quick thought on Fintan Neylan’s review

Finally Speculations Vol. 2 downloaded, and when I noticed that Fintan Neylan’s review of Towards Speculative Realism is pretty short, I was easily able to find a few minutes for it. The review is clear and fair.

Normally it seems best not to respond to reviews at all, but Neylan does raise an interesting point that allows this to be classified as an “advice” post since it may be relevant to graduate student readers of the blog.

Neylan says there is more finesse in my work from 2006 onward, and he says this has something to do with my dialogue with other members of speculative realism. This is certainly part of it, but it’s part of a more general cause.

Namely, from 2006 onward I was simply much more connected, in the Latourian sense. As a grad student I had a touch of an “F U” attitude. (Towards Speculative Realism was initially going to include the statement I read at the start of my dissertation defense, but I was too shocked upon rereading by how combative it was, and thus it was excluded.) I’d never enjoyed school from about age 8 onward, had deeply non-enjoyed graduate school all the way through, and there simply weren’t many people above my own generation who were regularly supportive of what I was doing with Heidegger. In short, my attitude was always one of “the rebel,” and one’s graduate school persona generally carries over into early career as well.

Some things happened at around that time to shift how I viewed my personal trajectory. First, from 2005 I regularly received speaking invitations, which meant that I finally had an audience, and that goes a long way towards dissolving one’s sense of marginalization no matter how “non-mainstream” one might remain.

There was also the speculative realism community from 2006 onward, and it doesn’t matter who still agrees or disagrees to be labelled with that term– the work is done. The label changed things for all of us, and brought us all to a wider audience, which was precisely the intention of it, as we all explicitly discussed at the time. It’s far too late to complain about misunderstandings now, especially since everyone without exception has benefitted from it. We were all looking for an alternative to the mainstream continental philosophy we grew up with, and a slightly younger readership apparently had the same desire, which is why we’re all receiving a fair amount of attention now.

In 2006 I was also tenured. There’s always a tendency among the young to scorn academia, academic ranks and titles, etc., and often with good reason. But it does wonders for your sense of connectedness to the world to know that, barring disaster, you’re guaranteed lifetime employment in a job you really like. This is especially true in my case where it happens to be in a fascinating city and country and at a rather unique institution that’s been on a tremendous upswing the entire time I’ve been here, but especially since the move the new campus in 2008.

When writing up my current promotion case, I went back and checked my tenure dossier, which was compiled and submitted in fall 2005, and even that feels a bit raw and gradstudentesque now when I look back at it.

The general lesson here is that it may be wrong to think of intellectual development as an internal process that transpires in your mind. There’s some of that, of course, since age and practice do improve us in various ways. But much of our development takes place on the outside. You develop by entering into dialogue with other people, learning new things, hearing an unexpected objection at a conference, struggling with a single problem for 3 or 4 years before realizing you were looking at it the wrong way, and so forth. I’d never even heard of Levi three years ago, and now we talk philosophy all the time and it’s been very enlightening.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve “mellowed with age,” but what has changed since a decade ago is that I’ve become better at linking my ideas to other people’s ideas in ways that are useful for everyone, instead of just slamming my ideas on the table and assuming defiantly from the start that they’d be rejected and I’d have to fight my way out of a corner for them. If I could speak to my 25-year-old self, that’s probably the first advice I’d give– people are actually more receptive than you might think, even when they sometimes don’t sound receptive at first. But if you make an interesting case for an idea, there is at least a certain percentage of people out there who will give you a fair hearing. (Though ironically, it is often outside philosophy that the fairest hearings occur.)

It was probably this growing sense of the value of linking one’s ideas to numerous different electrical outlets that led me to do things like… accept administrative posts recently. Those offers came from out of nowhere, but I’ve found that these jobs are a great way to see what really goes on inside institutions, which is not remotely as sinister as I would have insinuated during my graduate students years.

In general, I think accepting responsibilities is the best way to polish and ripen yourself. It reminds you of how dependent you are on other people even for your own successes, and also how this or that effort could have collapsed if you’d simply been lazy one day and not followed up on something, and how things could have been even better if you’d simply used a bit more imagination on this or that point. 90% of the best ideas I’ve implemented at work this year have come from other people. There are tons of good ideas already out there, and you can make yourself the channel for bringing them about. An extreme case of that, of course, would be the President of a country. No one is capable of knowing everything about all aspects of a nation, so they have to choose good people to surround them and listen carefully for the best ideas of those people and learn how to implement them.

Babycat’s been reminding me a lot about responsibility too. As my father once said about a neglected fox terrier puppy he and my mother saved from my brother’s parking lot: “I love Woody, even though he’s ruined my life.” Well, Tamanya’s ruined my life too, in the sense that I’m always tired now and social life will remain in a tailspin until I don’t have to run home early every night to bottle-feed a kitten in sessions lasting several hours. But the fact is, large blocks of unobstructed private free time aren’t always intellectually healthy, let alone emotionally healthy.

That’s the main reason I usually say “yes” to everything. It’s a variant on Schopenhauer’s point that you should never decline a social invitation in order to read. As he put it, you’re a lot more likely to be provoked into thinking by going out and doing something than you are by reading a book. After some initial resistance, I eventually came to agree with Schopenhauer here.

Likewise, having a baby kitten in the house cuts way down on the amount of time I have to write, but having more time to write doesn’t necessarily make for better writing. Having too much time often means that a majority of it goes to waste on anxieties precisely over how much time you have. Sometimes it can be better to have little glimmers of free time surrounded by weighty responsibilities.

It would be interesting to do a thorough survey of the work conditions under which good writing (philosophy and otherwise) has been done. I suspect that a lot of it was done on the fly with distractions swarming all around.

My favorite example: Vico, who had lots of noisy, crying kids (his own) in the same room where he worked. He forced himself to be able to work amidst all that, and eventually it reached the point where he couldn’t work at all under conditions of peace and quiet.

In a sense, I’ve simply had less peace and quiet since 2006, and that may be the root of what Fintan Neylan mentions about my essays since then.