Reading philosophy - how to
This will be about remembering and tracking my own story of reading philosophy.
I may risk a few tentative suggestions, born out of what I did and what then happened; and because I’ve had chances to watch how quite a number of people have gone about starting to read the philosophy of Gene Gendlin. Mostly, though, rather than advising you how you should read philosophy, it seems better to tell you how I’ve gone about it over the past twenty years.
Let me tell you my story.
For several years, as some readers may know, I kept myself busy running a series of weeklong seminars on the island of Cumbrae in Scotland, during which we read and thought about Gene’s philosophy. This project was the fruit of a long process.
Quite early on, in 1988 and 1989, I read and loved the philosophical appendix to Gene’s dream book, “Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams”, and “The Client’s Client”. Later, I was deeply touched by “The Small Steps of the Therapy Process…”
I sweated miserably through “Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning”, although chapters two and three made a lot of sense. I wish I had known then simply to miss out everything that turned the mind to spaghetti. I didn’t know that later on it would mean something. I drove myself to distraction one cold February night in 1989, struggling on into the wee, small hours with the scary and mind-numbing IOFI chapter.
Later “Language Beyond Post Modernism” came out. It is a wonderful play of voices, which made at last a bridge between my general reading and Gene’s thinking. The first chapter is a beautifully written guide by Gene Gendlin to his thoughts about language. And by this time, I was lucky enough to have Kye Nelson and Campbell Purton offering wisdom and counsel.
Light was dawning, not here and there, but over the whole.
Even now, I struggled horribly with Gene’s book, “A Process Model”. I tried starting with chapter eight. This didn’t work altogether, for the chapter is full of weird jargon from earlier chapters. Still, I learned something from the vivid examples. I got a sense of where the writer was coming from and where he was going.
I still find it pays to read chapters one to five over and over – preferably aloud, and preferably with a partner. “A Process Model” no longer seems so utterly daunting, though there is still stuff there of which I am only beginning to have glimmerings of understanding.
I was in a sense terribly in love for many years, blown away by Gene Gendlin’s uncanny insight, his genius for understanding you and me. It was painful to find myself so absolutely incapable of understanding him.
Even so, the daunting problem was not the difficulty of Gene’s writing, but a kind of tunnel vision which arose. I fell into the glitter of this tunnel for several years, and climbing out was slow. I mean by this, that I became so absorbed in understanding his vision, that I was tempted to see the whole of the intellectual life as a kind of gladiatorial contest between Gene (Right and Romantic) and “the old model” (Wrong and Wrepulsive).
I began to believe that “This is The New Paradigm, which is new and right, and leaves behind everything which is outdated, foolish and wrong”. And one day it came to me that I was no longer reading like a thinking being at all, merely drinking in The Words of the Master.
Gene is a wonderfully illuminating and highly original thinker. He casts light in all directions. You will easily imagine how dazzled and blinded my own reflective powers were, with altogether too much light in far too cramped a space.
I was losing myself. And so it was necessary to think again.
All this started to ease once I began my collection of beginners’ guides to philosophy. I have enjoyed reading lots of these. I still pick up new ones. I like best the Very Short Introductions by Edward Craig and Julia Annas. And I was much helped by getting some sense of the freewill problem. I found the “Very Short Introduction to Freewill” by Thomas Pink (OUP) nice and clear and readable.
I did the traditional thing, and went back to Plato; to some of the smaller conversations: “Euthyphro”, “Apology”, “Crito” and “Laches”. I loved the elegant adventure of the famous “Discourse on Method” by Descartes.
Against this background of voices, Gene Gendlin’s distinctive voice began to ring out more clearly. Now there was a context, into which his writing could fall. It feels urgent to me, that the sheer wonderfulness of Gene Gendlin should not drown out my own understanding and powers of sensing, reasoning, doubting and questioning.
Humph. This is tricky. I reckon it goes both ways. Yes, we must be able to have nothing in between, and enter a writers’s world wholeheartedly. And yes, we must be able to get out of that world, and sit down right here beside it, bringing with us the whole texture of our thoughts and feelings. Not being possessed or taken over, rather informed and illuminated. As I see it, this difference is crucial. It is after all how we relate to anything, when we are sincere about wanting to understand it.
I would myself tend to say: take your time about slinking up to “A Process Model”. But of course you won’t; it isn’t human nature. You will start wading through the treacle; and little by little you will taste the sweetness.
It certainly helps, when I keep stopping to sense, letting a process arise of sensing into the meaning; asking, “….I wonder what this means to me….?” and “….I wonder what sense this might make, in relation to the processes of Focusing and Listening, which I already know in myself….?”
That’s all.
I hope that wasn’t too didactic. I’ve learned something, in going back over a journey, trying to share what I’ve noticed. I know other people have had other journeys, which I’d love to hear about.
Rob
August 16th, 2008 at 10:10 am
We certainly agree, that Gendlin’s work is extremely important,
and also that one should know more than just Gene’s work (and, I’m
sure, Gene would agree with that, it’s already part of his message).
My problem is, that practically all Western philosophers’ writings
are very hard to understand to me. They mean very hard work.
It’s a bit parallel to music: Western avantgarde music (the stuff
from Schoenberg to Stockhausen) is not easy to listen to.
I can force myself into it and then I can find that at least at places
or in some respects that kind of music does make sense, but it doesn’t
come easy.
And then there are the Beatles and Bob Dylan, but the “serious
music” ( in Germany we distinguish E- and U-Musik: serious and
entertainment music) does not recognize them as art. Because they do
not come out of the academic tradition: John Lennon did not study with
Arnold Schoenberg or Olivier Messiaen.
But on the other hand the tradition of Western music has involved
the criterion, that each new generation of artists should do something new,
something original, and the Beatles certainly did something new. But not the
new that was expected. But the new that can be expected is not the real new.
What would be a parallel in philosophy: so-to-speak Pop-philosophy,
very easy to understand and (of course) not recognized by the academic
discourse as belonging to it? For me personally the books by Osho Rajneesh
did this, (who before he worked as a guru even studied philosophy and taught
it as a professor at the university of Jabalpur). Today I find him often too
easy, but that’s better than the opposite, and I learned in a fun way
many philosophical things, that stick in my mind, f.i. (rendered from memory):
being is a becoming, the creator is always more than the created, the best way
of learning something is by teaching it, there are explanation models that
explain the higher by the lower and others that go the opposite way, etc.
PS: I think it was a good idea that you put up this blog part on your website. As you
know I had always enjoyed the comment part at your previous werewolf-site.
Stefan
May 7th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Thanks for the wonderful and fascinating information! I have been amazed read through, it is surprising, as such simple things can be such fascinating…. Thanks for interesting articles!