on speed in philosophy

I’ve always liked Deleuze’s remark that commentary in the history of philosophy ought to be a kind of slow motion. But with equal justice, commentary can also work at high speed. The important thing is being able to shift between different speeds when considering any topic, because every topic displays different aspects depending on how much or how little detail we want to consider in it.

Is Kant’s Prolegomena really inferior to the First Critique? In some respects, maybe, but the Prolegomena might also be said to be a more lucid work that gets to the point more effectively. And I definitely prefer Hume’s crisp Enquiry to his boated Treatise, as even Hume himself did, and as many readers do.

It is the Scholar’s Disease to assume that everything is so rich and complicated that it can’t possibly be understood without hundreds of pages of detailed analysis. There is a place for this, but also a place for brevity in philosophy, just as we need globes that eliminate the exact street plans of New York and Tokyo.

To give more detail is not always to be more serious. Sometimes detail is superficiality incarnate, a symptom of being too lazy to discover the two or three key points that make a book or other topic so important.

Is Heidegger’s Being and Time worthy of a 700-page commentary? Sure, there’s enough going on in the book to warrant it. But it’s also possible to summarize Being and Time in 20 or so pages. I’m proud of Heidegger Explained, even though at least one reviewer seemed offended by the presumptuousness of summarizing Heidegger’s entire career in a single short book.

What would really be interesting is to do a survey of whoever the 20 top philosophers are in the world at this moment, and ask them to write a one-page history of philosophy. Most of them would probably refuse the exercise, perhaps even scoffing and laughing while refusing, saying that “there is no possible way to do justice to such a rich tradition in one page,” etc. But it would be a serious intellectual exercise, forcing them to lay their cards on the table and reveal what they take to be the handful of key moments in that history.

I’ll categorize this as a “Composition of Philosophy” post, because these thoughts are triggered by my ongoing work on the book. The task of presenting all of my ideas in 43,000 words is in many ways a pleasure. And it’s becoming easier now that a certain rhythm and speed has been established that is appropriate to the project. The outline is working very effectively as a Procrustean Bed, but in a positive sense of the term. If you can see that you only have two paragraphs to deal with a fairly important problem, then you will find a way to deal with it in two paragraphs and no more. Do the problems deserve more space? Sure, just as Paris “deserves” to be more than a tiny dot on a globe. But it’s a globe, after all, and a dot is the proper size of Paris if you are building a globe.

An analogous form of the Scholar’s Disease is found in the usual easy critique of tourism. Some years ago I made my first visit to a very nice place for one week. That’s all I had to spare. An old acquaintance offered to show me around while I was there, which was nice of him in principle. But the price I had to pay for his guidance was listening to a supercilious denunciation of my touristic superficiality in staying there for only one week. (This person was not a native of the place, so patriotism was no excuse in his case.) And to be sure, if I’d had more time and money at that point, the place would have been worth spending several years, studying the culture and language and cuisine. But you can get a certain good basic feel for a city in a week. Not enough to make you an anthropologist of the place, admittedly, but enough to have a basic sense of the geography and the way of life. The wish to denounce others as superficial carries an implied boast of one’s own greater depth. But much truth is contained on the surface of any topic.

This goes well with another of my observations, which is that my first impressions of people are often more accurate than later ones. To meet any new person always involves a mildly traumatic shock, lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a few days. And I’ve found over time that there is much information contained in that initial shock, if you know how to read it properly. As you get to know the person better, your initial impressions are gradually lost beneath all the detailed experiences you have with them. But quite often, the apparent “surprises” (both good and bad) that come from this person were already faintly legible in the first initial taste of that person’s presence.

To take some bad examples, I once met someone who immediately struck me as unusually selfish, unreliable, and unable to listen. He later became a fun acquaintance and much appreciated, but a few years later did something unconscionably selfish and unreliable that ruined someone else’s life (he never did anything bad of any consequence to me, so this is not personal resentment speaking). It seemed “out of character” until I remembered that first impression of a miraculously self-absorbed person for whom the other people in the room weren’t really present.

In another case, I remembered a distinct feeling of being negatively judged upon first meeting– something about the way I was being looked at. Hard to prove, but a strong feeling. Then that person became an amiable acquaintance as well, but then when the chips were down at a later point, I suddenly heard a torrent of negative judgments coming from this person, as if from nowhere. That too seemed completely out of character, until I remembered the vaguely creepy first impression of being pigeonholed in some hard-to-place fashion.

It’s necessary to look at the good side of this phenomenon as well. Certain people give a strong first impression of warmth and benevolence. Through our exchanges with such people it is later possible to enter into terrible disagreements and outright fights. But then eventually they snap back into showing that original benevolence.

And of course, our first impressions are far more complicated than “good” or “bad.” We have quick, vague impressions of sadness, insecurity, heroism, energy, greed, vanity, and the like. A lot of information is packed into our “superficial” first impressions of people, places, and things.