a simple tip

Here’s a quick new advice post.

Sometimes if you’re feeling stalled, and you have a lot on your plate, you will find it’s because you have a weird prejudice about the order in which things should be done.

Let’s say you have 5 small to medium projects you need to finish before the end of December (I think my number is more like 7, but close enough). If you go for about a week or so just spinning your wheels, in most cases it will be because you have an unspoken commitment to doing project #1 first, and it isn’t happening yet for some reason.

In those cases, ask yourself which one you really feel like doing at the moment. Maybe it’s project #4. Well, start working on #4. Anything to give you momentum and keep up your morale. Those are the two keys.

Momentum is always crucial in any intellectual pursuit. Turn your attention to whatever you are currently in the mood to do quickly. Not only will it knock off one of your obligations, but it may also shed indirect light on the other projects.

depression and graduate students

A little while ago I was corresponding with a talented graduate student who struggles with depression issues. It occurred to me that some of the content of our discussion might be useful to other readers.

When I started this blog, I never expected such a rampantly positive response to all the graduate student advice posts, but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense. Graduate students are generally thrown to the dogs. They have a lot of self-imposed pressure. They are judged by standards that are often more relevant to their own professors than to students (almost always, professors will prefer students who resemble mini-professors, executing their tasks efficiently and flawlessly, but some of the most promising students just aren’t like that yet at that age).

Graduate students can also be nastily competitive with each other, so there’s not a lot of peer support. And finally, those who escaped the woods often don’t want to admit their own past struggles; they’d rather act like they had it all together from the start. So, it takes a bit of an uncensored self-dissector like me to tell the truth about how brutal the road can be at the start.

The student with whom I was corresponding said that anti-depressants and therapy never worked for him, but that sincerity and kind words always do. That’s interesting, because Alva Noë’s book made me think about this yesterday. What Noë was saying is that the current fashion to consider depression a brain disease accomplishes two things, only one of them bad: 1. It de-stigmatizes the depressed by no longer treating them as moral failures, which is obviously good. 2. It serves the interests of the pharmaceutical industry, which is dubious.

Granted, we must remember that Noë has his own intellectual agenda lurking behind this statement. His thesis is that nothing at all happens “in” the brain, and that everything happens in the relation between brain and world. I happen to think he goes just a little too far in this thesis, but it’s a helpful model in many ways. And certainly it’s helpful to think of happiness as a network.

George Santayana is an underrated author. In The Sense of Beauty (always the surprise hit of my aesthetics classes whenever I use it) he talks about how beauty and happiness are not the same, that artists (and by extension, thinkers) suffer because they prefer beauty, whereas happiness generally comes from social factors: friends, marriage, a satisfying job, sufficient income so as not to worry, and being held in high esteem in the circles in which you travel. And in fact, it’s a reasonably good rule of thumb. Happiness (though perhaps not self-fulfillment) generally comes from links with other people. Or maybe with animals as well: pets can make us happy too.

Here’s another highly specific factor. The student with whom I was corresponding lives in a gloomy climate, and that might not be the best thing. One of the reasons my happiness level has been generally higher in Cairo than it was in Chicago is, quite simply, because the sun is always shining in Egypt. Sunlight invigorates. Sure, I sometimes miss rainy, foggy forests, but they’re not necessarily good for your mental state if you have to deal with them every day.

In a sense, my personal advice is the opposite of my philosophy. My philosophy is about the reality of entities in their own right, withdrawn from all relations. But most of the advice I would offer to other people is of the exact opposite kind: create as many connections as possible. Build up enough surplus personal energy that you can say “yes” to pretty much every proposed connection that comes along. These lead to surprises and unexpected cascades of good luck. The other thing this does is allow you to change fairly rapidly, and this fills up time with various novelties so that you don’t have to look back at the end of a year and say: “Where did the year go?”

There’s also a “harsh” side to this, which I’ve described on this blog before. You have to be ruthlessly willing to boot people out of your circle if they take the energy-sucker route. I’m not talking about depressed people, many of whom are perfectly good and interesting friends. I’m talking about the snide and the sneering: the people who always find vague, petty ways to keep you on the defensive about this or that. Don’t worry about whether you can “prove” that they’re doing it (you almost never can: that’s the whole point), just trust your internal energy meter, and give them a dropkick— as subtly as possible, but quite openly if necessary. And this goes as well for those who enable them, no matter how good the ostensible motives. There are energy-suckers and energy-multipliers, and you have to surround yourself with the latter. The energy-suckers will be sure to have perfectly good alibis 10 or 20 years from now for why nothing turned out well, and unless you want to be there with them listing your own alibis, you have to shake these people right now and move on. Don’t pretend that you’re strong enough to associate with them and not be corrupted; few people are.

Himanshu Damle

He mentions not being able to leave a comment on this blog. Right, I shut down comments more than a year ago: partly due to the usual garbage from the usual types, and partly because there were 3 or 4 *good* comments per day that required lengthy responses, and for awhile I wasn’t getting anything else done. So, comments will not be reopened on this blog.

He also says this:

“Many a times, I do feel like a sense of senselessness or that the entire endeavour of writing a PhD. thesis as a futile attempt and especially getting nostalgic in the process cannot help me from getting any more alienated. Now, that the panic button is half pressed and an approach to full throttle is required, this senselessness can culminate in sleeplessness and even desperation culled with irritation and frustration.”

The panic button is pretty common at that stage. But you will feel so much better once it is finished.

It’s also interesting what he says about nostalgia. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what he means, but Levi and I were just talking about this in the context of writing books. There comes a time near the end when strange anxiety attacks about the completion of a book are possible: not because one might not finish, but because one is finally in sight of the finish line. How to interpret this? Well, there’s always the Žižekian reflection about how terrifying it can be to be confronted with the accessibility of one’s desire.

But I tend to think of it in terms of the zero/infinity problem with writing. As I’ve said here many times before, those are your two biggest enemies with any writing project: the zero of the blank page, and the infinity of the demand placed on you (by yourself) to say something of limitless significance. Much of being able to finish a project has to do with being able to conceive it in finite terms, which is why many of the “tricks” I use to start and finish projects (and I was absolutely terrible at both until less than ten years ago) involve trying to lay down finite geographical markers for a project: What’s the word count limit? How many chapters will there be? How many sections in each chapter, and what is each one about? Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ve already stamped your personality on the project, because no one organizes a topic in the same way as anyone else. Style is primarily about organization, and only then is it about nice personal turns of phrase and the like.

In my current position there are no graduate students. But if I ever have Ph.D. students, I am looking forward to a 100% success rate in having them finish in a reasonable amount of time, and I think it’s doable. There’s a sort of political critique out there of graduate students as spoiled social parasites, but in fact they are one of the most suffering subpopulations one can imagine, imprisoned in their private self-condemning hells much of the time. It’s amazing that there haven’t been even more crazed gunmen emerging from that demographic group. But I think it’s not a difficult group to help, with just a bit of work.

on contrasting invectives, and academia

In one corner of the blogosphere today, I’m a dreary academic sell-out. In another corner, I’m a bizarre neo-Leibnizian mad scientist. Which is it? It’s a bit hard to be both of those simultaneously. And what’s even more strange is when Levi, teaching a 5/5 load at a Texas community college that doesn’t even offer tenure, is painted by these same people as an arch-academic inside operator. You’d have to feel pretty marginalized to feel envy for his academic position. Envy toward his prolific success as a charismatic blogger— now that would be more excusable. And come to think of it, that’s probably what’s really going on.

But anyway, what’s more interesting here than the usual embittered sniping of trolls are two general points that can be drawn from all of this.

First point (examined in this blog previously): It is typical of people under attack to say, a bit smugly, “Everyone’s attacking me, so I must be doing something right.” But this is false. Plenty of things and people are attacked deservedly at various times. What is far more revealing is when people or things are attacked simultaneously for opposite reasons. As long as there are sufficient numbers of people on both sides of the attack, it almost never fails that both sides are missing the point. If everyone says that Florida is humid, then it’s probably humid. But if one wing of Bruno Latour’s enemies calls him a social constructionist relativist and the other wing calls him a reactionary realist, then it’s a good bet that both are wrong. In my experience, this is so unfailingly true that it can even be used as an intellectual method. Be on the lookout for things or people who are attacked simultaneously for opposite reasons. I always link this to Aristotle’s theory of substance. One of his most interesting definitions of substance is that which can support opposite qualities at different times. Green is always green, but Socrates is sometimes happy and sometimes sad. That’s how you know Socrates is a substance and green is not.

And thus it is much more than a play on words to say that the more something or someone is criticized for opposite reasons, the more substantial that thing or person is. King Lear can support multiple interpretations in a way that “Return of the Jedi” cannot. Plato’s Phaedrus can be read in vastly more different ways than an average philosophy journal article. The more complicated a dream is, the more powerful the underlying wish that generated it. In general, something is more substantial the more it exceeds any specific content by which it can be described.

Second point: Academia isn’t worth getting too upset about.

I’ve said before that the best thing about having a Ph.D. is not having to take Ph.D. degrees that seriously anymore. I have one uncle with an M.F.A. (in jazz guitar) and one cousin with an M.S. (in wildlife conservation). Otherwise, there were never any advanced degrees in my family until mine. As a result, I can easily remember in my youth thinking of the Ph.D. degree as a stratospheric accomplishment indicating an absolutely crushing level of competence and insight. And of course, that’s not really the case. A Ph.D. is nothing to sneeze at. You generally need to be smarter than the average to earn one. You also need some organizational skill, a certain minimum of writing skill, and most importantly: the ability to carry out long-term projects. Receiving the degree is a well-deserved conclusion to years of study, and people who do that deserve the small quantum of social recognition and empowerment that go with it. However, the extent to which the general public is intimidated by doctoral degrees is often quite embarrassing. You’ve probably all seen newspaper ads for fly-by-night self-help programs that say “Approved by a Ph.D.”, or “Designed by a Ph.D.” But the best part of having the degree myself is that I’m no longer snowed by anyone else who happens to have one. I can judge people by their basic level of insight, credentials or none, and not have to defer to the judgment of a panel of doctoral experts. That’s probably the biggest benefit of going as high as you can go on the degree ladder. A Ph.D. is a solid accomplishment, but plenty of minimally insightful people have them. Go through a doctoral program and you’ll see what I mean. Don’t be intimidated by anyone who happens to be called Doctor.

And the same thing with university life. One of the problems with anger toward academia by people who have either never been there or who have dropped out along the way is that they invest academia with far more power for corrupt evil than it actually has. Universities exist to teach students and conduct research. Once you’ve done this for a number of years, it’s nice to have it made a permanent arrangement (a.k.a. “tenure”). Sometimes people with tenure become lazy and self-indulgent, sometimes they don’t: just like any other reward. It’s a stressful thing when you go up for it and quite an exciting thing when you get it. But for the most part, only people outside the system would invest tenure with some sort of all-powerful character-corrupting force. If you’ve actually been around academia, you would never take it as seriously as some of the critics of “academic philosophy” do. Essentially, tenure exists so that you can write what you want without fear of being fired for it, and that seems like a good thing to me. (There are some derivative negatives, such as the polarization of faculty between tenured senior people and untenured junior serfs. True enough, that can be a negative.) Just as with receiving a Ph.D., one of the best things about being in academia, is not having to take academia that seriously as a force for either good or evil. Like any other human institution, it has its specific strengths and weaknesses. We are also not yet at the point where it is quite replaceable, though I have my doubts that it will still be here in its current form in the year 2100. But too often, complaints about academia have the mythological ring of those who haven’t spent enough time in it to see that even its evils are rather finite and, to some extent, masterable.

And so I close with a final warning to any struggling dissertation writers who may still be thinking of packing it in and not finishing. Don’t do that. And the main reason not to do it is because if you don’t finish, you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking that a Ph.D. is the Holy Grail, when it’s actually just another finite accomplishment and the gateway to something else. And if you drop out of the academic job hunt because you found a more interesting way to fill your time: more power to you. But if you drop out because you feel defeated by it, then you are headed for years of infinite rancor towards a target that is as fragile and finite as any other.

on journals and diaries

Recently there has been a new spike in thank-you notes about “advice” posts from undergraduates and even a few high school students. And so I am reminded that it’s time for another such post.

One of the pillars of my life for the past 16 years has been a special journal I keep, though it began entirely by accident. I may have mentioned this before, but thought I would share the idea again in case anyone else finds it useful.

I kept a few journals during undergraduate years, and ended up destroying them all, for reasons perhaps shared by many. For one thing, a person tends to develop so rapidly in those formative years that what you were even one semester earlier can often seem fairly embarrassing to read about. For another thing, journals and diaries at that age tend toward lengthy, self-conscious introspection, often about pressing issues of the day that turn out to be trivialities within a few weeks, and hence it is not always very useful to go back and read them.

It was at around age 20 that I destroyed my final effort of this kind, and even decided never to do it again.

Then, a sheer set of accidents… At Christmas 1993, my best friend’s wife gave me as a gift one of those blank books made up of really nice paper. It was a lovely object, though I wasn’t quite sure what to put in those pages: I couldn’t imagine being ready to write anything permanent enough to be worthy of such paper. So, the blank book sat around blank for months to come.

In March 1994 I returned to Chicago after a failed half-year sojourn in Santa Fe (where most sojourns are failures before long unless you are heir to a fortune; there are no jobs there except waiting tables, basically). On one of my first days back, I was randomly browsing new items in the DePaul library. Something that caught my eye was a publication of Freud’s “calendar notes.” Freud would keep one of those large-squared calendars on his desk, perhaps even under glass. But instead of employing them in the usual manner to list future appointments, he would use them to record important or interesting things that happened. Some would be world events: Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassinated in Sarajevo. Others would be family events, such as a daughter’s wedding. Not every day had something of note recorded; I would say there were several per month.

While reading this, I suddenly realized that this was the right idea, and that I could use that nice blank book for the purpose. Unlike Freud, I decided to write something every day. But just like Freud, I decided to keep them brief: just whatever would fit on one line would be my record of every day that passed– the main good and/or bad things that happened on each day. And I knew that I would never have to destroy such a record, because it’s pretty hard to embarrass yourself later in the space of a single sentence.

March 25, 1994 is the first day in the book; just over 6 weeks short of turning 26 years old. That book goes all the way to March 21, 2007: nearly 13 years in one blank book. I’ve continued the practice with a second book, which looks like it will run to approximately 2020 given the size of writing I’m using (not very large).

I also make sure to record where I was on each day. Actually, you only have to do that on days when your location changes. So I only have Chicago for that first day. And I don’t list the location again until May 3, which is Edmonton (Canada) where I travelled several days for a conference.

Different colors can be used as well. I use black for most days, normal days. Blue is for exceptionally positive or important events. I have gold ink for those four days when I received my first copy of each of my four books so far. And red can be used for various purposes as well; I’ve tended to use it for the completion of writing projects, but haven’t used it much at all in recent years, perhaps because I’m getting a lot more projects done and don’t want to cheapen the color. Green for big personal stuff.

What’s good about keeping this sort of book? A number of things, especially if you start it even younger than I did. In no particular order:

1. It’s a good way to end each day by focusing on what the really essential feature of that day was. It’s a good way to stay serious about things and not just drift with the tides each day.

2. It’s an extremely valuable reference in later years. In a matter of seconds, I can see exactly where I was 16 years ago today (Berlin in the morning, Leipzig in the evening). Or 10 years ago (on the Amtrak from Austin where my brother lived at the time, back to Chicago, which I would depart forever just four days later). Or 5 years ago (in Karlsruhe, Germany, visiting Latour and Weibel’s “Making Things Public” art show, in whose catalog I have an essay). Or last year (in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, for a wedding). You can also go back and look at key periods and try to reconstruct what happened. Sticking purely to the intellectual sphere, 1997 was my most important year (followed closely by 1992, of which I have no written record). But as for ’97, I can go back and reconstruct day-by-day exactly what new thoughts I was thinking, what I was reading and how it affected me, and so forth. It’s nice to be able to do things like this, since it reminds you that your past is far richer than you realize at any given moment.

3. You can use this information as a basis for other things. For example, at the end of every month I write a one-page summary of the good and bad points of the month, and then do the same thing at the end of every year. This is important, because there is a natural tendency to feel that your life is a lot more boring than it actually is. Much happens in a month and even more so in a year, and it’s a good idea to be reminded of that constantly.

4. It’s especially important as you age. One of the alarming things about being past, say, 35, is that time starts to speed up to what feels like whirlwind pace. You start saying things to yourself like: “What? Eight years ago was the last time we came to this restaurant? Time to make funeral plans.” This is a mere illusion, of course, but you need to give yourself the tools to fight the illusion. And the major tool to that end is some record of all the main things you’ve done and places you’ve been.

I don’t take things quite as far as my late grandmother, who kept a remarkable written record of her frequent travels within the USA. I would travel with my grandparents fairly often, and while they were still alive it often happened that we would be reminiscing about one of those trips, and my grandmother would pull out a little notebook and say where we had breakfast every day on the trip. For unrelated practical reasons, she even had a record of every place they filled up the car with gas on each of those journeys. (She was also, by far, the most prolific letter writer I have ever encountered. She sent me hundreds if not thousands of letters over the years, and I believe I sent her exactly zero letters in return. Since she began writing to me when I was about 3 years old –with crayon drawings and a few simple words– I early acquired the role of a purely passive correspondent with her, and for some reason never really adapted to sending her anything but postcards, even after I became a prolific letter-writer myself.)

Anyway, it’s not a bad idea to start something like this when you’re young. And I’ve found this particular method to be a good way of preserving the best information while not wasting pages on fleeting mood-swings that will bore you a few weeks later in most cases anyway.

on “going to the beach”

Gratton adds one caveat to my previous advice post, and only half-jokingly so:

“But far worse than that is wasting all July still not writing, but still not enjoying yourself by going to the beach… There was a great interview this week (I forget the venue) on NPR with a novelist who was also a gamer, who said he would procrastinate every day and stalk around his bed at night with grand plans, all for the naught. He didn’t let himself leave the house (must work you know) but he also didn’t get his writing done… Far better to say you went to the beach than that you finally fixed all 30000 song titles in your Itunes…”

Here I am happy to agree, and it’s an important point. The ascetic renunciation of social activity in favor of staying home and working is utterly counterproductive if you end up not getting any work done.

What I find helpful in these cases is simply to be very conscious and explicit about what you are doing. For example, consciously tell yourself things like this:

“I had planned to stay home and work today, but this invitation is really just too good to pass up.”

“I had planned to stay home and work today, but I just can’t focus mentally for some reason. I’m going to go out and enjoy myself, and then get back to work tomorrow.”

Or as I’ve done myself from time to time in recent weeks:

“I probably ought to stay home tonight and work, but the World Cup only happens once every four years.”

But the key is that you have to tell yourself these things consciously, so that you can then make a conscious judgment as to whether or not your excuses are legitimate in the case at hand. Otherwise, you just blow with the wind of whatever comes up.

Also, let me add that I agree with another caveat stipulated by Schopenhauer. Namely, though it is quite often worthwhile to turn down social invitations for the sake of writing, don’t ever turn down an invitation for the sake of reading. Schopenhauer’s point was that activities generally provoke our mental faculties more than reading a book does. And I have found him to be correct about this.

satisfied with the manuscript

Yesterday I finished reading the French translation of The Quadruple Object, and still find the translation impressive. And as mentioned yesterday, encountering my own work indirectly (“vicariously”) through the medium of another language has made me like even the English version more than would normally be the case at this stage.

By the time you start proofreading a book, as a general rule you’ll have finished writing it 1-2 years earlier. And there’s nothing we appreciate less than our selves of the recent past. You can feel nostalgia for childhood or for age 23, but it’s hard to feel nostalgia for last year. At the distance of a year or two, everything tends to look like difficulties that we are extremely grateful to have gotten past (except in those instances where you just had a really incredible year for some reason and like to reminisce about it after it’s barely passed).

You know the old saying: nothing is more boring than last week’s newspaper. But in ten years it’ll be interesting again. The same with your life and with your writings.

But back to the topic… The Quadruple Object was not only written under financial constraints, but under audience constraints as well. Namely, the target was the French reading public, and I have only a handful of readers in France now– most of them personal acquaintances, as far as I know.

This necessitated an overview of my already published ideas. However, it had to be done in highly compressed fashion, since the financial constraints already made the book fairly short, and because I had no interest in only summarizing my past ideas. That would have been a very boring way to spend the late part of last summer.

So, I would say Chapters 1-7 of The Quadruple Object will be familiar terrain to anyone who knows my other books, and Chapters 8-10 perhaps more surprising. But the first seven chapters are also spiced up a bit with new ways of making certain claims.

I’ll count this as both an “advice” post and a “composition of philosophy” post, though the advice will be repeated from past posts.

Your biggest enemies in writing are zero and infinity. Zero is the blank paper, infinity is the false sense that you must write the most comprehensive masterpiece of all time or else your piece of writing is worthless.

The way to get over both of these things is to focus on the constraints on your project. Freedom is overrated; focus on those things that you are not free to decide.

One obvious example of a constraint on writing is length. You can’t write a 40-page Ph.D. thesis in philosophy, and if you write a 500-page thesis you’ll simply tick people off and they won’t read the whole thing. A good target is 200-300 pages for a Ph.D. in philosophy. (I think mine was 291, but that was after my advisor forced me to cut about 60-70 pages, and he was right to do so.)

If 200-300 still seems like a confusing range of lengths, then choose one arbitrarily and pretend that it’s ironclad law. (You can always change it later if needed, but don’t tell yourself that now.) By decree, say: “This dissertation must be exactly 260 pages long,” or some such length.

Now you have a constraint to work with, and the zero and the infinity are both gone. You’re on the right track, because you now have a finite range of options, and can begin to choose the best among them.

Those 260 pages will obviously be broken into chapters. And generally, chapters work best if they are of approximately equal length. 10 is probably a good number to shoot for with a 260-page dissertation.

So, take out a piece of paper and write the numbers 1-10 on the side. Start pencilling in chapter titles. You can always change them later, but I find it best to pretend that they’re final; it serves better to stop procrastination.

Now you have some idea of what can fit where in your dissertation. You’ll probably start to see that your original topic was too big, and this will allow you to cut back on the fat and focus on the really interesting part of your dissertation, the part that makes you most excited to think about. Sometimes, one of your original planned chapters can expand into the entire dissertation.

And if you have ten chapter titles figured out, you not only have a good organizing framework for your dissertation, you also have a good framework for organizing your calendar. You can start out slowly: the first of the ten chapters will be done by the end of July, for example. Then try to draft it right now, in the early part of the month, and then maybe edit it for the rest of the month. Don’t go to the beach for all of July and then try to pull an all-nighter on July 30 to meet your monthly quota. You’ll produce junk, and will hate yourself for falling behind on the calendar.

Also, once you have the ten chapters, you can start breaking them all into sections, giving you the chance at a very thorough outline. A chapter of that length might usually have 3-6 sections. It’s not usually good for every chapter to have the same number of sections, because it seems robotic. But one thing you can do is randomly choose the number of sections for each chapter (there are random number generators on the web) and again, pretend to yourself that those are ironclad law. (But then change them, of course, under pressure of the material.)

Simply by doing all of these minor organizational things, you will have escaped the dual zero/infinity curse. You will have a finite project on your hands, and suddenly you will feel your brain generating dozens of ideas per hour about how to improve the organizational schema with which you arbitrarily started. After a week or so of this, it will be great. You’ll have made a lot of progress.

Important Warning: avoid reading all secondary literature until you have written a fair amount of the dissertation in your own words. It is demoralizing to read a commentary before you have any thoughts of your own about a topic. The commentator’s voice invades your skull and you will soon confuse the commentator’s voice with your own. Once your own thoughts are clear, debate with the literature will help sharpen your ideas and may even change a few of them. But if you start by reading secondary literature, then you are already enveloped in masochistic procrastination. You have become decadent, in Nietszsche’s sense of preferring what is harmful to you over what is beneficial to you.

from reading a book to writing a chapter about it

Last year there was a lot of interest on this blog in reading very practical posts about how to get from Point A to Point B.

This will be a post about how I turn the reading of a book into a piece of writing about it. Others may do this differently, but it may be of interest to graduate students to hear how I do it myself.

1. While reading the book, mark important points in the margin. If I’m reading something for the first time I tend to make a simple X in the margin, since I don’t know yet exactly which points will turn out to be crucial to the argument. But if it’s something I’ve already read a number of times then I write sentence fragments in the margin.

How much should this be done? That varies depending on the book. Meillassoux packs his arguments fairly densely, so in that case it was maybe 4-6 per page, whereas in other books it can run from 2-4.

What to mark? It may sound crazy in a discipline like philosophy, but I think it’s important to do this step with your “heart” and not with your “head.” Allow me to explain. You might consciously try to reconstruct the author’s argument in logical form. But my sense is that this leads to lousy, boring exposition that no one wants to read, because you’re simply crunching propositions the way a computer would do it.

What does “taking notes with your heart” mean? It means this… Normally when reading, there are long stretches of prose where we follow everything perfectly, but which are as reliable as a Heideggerian hammer before it breaks. Content is communicated effectively. But there are other moments, often occurring several times per page, where we feel minor surprises, or hear keys turning in locks as the author moves from one inference to a rather different one.

I find it important to cultivate an awareness of these minor surprises and key-turning sounds that go on in your head while reading. Essentially, I’m marking only those passages that I truly care about, or which I’m quite sure that the author truly cares about. If you do it this way rather than the other way, you are likely to give a very good exposition, because either you or the author you’re writing about is going to have a deep personal investment in everything being written about. And there’s an absolute difference between being invested in an intellectual topic and simply blowing smoke about it. If you blow smoke, the reader will know it, and will become bored or even annoyed.

The act of reading, like the act of thinking, is a bit like being a surfer. But you’re surfing along the edge of surprises rather than waves of water. If you’re not finding yourself constantly resisted by minor surprises while thinking, reading, or writing, then there’s the danger that you’re just being a dogmatic know-it-all, clubbing others over the head with unearned insights borrowed from the books of others. Your work will have no moral authority, just as weapons have no moral authority.

So much for the actual process of note-taking in the margins of books.

2. Having just read the book, I now try to brainstorm ways of organizing the material. What are the 5 or 6 basic ideas into which this whole book can be broken down? (You all saw the results of this in one of my Meillassoux posts a few weeks ago, but I do that for everything I read, at least if I’m planning to write about it.)

In the case of Meillassoux’s book, I think I came up with 4 basic ideas at first.

I took a sheet of scrap paper for each of those 4 ideas, and labelled each of them clearly at the top. I then go back through, reading the marginal notations, and assign each of them to one of the 4 pages.

While doing this, you’ll find some notations that don’t fit well anywhere. At that point you can either decide not to write about them (if they are too peripheral to your main point) or else invent new categories where they will fit. While doing so in Meillassoux’s case, I came up with two new main ideas in his book, yielding 6 altogether.

By the end of this process, I have copied all of my marginal notations from After Finitude onto sheets of paper arranged into 6 categories.

Each of those categories is now fated to be a section of what I will write. Which one to start with? Sometimes that’s fairly obvious: you pretty much have to start a book on Meillassoux with the critique of correlationism, for instance. But sometimes it’s not so obvious. And the rule, here as with musical albums, is “lead with strength.” Don’t build up to the main point, but hit it early.

3. All right, now we have pieces of scrap paper (in this case, the backsides of the draft pages of Circus Philosophicus, meaning that one project is feeding off the last in a literal physical sense: a good sign) arranged into 6 categories. What next?

Now you repeat the previous process, but working within a smaller scope. My Category 1 pages are all about correlationism (most of those references comes from the first and final chapters of Meillassoux’s book). Now as you read through those notes, it’s sort of like a fractal… Here again, you will find that the argument about correlationism breaks down into about 4-6 steps. Go through the sheets of paper with a red pen and label citations as Categories A, B, C, D, E, and F depending on their topic. At this stage you can also winnow out the boring or more peripheral notes you took.

4. Now copy these onto a fresh sheet of paper, in the proper order. In the case of my section on correlationism, I have identified 4 key aspects to Meillassoux’s argument, each of them bolstered by anywhere from 3-7 citations, from which I can now choose the ripest and richest to support my points.

5. You now have a detailed outline of the section to be written. All you have to do now is go through in the proper order, and make sure the transitions from one to the next are clear and compelling. You can make the prose nice now as well, if you have time to do so. But it doesn’t really matter if the writing is dull at this stage. Your style will already be present, because your personal style is less about word choice and more about how you choose to organize topics: just as the shape of the human skeleton is much more important for your basic physical appearance than any cosmetics or clothing you might choose to wear. Clear structure is the best index of style. And don’t worry: no one else is going to organize an outline the same way you are.

6. Now, the polishing stage. Try to imagine yourself reading the finished section aloud to a group of people. Are you sure you can hold their interest with every sentence? Or will their attention wander sometimes? In cases where you can imagine the readers being distracted by daydreams, because your sentence is too boring, then change those sentences. This is the “stylistic” stage in the usual sense. Keep sentences crisply readable. If a cliché of speech or thought is unavoidable, at least try to alter it in some way to keep your personality alive in it. Always imagine your writing as oratory, not as a journal article. Be afraid (be very afraid) of being a bore, because only that fear can stop you from being one.

7. Now you have a finished, semi-polished section that reads pretty well. Wait until you have a number of such sections piled up. Then print them. Take them to a different environment from that in which they were written; cafés work well to pull you out of the solipsistic interior that writing inevitably encourages. Mark the needed changes in red pen. Go home and immediately enter the changes.

8. Do this repeatedly over the course of weeks. Don’t reread the same sections too often in too short a period, because they’ll just start to sound like mush, and you’ll lose your critical distance on them.

I like reaching stage 5. You can still be depressed at that point and think “this is really awful, boring stuff.” But at least the anxiety is gone. There is no longer any chance that you’ll miss the deadline, or that you’ll have some sort of horrific writer’s block or nervous breakdown. The right number of pages is now on hand, and it’s at least presentable to the public. It is now your job, after stage 5, to make it interesting to the public. Because remember, no one is forced to read anything you write. There are so many nice things to do in life besides read. Your competition is not just other books on Heidegger, but also television, cinema, outdoor recreation activities, and so forth. You have to make it a pleasure for people to read your thoughts, and this requires clarity and rigor along with a bit of style.

Having a finished draft is a perfect anxiety-killer, as I’ve said. The price you have to pay for that is coming face to face with your finitude as a thinker and writer. The draft will show you yourself in all your dull and error-prone weakness. There will be typos in droves. There will be boring and confusing stretches of writing. There will be logical gaps that never occurred to you before. But it’s best to handle those as a mechanical operation.

I suppose I’m arguing for a somewhat perverse modification of the usual view, in which people first brainstorm magical ideas and then try to shape it carefully into logical form. For me, the inspiration comes at the outline stage: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could say that this whole book just boils down to A, B, C, and D?” And then I do it that way, making whatever modifications are needed when my original schema fails. The usual stylistic magic, by contrast, is for me more the result of a careful, conscious operation on an already-existing draft.

All right, time to watch the Dutch play the Slovaks…

writing advice

A reader asks for writing advice. On the right-hand side of this page, much of it is stored under both “advice” and “the composition of philosophy.” But with summer beginning, it’s a good time to recapitulate what I regard as some of the main points.

But first, the reader mail:

“Quick question. Noticing that you’ve got about a million books coming to print right now (?!), and you mentioned in your last post that you’re “‘pretty good at writing books now,’ so I figured I’d ask a little on the process.

I find that writing comes to me very quickly. Both of the books I’ve got in manuscript right now basically were written in 6 month sprints. The result is usually quite polished, but not ready to be published, a step above blog posts but a step below publication standards. The result is I find I need to give them a full read through once after that to get rid of stupid shit – everything from grammar errors to ideas that just don’t work, things left unsaid that need to be inserted, putting in footnotes, etc. And I find that is a grueling, time consuming process which comes as slowly as the basic text comes quickly, because it is essentially rereading, which is a whole different mind-mode.

I was wondering if you could say a little more about your process, either on the blog or via email? Because I’m curious how the hell you do it, and wouldn’t mind some advice, which, I must admit, is one of the nicest part of the philosophical blogosphere these days.”

This reader has one central problem that I’m not sure how to address: the fact that he finds revision much more gruelling than the first draft. It’s hard for me to address this point simply because I’m the exact opposite. The step I find the most dangerous is the initial “blank paper” step, because there you are staring into a void and it’s hard to feel you can create anything ex nihilo, whereas once I have a draft I can see all sorts of ways to improve things.

But as for more general advice, some of the points I find most important are the following:

*Zero and infinity are your enemies. Your mind is not as blank as it may feel, nor will you save the world. You are working on a finite project with finite (and perhaps very positive) results.

*Seek excellence, not perfection. This sounds like a point from a self-help book, but it’s very important. There is no perfect book. There are bad passages and even bad arguments in Plato and Kant, and there’s little point holding yourself to a higher standard than that. Your work will have impact not from “avoiding mistakes” (a merely negative virtue) but from depth, imagination, originality, versatility, clarity, and other virtues of that sort. Perfectionism can be admirable on one level, but on another level it is a procrastination tool and perhaps reflects a fear of being judged: as long as a piece of work is still being polished, you can’t be judged by anyone, because they haven’t seen your best work yet. But you’ll have to stop caring about being judged.

*The more the years pass, the more I swear by outlines. This started when I was 19. At St. John’s we were given a week in March without classes to write our Sophomore Essay. The length of these was generally just 20-30 pages or so, but that’s a pretty sizable piece of work for people that young (in fact, it would remain my longest piece of writing until the Ph.D.). I kept putting it off and wasting time throughout the week. The night before the essay was due, I was at page 17 and exhausted, and hadn’t developed the main point of the essay yet. Rather than pull an all-nighter, I decided I would write up a very detailed outline of what was left and then let myself sleep. I didn’t actually think it would work; it consciously felt like I was lying to myself. But I wanted to sleep, not to stay up all night. So I went through the motions of writing a detailed outline. And then, the next day– it worked! I wrote 13 or so additional pages, by far the most I had ever written in one day at the time, and it was not only painless to do that, but exhilarating. It still took many more years for me to overcome the procrastination issue, but at least now I had a tool I could trust: detailed outlines.

*One reason outlines seem boring is that this seems like mere bean-counting and housecleaning, not a site of imagination. But if 20 people were to outline the same topic, you’d be surprised at how different all 20 outlines turn out. Mere logic and organization are surprisingly personal acts. I’ve come to think that style is less a matter of word choice than of organization. No two people organize their thoughts about the same subject in the same way. What is obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. People are different. Which leads me to the next point.

*If you feel like you have nothing original to say, remember the following point from Alphonso Lingis: “Go outside on a starry night and get a sense for the vastness of the universe. And realize that your fingerprint is enough to make you unique out of all that universe. And then think about how much more complicated your brain is than your fingerprint. Your brain is wired to do something that nothing else in the universe can do. And if you don’t do it, it’s not going to get done.”

*Avoid being intimidated by the fact that one article takes a lot of work for you while others seem to write dozens of articles and books effortlessly. For one thing, they were once in the same place as you are now. For another thing, the reason they’re writing so much more than you is often just because they are more famous. That means they’re receiving invitations to do most of their work. My favorite example is Zizek, as both a well-known and highly productive contemporary author. He churns out new work at an astonishing rate. But it’s unthinkable that Zizek at this stage is writing articles and then sending them off for slow, anonymous peer review. What’s happening is that he’s receiving more invitations for articles, books, and lectures, than he can handle. He’s trying to accept as many as he can, and then he’s trying to deliver on those promises. If someone invites you to write something, you don’t want to let them down or make a fool of yourself by breaking a commitment, and so you end up finding a way to get the writing done. Levi put this nicely: “the more you write, the more you will write.” In personal terms, I didn’t have any publications in philosophy at all until I was 34 years old (Tool-Being), and hence many of my readers are already ahead of me. In 2005, when I applied for promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, though I had already done well with writing books, I had only 1 book chapter and 2 journal articles. In my current promotion case, just 5 years later, that has increased to 12 book chapters and 27 articles. An unsympathetic committee member might be suspicious of that explosion of productivity, and assume that I had found some sly way to cut corners. But the real reason is simple. I didn’t suddenly start working harder in 2005. What happened is that my professional reputation started increasing rapidly at about that time, and the vast majority of those new publications were invited by people who knew my previous work. Either someone asked me to write an article, or else they asked me to give a lecture and I then turned it into an article. Which leads to the next couple of points.

*If you go to the trouble of delivering a conference paper, it’s a waste of time if you don’t try to turn it into a publishable piece of work. There are times when I prefer to give talks just off of notecards. But in the past 18 months there were at least five occasions when I wrote up invited lectures and read them aloud from paper: Paris, Bristol, Zagreb, Manchester, and Dundee. All five will soon be in print as articles or chapters in edited volumes. I spent enough time on each of them that it would be energy poured down the drain if I hadn’t tried to convert each of them into something readable.

*Get in the habit of saying “yes” to everything. Down the road you’ll need to lose that habit (I’m starting to reject some invitations for the first time). But in the early stages, it’s important never to say no, or almost never.

*Capitalize on any outside impetus to your work. If you read a new author who shocks you with insights, try to put that shock into communicable form. If you’re having a debate with a friend (or enemy) try to articulate that debate in writing. The point is that written work should come from actual stimuli.

*A related point: be yourself. Don’t go into “writer mode” and write the way you think some faceless authority would want you to write if looking over your shoulder. Draw on the same mental energy reserves you use when writing personal letters to friends.

*Don’t be boring. No one has to read your work. Every sentence you write should be a sentence that you could read aloud in a room without anyone ceasing to pay attention. We would all be mortified to tell a boring five-minute story at a dinner party, but plenty of people give boring forty-minute lectures in front of even larger numbers of people. Why? Don’t forget that you’re addressing real humans in your work. Humans have limited attention spans, so it’s important to pace your arguments and make sure that your readers remain interested, or even entertained. Bring in the jugglers and jesters now and then as nice interludes between difficult thoughts. Rhetorical failures are true intellectual failures, as Aristotle knew.

*Choose good stylistic gurus. We all have favorite thinkers in our respective fields. But do you have favorite stylists? You should. That is to say, there should be a handful of authors you most admire as communicators. I wouldn’t make the case that José Ortega y Gasset is one of the greatest philosophers of all time, but would claim that he’s one of the best philosophical stylists of all time, and from reading his books often at a young age I learned a lot about how to make philosophy clear and communicable to a broader audience than 4 or 5 specialists. And then I met Lingis in person, and he’s a superb stylist, unnaturally gifted in this area. It’s good to have a few people like that.

*Finally… You must choose to spend your time either with productive people, or with those who at least want to be productive. It is crucial to develop a good “sense of smell” about people on this point. There are people who are trying to get things done, and other people who are just trying to produce alibis for not getting things done. You must cease your dealings with the latter category of person as quickly as possible, because their attitude can be dangerously contagious. One sign of this type of person is a tendency to belittle every achievement of those around them. A related point is that you have to learn to be unimpressed/unintimidated by the aggressive “argument bullies” who exist in philosophy in large numbers. What these people generally do is read lots of books, then butt into every discussion in sight and beat people up using things they have read in these books. Over time you will begin to see that these people never actually get anything written. The reason for that is probably because they never really digest anything that they read; books for them are ammunition dumps, most useful for annihilating other people in combat. But fifty years from now, no one is going to care about or even remember who annihilated whom in an argument. If there’s anything left of you then, it will be in written form.

And the point was already made quite often during the various troll/grey vampire discussions in this part of the blogosphere… Ignore your surface judgments of who does and does not have intelligent things to say, and instead pay attention to who makes you feel more enthusiastic about intellectual life, and who makes you feel less enthusiastic. Every human encounter either increases or decreases your level of energy and enthusiasm, and you simply must avoid the energy suckers. It’s an idea I took from William S. Burroughs: if someone always makes you feel like you’ve lost two pints of blood every time you interact with them, avoid that person, even if you can’t articulate a good “reason” for it. Don’t try to defeat these people, just stay away from them. Energy levels don’t lie.

I hope some of this is helpful to readers.

a funny and thought-provoking Hegel passage

Phenomenology of Spirit, §625:

“Since morality is always incomplete, it is a mere expression of envy when people complain that the wicked flourish while the good suffer. There are no good and no wicked, and happiness should simply be as widely spread as possible.”

This doesn’t quite correlate with my experiences over the years, which indicate that there are in fact the good and the wicked. I have found the wicked to be fairly rare, though not as rare as lottery jackpots and lightning striking the same tree twice. Furthermore, I tend to agree with the conviction of Max Scheler (among others) that there are wicked people rather than wicked actions. It may sound reactionary to believe in evil, but there really are a handful of people out there who spread a bit of wickedness to everything they touch. Comb through your memories and, no doubt, you will find a half dozen or so of them.

I can think of one in particular who was so awful that you could practically write an entire ethics simply by taking each of his actions and reversing them 180 degrees.

One possible red flag (there are others)… If you meet someone who gives a reason for everything he/she does, you may start to find after awhile that this sort of systematic rationalization is an effort to conceal the true reason in each case.