How to do philosophy

A bit of advice

Hey everyone,

Happy Phill Niblock Appreciation Day / winter solstice / peak holiday madness. I’m one of those people that gets a little numb as the season wears on, and daily doses of fresh political horror aren’t helping. At least it’s a good time of year for losing yourself in music. The other day I picked up Bill Bruford’s Gradually Going Tornado on vinyl. “The Sliding Floor” is a rare and special breed of love song, and it’s festive enough if you listen to it right.

Some news: first, Michael Garfield and I are coordinating daytime sessions for Weird Academia, a series of events taking place next month at Indiana University Bloomington. If you’re interested in participating, please email elfthoughts@gmail.com. Michael and I are using that account to make introductions and collect ideas for session themes.

Second, I'm joining LEPHT HAND as an alternating host/co-host. LEPHT HAND is a podcast from Acid Horizon’s Sereptie (Craig.) Sereptie and I have a similar approach to theory and politics, and I’ve had a lot of fun planning episodes so far. If you’re new to the Acid Horizon universe, can’t recommend it enough. They’re doing the lord’s work by taking theory out of academia without giving a foothold to pop anti-intellectualism. They’re also hosting my course on acid communism (seats are filling up!), and they’re responsible for the world's greatest coffee mug. Get on it.

In a recent LEPHT HAND video, Sereptie shared advice for reading philosophy without getting lost. I wanted to comment on a few of his strategies and add some of my own, focusing on general best practices in addition to reading techniques. It may seem elementary, but if I’d had advice like this when I was younger, it would’ve saved me a lot of time and mental bandwidth.

In no particular order:

Atmospheric reading. What Sereptie calls “atmospheric reading” is a bit like stream-of-consciousness writing. You’re not concerned with anything making sense; you’re just going with the flow of the words. The idea is that reading and understanding are two different steps in the process.

His advice is to do a first pass of atmospheric reading whenever the text is confusing, especially if it’s your first encounter with a particular thinker. Absorb the words; let them simmer in the back of your head for a few days; then come back and give it a second try. If you stay with them long enough, they’ll start to open up to you. This has worked for me on lots of different occasions.

Gravitational pull. Some sentences won’t make sense right away, but you’ll still find yourself drawn to them. This is a sign that there’s some “there” there. Take note of these parts (highlight or underline them) and revisit them later on. It’s pretty normal to take philosophy line-by-line or word-by-word. A big part of the practice is lingering with a single word, sentence, or idea until you feel you’ve gotten it. You may or may not have actually gotten it, but the feeling is a sign that you’re on the right track.

The grain. Per the video: you can read to get the grain (attain a basic understanding of the text), go with the grain (come into agreement with it), or go against the grain (develop a critical perspective on it.) If you’re a beginner, it’s helpful to deliberately choose your approach before you start reading. The default is reading to get the grain, but the other methods will draw your attention to details you might miss otherwise. If you find that you can’t stay with your chosen approach — for example, if you read to go against the grain, but can’t help but agree with the text — all the better: it means you’re developing your own unique outlook.

A side note: understanding and belief are a lot closer than most people realize. When you understand something really well, it’s hard not to see it as truthful or valuable in some sense. This means that the first two approaches have a lot more in common with each other than they do with against-the-grain or “critical” reading. Critical reading requires that you not only bring your full attention to the material, but that you take the additional step of distancing yourself from it. This is actually a pretty complicated thing to do, which is why it’s stressed so much in formal education: it’s a hallmark of intellectual sophistication.

Back when I was a philosophy professor, I was encouraged to fast-track students to the critical phase. I wish I’d pushed back against this. The vital question isn’t what do you think about this?, it’s do you understand this?. This is true for learners at any stage, not just newcomers.

Tests are good. Speaking of comprehension, you can’t rely on yourself to be your own evaluator. If you have a mentor or friend who knows their stuff, ask them to assess you. If they don’t have their own assessment methods, here’s a basic exercise: restate a concept in your own words and ask them if you’ve got it right, more or less.

This doesn’t just apply to philosophy. When I was teaching myself the basics of machine learning, I used to ask people questions like “this is how I understand ‘latent space,’ is this right?.” It’s not the least awkward ask in the world, but most people are flattered by it, and no one ever hung up the phone on me.

Carry water, chop wood. There’s so much value in “mindless” organizational tasks. On top of making your life easier, they’ll keep you connected to the material in a way that’s not cognitively draining. Reorganizing your library (including your PDF library) is an example of this sort of activity. So are practical preparations for writing projects. When I was studying for my prelim exams, I got into the habit of manually copying passages from physical books into Word docs. I started doing this so that I’d have excerpts ready to go for copy-pasting into drafts (during prelims, you do a ton of writing under super tight deadlines), but I kept it up all throughout my dissertation. The fact that you can automate a lot of the mindless side of intellectual labor doesn’t mean you should.

Embrace embodiment. Almost everybody prefers hard copy for a reason: ideas feel more real when you’ve got a tactile connection with them. In the run-up to prelims, I trained myself to read PDFs on my 13” MacBook screen, since there was no way I could’ve printed everything out. I’m used to this by now, but I don’t love it. Just this year, I got a Supernote tablet and a 27” external monitor, and I’m kicking myself for not having done so earlier in my career. The tablet is a good proxy for the feeling of pen and paper, and the monitor does a lot for eye strain. Still, nothing beats analog. When I’m working on a serious project, I try to get as many hard copies as I can, and I do a lot of brainstorming in a paper notebook.

Take pleasure in the ritual. Even if you’re fully on board with philosophy as a useful way to spend your time, it can be a slog. Much of it will seem less interesting than whatever’s coming at you through your phone. A little ritual magic goes a long way here. Find a beautiful place to work; use a nice pen and notebook; take the time to find background music that lifts your mood and helps you focus. A hot beverage will force you to slow down; so will incense and candles. Learn to connect a feeling of elegance with those fresh neural pathways you’re carving.

Don’t worry about looking or feeling pretentious. Everything interesting starts out as stagecraft.

Talk about it. If philosophy has a proper medium, it’s dialogue, not the written word. Something about the immediacy of conversation trains the mind in a way that writing can’t. (See: Heinrich von Kleist, On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech.)

Do not use AI as your conversation partner. No one needs a degree or special qualifications to do philosophy, but they should at least be conscious. If none of your friends are into it, join a book club, a class, or a philosophy community online. (I will not use this as an opportunity to promote my upcoming class, but fyi the link’s right here.)

***

I’ll end with a broad observation: scholarly habits are personal. I have a few that are so idiosyncratic they’re not really worth mentioning. You’ll find your own if you’re committed to doing so.

I’ve shared the ones that I used to share with my students, often as I was reminding them to get enough sleep and eat a healthy diet. They still found philosophy painful, but I like to think I helped some of them find pleasure in the pain. I hope this made you a better masochist, too.