On Reading Philosophy

Day 49

The first thing that comes to mind when advising someone about reading a book is, somewhat obviously, to read carefully. The writer may be wrong in all sorts of ways and you don't want to get caught up in the flow so much so that you don't questions them, or that you too quickly accept their arguments. At the same time, you don't want to read so fast and with so much prejudice that you misunderstand what the author has to say, or that you immediately dismiss all that the author has to say as delusional and worthless opinions not worth actually engaging with. Remember that, while the ideas and words that you read may be said by the devil, the structure and logic might be flawed, and the ideas themselves may be fuzzy and vague, that the picture painted by the book was something that somebody thought. I've found that most philosophy consists of things like arguments, facts, and conclusions all placed together in a net of relations. Books paint pictures of world, and suggest a sort of logical field using the words on their pages. A book is an attempt to communicate.

To communicate an idea is to transfer the meaning of the idea through various logical fields, or to talk to another person. When we read a book of philosophy, we engage with the logical field painted by that book. We try to understand what the book has to say, and to imagine the logical field within it. This is what it mean to understand another – to be able to see the world though their eyes, and as they see it, is to know, to a certain degree, of their logical field. Thus, when reading a book we can become swept along it's flow, following the lines of its logical field as we leave our own. We can also find a book incomprehensible, as its logical field and ours present have some incompatibilities, or communication is too difficult. The closer something is to our own ideas, and our own experiences, the easier we will understand it, but also the easier we will misinterpret it in our same old way, because of our familiarity with it. The further something is from our own ideas and experiences, the harder it will be to understand and imagine, but the more we will be aware of how badly we don't get it. A logical field is a series of relations, and is often just as much a set of facts as it is a way of thinking, both being gems in the world.

Being a gem in the world, a book of philosophy is something that exists, and so is a facet or aspect of the world – something that somebody has thought and said, believed and spent energy putting down in writing. It offers another way of viewing the world. Being a single facet, it is almost certainly not entirely correct -witness that no book seems to have all the answers – but neither is it likely to be entirely incorrect. If everything is connected in the world, then we can learn about the world from everything in it, from the great books and the books that aren't very good at all. Where they hopefully differ is in the degree we can learn from them. This isn't just about books of course, but also all things in the world.

Figuring out whether a book is great or horrible is often a very difficult thing to do. The books that one segment of the world holds up as a great foundation of knowledge and wisdom, other sections of the world often decry it to be full of misinformation and propaganda. Someone may tell you that something is a great book, but when you read it, you find it to be dense, boring, and and of no use. For the books of science, we can generally aim at reading the most advanced and most referenced books at the time, even though we know very well that half of the information in them cold be hopelessly out of date in twenty or forty years. You should also be careful to distinguish between facts and opinions, between reports of what happened, and reports of the authors understanding of what happened, tells us about the world. Theories are theories for a reason, and a good reading of science understands this. For books of the heart, read famous poetry or famous stories, ones which seem to strike at the heart of men for reasons which are generally seen as non-logical. Watch also popular and acclaimed films, talk shows, and people in ordinary life as well. That will help you to understand what the people of today think and feel, what they consider important and what moves them now. Reading the novels of the past is all well and good, but better if they are read today. For philosophical texts, generally speaking, the longer the book has been around, and the more famous it is, the better. The philosophy books written today may well be the ones to read if we want to find out what people is thinking and where we are gong next, but they are untested. The new ideas that are thought to be the blazing fire leading to well-lit days right now, but they might be ashes tomorrow. I don't say that you should never read them, for I think it would be a very bright idea to do so, but that they are, generally speaking, less powerful.

If a book has been around for an appreciable amount of time, and is still being read and recommended regularly, then we can say that book has a great deal of acclaim and historicity. Acclaim and historicity don't mean that a book is right or true, but they do mean that it is powerful, and it is likely so because it touches on something powerful. The book could touch on an area of stress in the world, releasing energy. It could be a force in or society, a source of some of the ideas that effect how we all live today. It could touch on some foundational pillar of the world which is common to all of us. It is rare than people create an entirely new idea. More often then not, a new creation is not a source-less spark coming in from the void, but is an extension of some gem which is already in the world, to outside the world. We don't create from nothing – we create with nothing. This extension of a gem and enlargement of the world can happen because of some new force from outside revealing something about a gem we thought we knew well, from the examination of a gem in the world, arising in a new world after the shattering of the old one, or happen because of some action that our will has taken.

We are writers as well as readers. When we intake information, when we read about some philosophical idea, we interpret it and come to have an opinion about it. We can speak or write down our thoughts. We can engage in conversations between ourselves, and the book or the people. The person who wrote that book is a person just like you, and the people who acclaim or decry that book are people just like you. Your opinion is, potentially, just as correct as theirs. This doesn't mean that it is, by any means – we have all been wrong. However, it does mean that just because some book tells you one thing or another, or some person or group of persons tells you they are right and you are wrong, that they are automatically correct just because they are more learned or famous than you. They can be wrong too – the key is to trust yourself, to trust that you understand them and that you are worthy of disagreeing with even the most ardent genius or deepest mystic ever born. You are the judge of , if not the power, the worth of their ideas – though that also comes with a judge's responsibility. If you deem a book or an idea worthless, toss it away and move on to what seems right to you, but remember that everything tells us something, that every lie is made up of truths. When you toss it away you are also tossing away the views that someone out there has or had. As we all learn, it generally is a lot harder to do this to someone when they are right in front of you. Perhaps unfortunately, the person who is most in front of you, is yourself. Judge yourself well.

Each time we read about something from another point of view, we gain perspective on that gem, a better view of what it actually is in the world. Because we have the ability to be self-reflective, we can do this to ourselves. Look at the world to find yourself, to figure out what your thoughts are, what your words say, what your actions reveal about you. As you can read the thoughts of others, so to can you read your own thoughts, though a bit of time between writing and review is strongly suggested. When we strike down our thoughts and opinions, when we decide that we were wrong to say what we said to do what we did, then we are often left feeling a bit lost. We used to know who we are, but now we have to discover ourselves again.

I have generally found that personal change is not sudden and does not come in a flash of enlightenment. That may be well and good for stripping away illusions, but building yourself up again is a longer process. This accords with the lessons of childhood – that it takes a lot longer to stack p some wooden blocks or plug a bunch of Lego's together than it does to bring the tower down or to smash the spaceship on the floor. We tend to change slowly, and have hidden depths. Witness your rants and your writings, that when when we put something intelligible out in the world, we often end up saying much more than we meant to. Your words and your actions both say something about who you are. To investigate yourself, there is a time for a degree of control and order, and a time for a degree of freedom and chaos, because we don't spend all our time living as just one or the other.

The self-illusions that we have, like our knee-jerks reactions, personal doubts, and points of sensitivity, are things which we encounter out there in the world. With the hopes of the world also come the jeers. I'm not going to name every one of them, but I will try and point out some major ones I feel that I often encounter when reading philosophy: One of the most common stances to take in a oral or interpretive debate is to hold the idea that 'You are either with us, or against us'. This is a self-illusion, because it suggests that there are only two paths. On the contrary, since the world is open and you have free will, there is almost always the possibility of a third path. Sometimes this is neutral, sometimes agreeing in part and disagree in part with both sides, and sometimes going some other way entirely that no-one else ever considered. Don't let them, or your own doubts, place you in chains. A claim that many philosophers will make at one point or another is that something cannot be done. The wise ones continue after this and say that if you can show them an example of doing so then they will withdraw their claim – but this understanding is more the exception than the rule. Because the world is open and limits are vague, because there are unknown things in the world, no claim that includes the word “can't” is a proven claim. It may be beyond a reasonable doubt, and that might be good enough for life – but it is not beyond a possible doubt, and I would hope to find something better. I have tried not to do this in my writing here, tried to be making only claims about what we can do, which even if an illusion is at least a something, an area of open possibility and not a an area closed by limit.

I've said before that all that is, is consistent with reality. This does not mean that it is complete, so watch out for arguments that claim to contain complete truth about anything. As well though, even if something is consistent with reality, that does not mean that it is consistent with or in the world. Logical fields can disagree with each other or have holes in them, and a world might not remain stable in such a case. There may be a possible point of view, or a possible world, that is so strange compared to our own that what appears to be a gem or an aspect of a gem there, appears to us as nonsense. It might be the case that something in reality is not in the world, and there are things we know not of, ways we haven't ever been able to think, which are truthful as anything we have ever encountered. It is also possible that there is no such thing, and that the limits of the world are in fact the limits of reality. I do not think that we have yet found out which it is, isn't, or could be. When we read philosophy, it often seem to us to say something very deep and meaningful, to reveal some deep truth about reality. Prehaps it does, or perhaps it just reveals some deep truth about the world, about us. Is there another possible way of seeing things, of understanding things, of saying things – speaking in reality, but silent in the world?

Finally, philosophy is of the world, and about the world – The mundane as well as the phantastical.