, then you should withdraw all support from the culturally Marxist indoctrination centers that the vast majority of contemporary 'universities' have become.

A good stylist, I will add, varies the length of his sentences. (And a good upholder of traditional values insists on his right to use standard English.)

The 'universities' of the present day are more an impediment to the development of an educated mind than a help. You don't need them. Do your bit to defund them.

Note the difference between 'good, long sentence' and 'good long sentence.'

Machiavelli on the Pleasure of Study

Although he was decidedly of the world and not merely in it, Machiavelli knew how to retreat from its brutality into the serene precincts of the life of the mind and lose himself there, for a time, in conversations with the ancients.

I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them . . . and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus.

See here.

My Approach to Study and Writing

A reader inquires,

A question. It seems I hit a wall every year or so in my intellectual life which involves uncertainty about what books/essays to read next, what subject matter to systematically pursue, what to reread and review (review is all too important). Now I know everyone is different, but could you share your approach to study during the week/month? Do you have a review day once a week? Do you have both a long-term project and a short term one going at the same time? Sorry if you’ve answered this in a post before, you may refer me to it.

I do have a long-term project, namely, a book I am trying to finish. The subject matter is extremely difficult and technical and so the going is slow. I am perhaps perversely attracted to the nastiest and toughest problems there are, problems that tax my poor pate to its paltry limits. I work on the book a little each day. And then I have a number of short-term projects going at the same time. One is a review article I have been invited to write, and another is an invited contribution to a collection of essays that must be submitted by January 1st. And then there is my pursuit of all sorts of other questions via blogging. On top of that 'culture war' activities: Blasting away day by day against the insanity of the destructive Left. The Kavanaugh proceedings galvanized me and 'inspired' me to bring the fight into the belly of the beast, Zuck's Facebook. I can't sit back and only think about God and the soul, time and existence, while my beloved country is destroyed by liberal-left filth.

You ask about review. Blogging helps with this. You shouldn't read serious material if you are not willing to study it, and there is little point in studying it if you don't take notes, assemble them into a coherent commentary, and evaluate what the author is maintaining, taking on board what is useful to you. For example, I have written series of posts on books by Benatar, Nagel, Plantinga, and others. These posts are available for review and cannibalization. The book I am writing will have a chapter on death. Some of the material from the Benatar posts will find its way into it.

Above all you need a direction and a definite focus. What is it that most concerns you that you want to understand? What is the cynosure of your interest? The nature of disagreement? The rationality/irrationality of religious belief? The foundation of morality? The nature of the political? Mind's place in nature? In Aristotelian terms, you need a 'final cause' of your inquiries, a unifying telos lest you spread yourself too thin and scatter your energies — as I am wont to do.

A Method of Study

Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age

We Lesser Lights

The great thinkers think for humanity, and the great writers write for humanity. The great teachers are teachers of humanity. Buddha was such a one and so were Jesus and Socrates. We lesser lights think and write to clear our heads, and to appropriate what we have inherited.

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!

What from your fathers you received as heir,

Acquire if you would possess it.

(Goethe's Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)

We think and write to know our own minds, to form our minds, and attract a few of the like-minded. As Aristotle says somewhere, we philosophize best with friends. Philosophy does not make progress in us so much as we make progress in philosophy. We are teachers of humanity only at second-hand, and only to a few. But we too participate in the great tradition and are grateful for the vocation to such participation.

Evening and Morning

The quality of the first will affect the quality of the second. An evening of drinking and dancing is no preparation for a morning of thinking and trancing.

Related: Suggestions on How to Study

Misattributed to Socrates

I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression. Have I ever done any of these things? Probably. 'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above. But I try to avoid these 'sins.'

This morning I was reading from Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became of Sin? (Hawthorn Books, 1973). On p. 156, I found this quotation:

Our youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people. Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

At the bottom of the page there is a footnote that reads: "Socrates, circa 425 B. C. Quoted in Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)."

I was immediately skeptical of this 'quotation.' In part because I had never encountered the passage in the Platonic dialogues I have read, but also because the quotation is second-hand. So I took to the 'Net and found what appears to be a reputable site, Quote Investigator.

Therein a pertinent post entitled Misbehaving Children in Ancient Times? Plato or Socrates? It turns out that the answer is neither. The above quotation, or rather something very close to it,

. . . was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.

On Writing Well: The Example of William James

This from a graduate student in philosophy:

I have always been an admirer of your philosophical writing style–both in your published works and on your blog. Have you ever blogged about which writers and books have most influenced your philosophical writing style?

Yes, I have some posts on or near this topic. What follows is one from 21 September 2009, slightly revised.

……………………….

From the mail bag:

I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

Write it Down!

If you are blessed by a good thought, do not hesitate to write it down at once. Good thoughts are visitors from Elsewhere and like most visitors they do not like being snubbed or made to wait.

Let us say a fine aphorism flashes before your mind. There it is is fully formed. All you have to do is write it down. If you don't, you may be able to write only that an excellent thought has escaped.

"But there is more where that one came from." No doubt, but that very one may never return.

Are You a Natural Writer? Take the Gide Test

Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows.

It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one's work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what's the use? . . . And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding. This is the need that now prompts the ratiocinations with which I am filling this notebook and makes me banish all bombast from them. I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don't bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt of yourself. There is more light in Christ's words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.

1. Writers are born, not made. For the born writer, doubts about the value of writing are insufficient to impede the process of putting words on paper. Something similar goes for the born philosopher. Doubts about philosophy are just more grist for the philosophical mill and have no tendency to impede the thinker's inquiry. No real philosopher is put off by doubts and objections of the sort cataloged and refuted in Philosophy Under Attack. You are either driven by a need to understand the world or you are not. If you are driven by that need you will gravitate toward philosophy whether or not you call it 'philosophy.'

2. The writer writes to satisfy a pressing need, the need to understand himself and the world. Driven by that need, he scribbles away, well or poorly, with or without a readership, under gusts of inspiration or in the horse-latitudes of the spirit, and whether it fills or depletes his belly.

3. The truth-seekers are to be trusted, the truth-finders doubted. Makes a good aphorism!

4. Unlike Bertrand Russell and others, Gide discerned truth in Christ's words, but was unable to believe. This shows that the discerning of truth is insufficient for belief. So much the worse for doxastic involuntarism. Belief requires something more, an act of will. There is something voluntary about belief. In many cases, not all, we decide what to believe and what to disbelieve. Josef Pieper who, in his Belief and Faith, p. 26, refers to the last of the Gide lines just quoted, remarks, "A free assent of will must be performed. Belief rests upon volition." (p. 27) See here for more on doxastic voluntarism.

5. Memo to BV: Get hold of the André Gide-Paul Claudel correspondence and explore why Claudel but not Gide embraced the Church of Rome.

Why Write?

A reader sends me the following quotation from a Richard Mitchell:

I have never yet written anything, long or short, that did not surprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatest worth of writing, which is only incidentally a way of telling others what you think. Its first use is for the making of what you think, for the discovery of understanding, an act that happens only in language.

I surmise that the Richard Mitchell in question is The Underground Grammarian.

I agree with Mitchell's thought subject to a minor qualification. The achievement of understanding is not possible without language, but it does not, in every instance, require writing, or even speech. Nevertheless, the perfection of (discursive) understanding is possible only by writing.

Second to the careful articulation of one's thought in written language comes that rare event called 'dialogue,' in which two sympathetic minds use each other to arrive at a truth that transcends both.