Composition of Philosophy. July 18.

In last night’s post I admonished myself for only spending a bit over three hours writing yesterday. Now I’m not sure why I did so– perhaps just because the writing was hard. Three hours and a bit of a change is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to spend writing drafts unless you’re really under the gun, and I’ve scheduled the rest of the summer precisely so that I will not be under the gun.

In fact, today’s actual writing time totaled only 2 hours and 31 minutes, for 16 pages, and 16 pages is already 3 pages longer than the chapter is allowed to be. The writing was faster, easier, and more enjoyable today, perhaps because Chapter Two is the Husserl/Heidegger chapter, and by now I know exactly what I want to say about those two. Better yet, I was able to do it just a bit differently from how I’ve done it before, which helped prevent phenomenology fatigue.

The basic features of my interpretation of Heidegger date, in two great chunks, to 1992 and 1997, and after that much time the only real problem is trying to put myself in the mindset of mainstream readings of Heidegger so that I can argue against them. Over time it becomes harder even to remember what they are.

If it’s only taking two and a half hours to write a rough 16-page chapter draft (and remember, I was incapable of such speed until maybe two years ago, so don’t blame your slow-moving graduate school self, which probably resembles my own quite closely) then you might wonder why I’m not taking a few more hours each day to polish up the prose into final form. The answer is simple, and even a bit flippant-sounding: I don’t feel like it.

If there were a deadline coming up soon, then of course I would force myself to do it. But the deadline is still 44 days away. In fact, I just learned yesterday that the translator might not even want the manuscript until October. But I’m still tricking myself into thinking that August 31 is a rigid deadline, because I’ll just have too much to do once the school year begins.

But the fact that I just don’t feel like moving on to the final draft yet probably has some sort of intellectual significance, and I want to revisit that issue briefly.

As stated on this blog in the past, one typical way of looking at thinking is that reason is a sort of pure transcendence of primitive moods and emotions, by which we break loose from irrational prejudice and become rational thinkers and arguers. Mr. Spock, free of emotion, would be the model of the ideal thinker.

Against this view, I hold that mood and emotion are powerful cognitive tools, but simply more vague, indefinite, and less communicable than reasoned argument. One must eventually end up with the cogent, reasoned arguments, but if you start with these then most likely you are giving a flat, external, insincere account of your subject matter, one aimed primarily at beating other people in debates. (I’ve mentioned in the past that Nietzsche makes this point about the risk of those who think in fully-formed sentences.)

I’ve found that thinking is more hard-hitting and durable when it initially takes the form of: “something just doesn’t feel right about this paragraph.” And as a corollary of writing method, I’ve also found that setting the right tone in a paragraph is often the best way to make all the arguments fall into place. An argument is not a string of accurate propositions. It is a way of showing the reader or listener something for herself/himself, then showing how something else follows from that, and something else from that, and so on. This requires that we as writers not be too quick to reduce the ambiguity of our subject matter to shop-sharpened proclamations. This is the final stage, often reached only after years of refinement. Michel Serres compares this process to the gradual smoothing down of coins after much handling, and for Serres the smooth coins must already be quite old, meaning that debate is never the frontier of current thinking, since the frontier will always be where fresh coins are minted.

Sometimes we forget the role of intuition in intellectual history, but it’s smeared over nearly every chapter of that history. The example that comes to mind is from Enrico Fermi’s early fission experiments in Italy. He was using a metal screen as part of his experiments. One day, working alone in the lab, he felt himself procrastinating on putting the screen in place, and wasn’t sure why. Suddenly he thought: “I don’t actually want this metal, I want a piece of paraffin.” The paraffin immediately gave a very exciting result: the discovery of slow-neutron fission, a possibility previously unknown. It was the hydrogen in the paraffin that was slowing down the neutrons, as proven when the same results were achieved from the water in the fish pond behind the institute. If memory serves, this is how Fermi earned his Nobel Prize.

So, as much as I think it’s important to fight one’s way through the desire not to write, there are times when procrastination isn’t avoidance, but might be telling us something useful.

Another point… I suppose I now have about 35 double-spaced pages of this book drafted, which is pretty good after just a few days. Of course, I don’t feel entirely at ease with these pages, because:

1. these pages are not very well written yet

2. there are two or three arguments in these pages that I find not completely convincing

But as to the first point, the important thing is that all the content is in serviceable order. In past months on this blog, I have repeatedly expressed my surprise at how quickly the prose-polishing stage goes. In other words, I always wince a bit when imagining how my draft pages would read to a stranger. But in practice, they’re almost always in better condition than I expect. And since I’ve written beyond the needed length on both chapters so far, the mere act of cutting words down to the maximum allowed will go a long way toward improving the style, and (for the same reason) the thought.

As for the two or three weak arguments, I think it’s important to write them in all their weakness and then move on. They are to be fixed later, at final draft stage. Why? Because:

(a) you need to maintain momentum in order to keep morale at a high level. If you pause at each argument until getting it perfectly right, then this can become another method of procrastination. It’s much better to have 150 pages containing 7 weak arguments than to have 30 pages containing no weak arguments, because it’s much easier to go back and reflect on the 7 weak arguments if you know that the project is “basically done.” (By “weak argument,” of course, I don’t mean a completely hopeless one, but one that you’re pretty sure is true for various reasons, but has not yet been stated in fully convincing form. Once in awhile I go back and find out that I think one of them is actually false, and this undermines a couple of things that come later, but this happens less often than you might expect. And even when it does, it’s rarely the case that everything that comes afterward has to go straight into the garbage. The ideas in a manuscript are less globally interdependent than you might think. The damage of an argument discovered to be faulty is almost always fairly local damage, affecting only one aspect of the project.)

(b) Even more importantly, the solution to a problem often becomes clearer when it is surrounded by other problems or non-problems. As a rule, you are always better off having a critical mass of pages containing some problem areas than you are if you proceed by stopping to fuss over each individual point.

My inspiration for this strategy is none other than my military hero, General Ulysses S. Grant, who always made a point of going for the nerve center of any problem rather than hanging around doing niggling mop-up operations. No point holding up the entire army’s movement because of a few snipers and a few enemy stragglers in your midst. Get to the major goal, then go back and mop up. It works for me, at least.

It’s 11:30 PM on Saturday night in Cairo. If all goes well, by late Tuesday night I’ll have around 80 rough but promising pages, well over half the length I need for this short book to be finished. And morale is always the key with projects of this sort. If I’m there on Tuesday night, I may take a couple of days off to reflect, then spend next weekend polishing the prose, giving me around 65-70 rather good pages.

And then, I can even take a couple of weeks if I want to stroll around and think, to hang out with friends more than I am doing currently, go up to Alexandria and spend the weekend there, or whatever I feel like doing– maybe just reading more Gibbon. If you have the first half of a project under your belt, the second half becomes vastly less stressful. And by the end of August I ought to have a good book finished and ready for the translator, probably with a few new ideas that I cannot yet anticipate as of July 18.

That will be a very nice note on which to begin the school year, much nicer than if I went into one of those three-year drag-it-out periods that characterized my graduate studies and left a generally hopeless feeling in the air.