p.s. more thesis advice

p.s. Seriously, though your advisor would want me dead for saying this, the very best thing you can do for your thesis is not read a word of secondary literature until after you are clear about your own basic concepts. It is just not possible to reach any clear ideas of your own by reading the articles of 5 duelling scholars and then trying to figure out your own position.

Primitive tribes often have walkabout rituals, or require a prospective adult to slay a wild boar or lion without assistance. It’s not bad to think the same way in intellectual life. Until you’ve had a few thoughts of your own, there’s no point reading what the scholars have to say about anything. I insist on this point. I’m not saying to ignore the secondary literature, I’m saying don’t read it until you’ve attained a sort of intellectual adulthood by slaying a wild boar all by yourself.

That’s how I instinctively did it in my own case, and it’s the best decision I ever made. I barely touched the secondary literature on Heidegger until almost the first 100 pages of Tool-Being were written. Then I immersed myself in the literature. And at that point, it was both easy and fun to read what everyone else was saying about Heidegger.

During my first year of graduate school I had made a special effort to read a lot of what contemporary SPEP-type philosophers were reading. Part of that was simply a coming out party– I’d been an undergraduate at St. John’s, which as is well known strongly disocurages the reading of any secondary literature on anything at all. You’re supposed to learn your calculus from Leibniz’s papers, do your own inclined plane experiments for physics, read Hegel and not books about Hegel, etc. I still think it was the best possible education, because you end up intimidated by nothing in any discipline.

But, I was really excited to break out of that mold as a 22-year-old and read the latest SUNY Press books on Heidegger and so forth. And I found that it was a mistake. Sometimes it was frustrating, sometimes it was boring… And the fault belonged less to the authors than to the fact that I didn’t have my own ideas clear in my head yet, and to hear the ideas of a bunch of Heidegger scholars about Heidegger was simply confusing.

Move forward another 8 years, once my own ideas were much clearer in my head, and it was a hell of a lot of fun to return to reading what other people were doing, and also much faster than it had been the first time.

So, you really should be trying to write a 30-50 page dissertation summary containing no notes or citations.

The reason I loved writing Heidegger Explained is that by the conditions of the series, I was not allowed to use footnotes, and was discouraged from making any quotations. Surely that must be the first and only book on Heidegger to contain no footnotes and few or no citations? Someone needed to do that; it was a good idea.