I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
For the next phase of my writing and my midlife transformation, I want to move from sharing and interpreting other people’s ideas and frameworks to developing my own. I’ve already started that process in delineating my distinction of reckfulness vs recklessness. But that is just one aspect of a full philosophy which might answer the questions:
- What is real? (metaphysics)
- What is the nature of being? (ontology)
- How do we know? (epistemology, logic, philosophy of science)
- How should we live? (morality, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy)
As I’ve been studying and sharing ideas from important philosophers (well, important to me) I’ve also been learning about and sharing details of their individual lives. This is important for at least two reasons: first, because people’s lives influence their philosophy in critical ways and second, because the shape of their lives can provide me with a roadmap for my own, when I have this burgeoning idea that my next phase is that of independent philosopher.
Moving from serving as a secondary to a primary source
Claire Vo writes in Earn your content:
Primary > Secondary > Tertiary
[Too] much of what is created and consumed are tertiary sources–synthesis of synthesis. What is so insidious about the Summary Industrial Complex is that it obliquely claims authority where there is none; surely someone who managed five to seven paragraphs on a topic must know something about it! We convey primary-source authority to secondary-source consumers and call it insight.
While of course there is a place for translation, interpretation, and analysis in the distribution of information, my problem is with those who lump themselves in with the researchers because they proverbially read the paper. Even worse are the transactional experience-miners who don’t cite, reference, or acknowledge the sources of raw material behind their packaged posts, except insofar as it’s an effective amplification mechanism.
This is all to say, I want more primary sources. Builders, diarists, researchers. I want your hands on keyboards–not writing what someone else discovered–but trying something new yourself. I want to see it in practice. I want to know what you know. It’s ok if it doesn’t feel novel. It’s ok if it didn’t perfectly work. It’s ok if it’s not relatable, or copyable, or easy to understand.
I am moving from interpreting philosophical frameworks created by others (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Murdoch, de Beauvoir, Han, and more) to creating my own.
Ultimately I don’t just want to describe and explain other people’s ideas and theories. I intend to come up with my own framework for living and for understanding this human life.
It’s not too late
British philosopher Mary Midgley wrote her first book, Beast and Man, in 1978, when she was in her late fifties. She then went on to write at least 15 more. Her autobiography was published in 2005, when she was 86 years old! She studied philosophy at Oxford as an undergrad during World War II. Many of the young male undergraduates departed to fight the war, and this left a group of women including Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Warnock, who would all go on to make their names in philosophy. Midgley returned to Oxford in 1947 after the war to do graduate work, but never finished her doctorate. She did go on to teach philosophy, following her husband to Newcastle University, where she lectured for many years.
I studied philosophy as an undergrad but never considered graduate work in that field. I always wanted to move into something more technical — computer science or economics or, where I landed, statistics. This background and my experience living and working in tech through the greatest computing revolutions of our time — the birth of the microprocessor and personal computing, the advent of the Internet and the world wide web, and now generative artificial intelligence — could give me a unique perspective as a philosopher, one that pure philosophers like Byung-Chul Han don’t have.
I’ve as well noticed in reading male vs female philosophers that women seem to have a generally different, more communal, approach to philosophy. Consider Sartre vs de Beauvoir for example. Sartre focused on individual decision-making and existential becoming. Beauvoir formulated the idea that one must will one’s own freedom and other people’s freedom as well. Beauvoir also wrote about the challenges women face — treated as the Other rather than seen as the default subject, the “One” — and wrote a book about old age dealing in similar topics.
Murdoch, coming out of the analytic philosophy tradition in England, was also interesting in that she combined British philosophy ideas with continental influences, and as well brought Platonism into her unique mix.
next steps?
Defining next steps for my path towards becoming an independent philosopher would be too reckful, so I won’t do that here.