aim for 20 years, at least

Here’s another principle I like to keep in mind when writing anything (I can fail at this as much as anyone else, but it’s a useful principle)…

You should try to write something with staying power, not just something to be tossed about on the waves of current fashion. The problem is that people go to extremes too quickly, and think that if they can’t write anything worth reading for the next 2,500 years like Plato, then it’s all hopeless and therefore all we can do is write reports on people of that stature.

But this misses the entire middle ground where so many interesting things happen. It’s best to think small, in a manner more attainable and therefore also somehow more threatening… Can you write something on your topic that will still be worth reading in 20 years?

20 years is not the same thing as millennia. But it’s not an insignificant amount of time either. Calculate how old you will be 20 years from now, or how old you were 20 years ago, and you’ll see that we’re almost talking about different people.

How many works in the continental philosophy field from 1989 are still actively being read? It’s not a minuscule amount, to be sure, but it’s also only a certain percentage of the books that were published in the field in 1989.

A few of the forgotten ones may be unjustly forgotten, yes, and we can make it our duty to reference those when we come across them. But let’s face it– a lot of the forgotten books of 1989 are forgotten because they were just transient, trendy, Zeitgeist productions that have given way to later spirits of later ages.

That’s the sort of stuff you should aspire not to write. Try to write something that sticks so closely to the genuine contours of an important problem that it will be relatively durable when compared with the wildly shifting whirlwinds of fashion that change governments and sports rosters (and unfortunately, friendships and love affairs) so quickly.

If you can write something today that people still read avidly in 2029, you will have done very well. And then maybe it will go on a bit longer.

That’s not a bad criterion for ranking books, in fact, though it will always be hard to pinpoint with accuracy. I’m actually not a believer that any book is “immortal”. It seems unlikely to me that even Plato will be relevant in 55,000 years to whatever the human species has become. There will probably be intellectual monuments quite different from books or dialogues by then. But that doesn’t mean that all is vain and transient.

But maybe Plato and Aristotle wrote 10,000-year books, still read perhaps as late as 7500 A.D., perhaps a bit longer or a bit shorter.

At the other extreme would be really short-term stuff, 2- or 3- year books. Once when living in Iowa City, I killed off a whole evening for some reason reading Kato Kaelin’s book (actually a ghostwriter’s) on the O.J. Simpson murders. As a childhood Simpson fan it had some personal interest to me, but obviously it was surprising that I read it even in 1995 a year after the murders, and I couldn’t be bothered to touch it even now.

The middle ground is where the interesting gradations happen. What is the durability of the collected Sherlock Holmes stories? I’m talking about their viability with a readership beyond 1 or 2 specialists whose job it is to read dead books. Will Sherlock Holmes still be of interest to numerous reader 500 years from now? What about 2,000 years?

It is only given to a few people to be of the stature of Plato or Shakespeare, but I think it’s in the power of all of us who are serious about our work to shoot for, say, a 50-year book, or even a 100-year book. That is already a very healthy success, and then maybe it will last even longer if others build upon it.

Look, for instance, at William Richardson’s Heidegger book, which is now over 40 years old, and really still hasn’t been surpassed as an encyclopedic account of Heidegger. That’s a nice achievement. There may be individual parts of that book that look dated, but the last time I checked, it was still reading fairly well on the whole.

Moreover, with a bit of reflection, I think this can easily become a practical maxim that actually helps you to write books. If you imagine that you are writing for an audience in the year 2080, that’s hardly an arrogant fantasy, because it’s probably within reach. Start thinking that way, and you will find yourself automatically cutting trendy jargon out of your writing, because you realize they’ll have different trendy jargon then. You’ll avoid stupid political dogwhistling, because we have no idea what the various political factions will be like in 2080. We don’t even know which nations of the world will dominate geopolitics and university life in 2080, or if any one of them will be dominant at all. So it can also be useful as a method of internationalizing your audience.

ADDENDUM: and I should have added that this is also a good way to read… When reading a new academic book, I am constantly asking myself– what will this book look like in 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? A century? It’s a good way to focus on sorting the wheat from the chaff, and a great way not to be fooled by empty hipsterism, since in 15 years there will be a new form of empty intellectual hipsterism that has no interest in today’s kind.