This may or may not be interesting to anyone (I’m assuming it’s not) but I feel like I need to write this to get a more coherent sense of the influences that shaped my thinking. Or maybe that’s not it — I don’t really know why I feel like I need to write this, I just feel like it, and I’ve felt like it for long enough that now I’m thinking I need to get this damn thing out of the way so I can move onto something else.
The next thing I have to say is that I don’t especially enjoy reading. I’m not ”a reader,” as in someone who loves curling up with a book and being swept away etc. I’d rather have a conversation, or watch TV. I don’t especially hate it either. It’s just a disciplinary necessity to what I try to do well, which is learn and think about a lot of different stuff all the time. Reading is to my life what skating is to hockey: I do it a lot and try to be good at it, but if you take the puck out of the experience — if there’s not goal, no opposition, no strategy, no need to improve, no complex challenges — you take away my whole reason for doing it.
So I didn’t really read much to speak of when I was younger. I liked books about science and geography. One memory that stands out is a summer book club my parents enrolled me in at the local library. I think I was 8 or so. Kids had to read ten books by the end of the summer. The first time I went I picked out something about the solar system, or the Earth’s crust. I eagerly went to sign it out, only to be told it wouldn’t count towards my ten books. I distinctly remember what the librarian said: “It isn’t a book.” I was confused, so she clarified: “It has to have a story.” Then she told me that choose your own adventure books didn’t count either. So I picked out the least bad-looking story, gave it a few tries and quit the club.
The first grown-up book I read that (I think I was 11 or 12) was Lee Ioccoca’s autobiography. It was sitting around the house. I picked it up and loved it. Biographies and autobiographies are my favourite books to read, and I especially love the ones that go behind the scenes that shape our world (for executive memoires I’d pick Jack Welch’s as my favourite). That’s when I started reading Popular Mechanics, thinking about cars and designing them for fun. I started thinking about companies as well — and “designing” them too.
In high school I liked a few things I had to read for class (e.g. Catcher in the Rye), but the only book I remember reading on my own accord was Boom, Bust, and Echo, about the effect of demographics on the economy. I’ve never strayed very far from business-related reading — though just straight business blah doesn’t do much for me. The most formative influence on me in high school was probably Wired magazine. I loved the combination of technology, enterprise, and style…
The first thinkers that really influenced me in an intellectual way were Friedrich Nietzsche, Abraham Maslow, and A.N. Whitehead.
I was actually influenced by Nietzsche very early, in an unconventional way: Jennifer on Family Ties made a lot of references to existentialism and Kierkegaard that resonated with my precocious skepticism. I looked it up in the encyclopedia, found Nietszche, and wondered why Jennifer didn’t say more about him — “This is the man.” I didn’t follow up on it (I was too young, it never occurred to me to read further), but what I read in the encyclopedia was enough to affirm a lot of the thoughts (and questions) that had been germinating in my head. When I read (parts of) Beyond Good and Evil in my second year political theory class I kept thinking to myself, this couldn’t be more true. Yet, not being an avid reader, I didn’t turn it into a more systematic or thorough study.
I first heard of Maslow the same year I read BG&E, in a university class on personality psychology. When I say Maslow here I really just mean his hierarchy of needs. It just clicked and I started to adopt it in a way that made me try to interpret everything by it. All day I’d go around thinking about where to place all of my experiences (and everyone else’s) on Maslow’s hierarchy — and how to get from there to a higher level.
While Nietzsche and Maslow are kind of cliche sophomore influences, A.N. Whitehead certainly is not, and he’s maybe the reason I don’t still go around sporting rudimentary memes taken from existential philosophy and humanist psychology. I was introduced to Whitehead in a third year philosophy of education class. We read Aims of Education and I was deeply affected by Whitehead’s notion of the rhythm of education, going from a phase of passion (e.g. wailing on an instrument) to a phase of discipline (e.g. learning theory and scales) and then into a phase of “synthesis,” in which passion and discipline are both present and are complementary. More important than the philosophy of education itself was the more general notion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. I extrapolated that and started applying it everywhere.
If I read the book more carefully I would have known that was actually G.W.F Hegel’s idea, known as Hegelian dialectic – one of the most influential ideas in the history of philosophy. In my typical way I didn’t bother to pursue it through further reading, but rather reflected on it, interpreted and refined it to the problems and questions I saw around me. I think this tendency (which could be interpreted another way as a kind of laziness) – putting the priority on thinking things out for myself before turning to books for answers — really benefited me. I think of something Thomas Hobbes supposedly said (I’m not bothered to look it up): “If I read as much as everyone else I’d be just as ignorant.”
Come to think of it, I can’t move on without mentioning Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Tretise, Rousseau’s Second Discourse and Social Contract, Mill’s On Liberty and Utilitarianism, Augustine’s City of God… Aristotle’s Ethics, and Plato’s Gorgias and Republic… “State of nature… war of all against all… nasty, brutish, and short… noble savage… social contract… the greatest good for the greatest number… it’s better to receive harm than to be unjust… the philosopher-king…” All of these basic ideas in political philosophy helped orient my thinking.
Of all of those, Plato is the only philosopher who I’ve continued to grow in respect for. Or I should say, the only one I continue to study to this day. I haven’t put the others aside altogether, but Plato is where it’s at for me right now. I wouldn’t recommend starting with The Republic. Start with The Apology — not just as a starting point for Plato, but for all of philosophy: Wisdom starts with knowing your own ignorance. Then a few other short dialogues cover some fundamental notions: Meno on (what I call) creative education, Euthyphro on piety, and Crito on justice. From there take your pick of: Gorgias on philosophy vs. persuasion, Protagoras on the teachability of virtue, Phaedo on the soul and immortality, Symposium on love, Theaetetus on knowledge, and Phaedrus on all of it wrapped into one. Republic can be read whenever (or rather, as soon as) you feel up to tackling it — keeping in mind that the longer you put it off, the more you’ll have to go back and reread in order to understand them in relation to Plato’s masterpiece (I’m still working through the rest of it myself, and I don’t expect to ever totally “finish” studying Plato).
Don’t get the impression I was a diligent student. I had a lot of trouble staying motivated at university. It wasn’t until a couple of years after I graduated (I joke that it took me that long to unlearn everything I learned in school) that I went back and actually read Beyond Good and Evil cover-to-cover… then Zarathustra, Genealogy of Morals, and Nietzsche’s other essential works, and then following where that led me.
In the mean time, reading and thinking about business kept my mind active yet grounded. When I finished school in 2000 I was excited by the notion of “the new economy” (Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economyis the book to read) — even though the dotcom bubble was crashing at the time — and Fast Company magazine introduced me to people like Tom Peters (e.g. “The Brand Called You“), while Harvard Business Review introduced me to Peter Drucker, who, more than anyone, affected the way I conceived my career. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence was big then too, and that affected me…
The irony of it is that I first started going to the library to use their employment resources and take out advice books on resumes and networking. I ended up sitting there for hours reading magazines, wandering around, and eventually walking out with books on everything from financial planning to architecture.
It was Drucker — the leading management intellectual of the century (start with The Essential Drucker) — who totally screwed up my career. He wrote (in an article I must have read in HBR) that computers and communications technology would do to white collar, “knowledge workers,” what robotics and offshoring had done to manufacturers and labourers before: make their jobs obsolete (or at least very unstable) unless we kept learning to add value and do things that a computer or machine can’t. A few years ago that was validated even more by Thomas Friedman’s hugely influential case in The World is Flat.
Once in the business section I noticed a fairly new looking book on the shelf and pulled it to take a closer look. It was by a Wall Street Journal columnist, Thomas Petzinger, titled The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace. I really don’t think this book got the recognition it deserved (and still deserves). Seven years later, I found recently at a used bookstore for $1.99, and it’s even better than I remembered. I remembered some of the great stories and profiles of innovative companies — and the creative individuals running them — but I had completely forgotten about the “complexity science” (I’ll get to that later) Petzinger used to explain it all. Oh, and old Abe Maslow showed up in the mix as well.
Petzinger introduced me to Maslow on Management — a book (originally called Eupsychian Management) that even Drucker deferred to. It’s full of great insights (loosely arranged, if at all) about organizational psychology, motivation, creativity, and self-actualization. The idea that stood out for me was about innovation and imitation: it isn’t worth getting too worried about being imitated, that allows you to continue innovating and moving forward while your competitors are still catching up to where you were in the past. More recent discussions about creative commons, open innovation, and the social life of information – by Lawrence Lessig, Henry Chesbrough, and John Seely Brown respectively — are extensions and refinements of ideas Maslow suggested almost a half-century ago.
Which isn’t to say that Maslow was the first person to ever think of them. Our old friend A.N. Whitehead pointed this out in a talk he gave at the Harvard Business School in 1933, titled “The Study of the Past — its Uses and Dangers” (published in Essays in Science and Philosophy). There he made a case for a more humanist, aesthetically-oriented way of doing business (keep in mind Whitehead was originally a mathemetician), giving credit to Elton Mayo before him, as well as Robert Southey and John Ruskin from long before.
A couple years ago Matthew Stewart wrote an article for The Atlantic, arguing that management education is a waste of time, and aspiring executives are better off reading from the history of philosophy — which consists of essentially the same debate, “between reason and passion, the individual and the group,” as management theory. (I’ve discussed this before.)
I still enjoy reading business books — as long as I have the time. I loved and learned a lot reading books like Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, the quasi-business Get Back in the Boxby Douglas Rushkoff, The Responsibility Virus and The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin, The Art of Innovation by IDEO’s Tom Kelley, Good to Great by Jim Collins, Blue Ocean Strategy, The Innovator’s Dilemma…Henry Mintzberg, Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad…
But on some level business books like this are a lot like biographies: they contain interesting information and insights, but 95 percent of them are padding in the form of stories and case studies. In other words, I enjoy them too much, and read them for that reason rather than for how generative their ideas are. A lot of them start as HBR articles, with the essential argument given within a few pages, and then get inflated by extra arguments and examples to make them more persuasive, palatable, and compelling. Every day I see another business book I’d love to read but can’t because there’s too much else I should be reading.
If I had to recommend any single business book (other than The Essential Drucker) to a newbie it would be Delivering Results, edited by Dave Ulrich. It’s a collection of HBR articles (some by authors mentioned above, as well as articles by heavyweight business intellectuals Michael Porter and Chris Argyris) intended to give HR professionals a well-rounded overview of the most essential business ideas circa 1998.
I don’t see how anyone could seriously do political philosophy — at least the more application-oriented kind — without being conversant in business. Their both about organizing people. Drucker himself was something of a political philosopher; the core theme that penetrates all of his work is that we live in a “society of organizations,” and any more general theories about managing society have to be consistent (not just analogous) with the management of business organizations.
[Update: A few days after writing this I realized that I totally overlooked some very important books, the most important being Let's Be Frank About It, a memoir by my grandpa, Bill Frank. All the characteristics that made him successful were the ones that I most lacked at this point in my life -- work ethic, self-confidence, tenacity, a willingness to take chances -- and his story's tangible relevance affected me far more deeply than the big-name autobiographies. Even though we have very different careers, reading my grandpa's book was the turning point that led to everything that follows below.]
Reading-wise, things really got rolling for me in 2002. Ironically, I moved to a larger city in order to network and establish myself in a more creative milieu. I went to the library to print off a bunch of resumes and ended up reading magazines there for hours. I came home with Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and from then-on I pretty well just lived in the world of ideas — going to the library every day, finally reading all those books I was assigned in school and just seeing where it all led.
Mid-twenties is just about the right age for something like that — and Marshall McLuhan is a pretty good thinker to start with. Twenty-four is still young enough to be be passionate about it, yet old enough not to spend months-on-end rereading it like some kind of bible. Whatever you might say about his ideas, McLuhan is a great hub, a base from which to start exploring everything from economics to modern literature. That’s exactly what I did. I moved on pretty fast and never really looked back. It was mainly about finding my legs, getting my bearings, and figuring out what I really wanted and needed to learn.
Since I didn’t have any consistent direction or organizing theme, most of what I read then is fairly diffuse — some of this and some of that. I read a lot about music, delved into the theory and history, learned a lot more about jazz, loved Miles Davis and studied his creative process. I dabbled in a little history, mainly around the First World War and anything leading up to it. And I started to familiarize myself more with the current ideas and issues, through magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and especially via Arts & Letters Daily.
Reaching farther, I had a sense I wanted to learn more about “Eastern religions” but I never really got around to it; or when I did look, what I found was never what I hoped it would be. Then one day I took a shortcut through a previously unexplored aisle in the library and the words “Learning for One’s Self” caught the corner of my eye. That was what I was looking for. I stopped, took a few seconds to find it again, pulled the book down and read the subtitle: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought. Confucianism? Never really registered with me before then. The description was perfect for my little project:
Central concerns of Confucianism are self-understanding and self-cultivation, by which one shapes the self into a responsible person and helps one to make a life for oneself in the company of others. In response to the challenge of Taoism and Buddhism, which called into question the substantial nature of the self, thinkers in later centuries greatly expanded their view of the individual through discussions of “learning for one’s self”, or “getting the Way of oneself.”
That’s when I started to find my direction. I guess Confucianism is about as close as I get to being religious — which is pretty far from close.
And then I found science. I had Darwinism on my list of things to study for months but it never really clicked — until I stumbled on philosopher Daniel Dennett and his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. I couldn’t possibly overstate how influential this book was for me. Even more that McLuhan, Dennett was a great hub from which much else suddenly became accessible: biology, genetics, neuroscience, complexity theory, linguistics, the history of science…
Dennett led me to Richard Dawkins — whose Selfish Gene became another great influence, helping me not just to understand genetics but to learn how to uproot old assumptions and counter intuitions – and other leading voices in science. Seed Magazine was founded around that time and science got a little sexier. I became an avid follower of discussions on Edge.org. I finally got around to reading Robert Wright’s Non-Zero (which I bought years earlier). Books like Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker stirred my passion for psychology again.
But before I really got into psychology I went through a bit of a Goethe phase – who doesn’t go through a Goethe phase? I read Faust back when I was getting my bearings, and his name always came up alongside Shakespeare and Dante yet there was something especially obscure and mysterious about him. On Nietzsche’s recommendation I started with Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, which I loved, then read G.H. Lewes’s great Life of Goethe.
On the same shelf in the library I noticed Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana, about Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe’s Faust. But it was Santayana himself who impressed me most in the book. I transcribed entire pages of it into my notebook. This passage in particular pretty well defined my project from then-on; I stuck it on the wall beside my desk:
The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and conquest is for the sake of self-possession.
Sounds a little new-agey, I know. I don’t normally go in for that, being a rural-raised pragmatist. Though around this time a couple of Buddhist-inspired books had a significant influence on me. Turning the Mind Into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham absorbed me for a while. It was a book I bought just because I felt like buying a book and it seemed interesting. It’s a good introduction to meditation, mindfulness, and “peaceful abiding.” It’s not something I’ve stayed with but lately I feel like I ought to pick it up again (actually, since writing this a couple days ago I’ve had it on my mind again; and I picked up his latest book, Ruling Your World — I’ll see how it goes).
The other book was Destructive Emotions, edited by Daniel Goleman (whose Emotional Intelligence I already mentioned). I noticed this one near the library check-out and I’m really not sure why it wasn’t more widely read and appreciated. It’s a record of a series of “dialogues between the Dalai Lama and a small group of eminent psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers…” [from the Amazon review]. Other participants included Francisco Varela (biologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, and Buddhist), Paul Ekman (leader in the psychological subfield that studies facial expressions), Richard Davidson (leader in the use of fMRI scans in psychology, indcluding the study of the mind in meditative states), and philosopher/neurobiologist Owen Flanagan.
I loved the hybrid of “Eastern” and “Western” approaches, I loved experiencing the dialogue among these eminent and enthusiastic scholars (the most enthusiastic — if that’s the right term — being the Dalai Lama himself), I was inspired by the ideas, and it introduced me to names that would come up again-and-again in my research.
I don’t remember exactly when but some time around then I also came accross the work of Martin Seligman, who conceived the positive psychology movement, practices meditation himself, and — despite what those qualifications imply – happens to one of the most grounded thinkers and personable writers I’ve read. His concept of learned helplessness (and its antithesis, learned optimism) had a huge influence in the field of psychology and on me personally. I generalized it and applied the underlying principles more broadly (like a kind of “universal acid” — as Daniel Dennett described Darwinism).
Authentic Happiness was a major influence on me — both life-wise and idea-wise. It taught me to think about different kinds of happiness, focusing on gratifications we can build on and share rather than amusements that dissipate or keep us on a “hedonic treadmill.” A lot of what I say when I talk about “investments” was initially inspired by Seligman. Perhaps more importantly, Authentic Happiness was another intellectual hub — a great bibliography that gave me access to the current field of psychology. More on that later…
In the mean time I continued to have my fingers in many bowls. Following up on George Santayana, I was poking around the philosophy section looking for more of his work. I noticed a book called Seven Sages: The Story of American Philosophy, focusing on Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, Santayana, Charles Sanders Peirce, and my old friend, Alfred North Whitehead. What was funny is that I thought about skipping the sections on James and Peirce. I’d never heard of them. Sounded like boring dudes. Seven Sages turned out to be a kind of bible for me for a month as I started to love American philosophy – especially the pragmatism of James and Peirce.
But in my usual way I thought “that was cool” and moved on to other things. Until I found The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand. Like the book on Confucianism, it happened to catch the corner of my eye as I breezed through the stacks. I’d recommend this to just about anyone. Menand won a Pulitzer Prize in history for it and it’s very readable (Menand, a Harvard English professor and leading literary critic, also writes for the New Yorker). The book isn’t just about the conversation club from which it gets its title and organizing device; it is more generally about the whole period in which the US matured politically and intellectually. And it’s a great biographical account of some of the personalities that shaped American attitudes and ideals in everything from education to commerce and law.
Emerson I already loved from reading “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar” a couple years earlier (must-reads). Dewey I was already familiar with from my philosophy of education class. We studied Experience and Education but I never saw the point of his writing. But after reading Seven Sages, when I picked up Democracy and Education I was engrossed. I transcribed entire pages. People who criticize Dewey’s education theories miss the point: you can’t understand his education theories without appreciating his more general political philosophy (which in turn requires an appreciation of his psychology and his philosophy of science).
Unfortunately the London Public Library has no Peirce and only a few books about James — nothing by him (and nothing about Peirce exclusively) — and very little by Whitehead. Nor did I ever find any American philosophy in the local used bookstores (and it never occurred to me to order it online). Then one day, by some miracle, I walked into a used bookstore and was absolutely astonished to find an aged copy of Values in a Universe of Chance (a volume of Peirce’s work), James’s Pragmatism, and Other Essays, Whitehead’s Adventures in Ideas and Science in the Modern World, and Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct. The finishing touch that day was finding Varieties of Religious Experience, shelved under Henry James in the fiction section.
That was in the spring of 2005. That’s when my whole attitude and outlook changed, becoming more focused and assured — more mature. A few ‘graphs ago I forgot to mention I read Allan Bloom ’s Closing of the American Mind at the same time as Seven Sages. I switched back and forth. Between the two I developed a more grounded, deeper, more pragmatic sense of value. Ironically, when I say my outlook became more “mature,” I don’t mean I came to terms with the values of my parents’ generation, I mean I came to terms with values that they haven’t even come to terms with yet. But this is a discussion all its own…
I spent the next couple of years immersing myself in philosphy — I mean literally immersing myself. I felt like I was close to ”figuring it all out.” I saved my money and quit my job to spend the summer writing. I fell asleep every night and woke up every morning thinking about philosophy. I inverted my sleeping habits, waking up in the middle of the afternoon, reading for a few hours until I was burned-out and had to go for a long walk (maybe running one errand before businesses closed); had my big meal at 10 pm, watched a movie and thought about absolutely nothing for a couple of hours; then when the world got quiet again I could focus on deep reading, thinking, and writing until I passed out around 7 am.
At some point in the middle of that I decided I had to read Richard Rorty – a natural progression. Rorty is associated with Pragmatism, wrote a fair bit about it, and developed much of his thinking from John Dewey. I don’t know how much direct credity I’d give Rorty for how my own thinking turned out, but as an intellectual hub he was an even greater influence than McLuhan or Dennett.
Through Rorty I took second and third looks at the work of Ludwid Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Harold Bloom – such different thinkers, who I looked at when I was younger but didn’t quite know how to “place” (to use Rorty’s own term). He also helped me place (and get a little more access to) the looming profiles of Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida. More useful to me was the introduction Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature gave me to the names of more contemporary philosophers like Davidson, Quine, Sellars, Ryle, Oakeshott, and Putnam.
Maybe Rorty did influence me, because after reading that and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, I had little interest in looking any further into analytic or linguistically-inclined philosophy. Coming from pragmatism, when I left Rorty I moved towards the philosophy of science.
In between living arrangements I found myself staying near campus for two weeks at the end of that summer. I finally did what I should have done months ago and ventured into UWO’s Weldon Library. I had a list of philosophy of science books I wanted to take a look through and I grabbed Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (people who follow business and management ideas would know of Polanyi’s work through his conception of “tacit knowledge”). After the original pragmatists, that and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method had a huge influence on my ideas about science and knowledge in general.
(I have to make a note on Karl Popper. I’d be lying if I said I did more than glance at The Logic of Scientific Discovery – or much else of his for that matter. I read chunks of The Open Society a few years earlier, and I did a quick seek-and-scan of Conjectures and Refutations and Objective Knowledge. Eventually I want to go back and make a proper study of his work but for now Peirce, Polanyi, Feyerabend, and Kuhn serve my purposes well enough.)
For the next year or so I was a regular visitor at Weldon. Not allowed to sign books out, I had to sit there and read and transcribe. It actually made me more productive. When I take a book home I sit and read the whole silly thing. When I’m sitting in the library with a pile of books (or sometimes still standing at the shelf I’m pulling them down from — this works in bookstores too) I manage to scan the table of contents and index and kind of work my way backwards, somehow managing to find exactly what I’m looking for in a few hours or minutes. Through the sense of urgency, or spontaneaity, the brain’s subconscious processes do most of the work.
Speaking of subconscious, that’s what I spent most of my time reading about then — I mean, psychology more generally, and a lot of philosophy of mind and anything that might relate to it. Don’t be too impressed. I gave it the same treatment I gave Popper: scanning it quickly to make sure there isn’t anything there I absolutely need for my little project (i.e. any refutations, or anyone who already said exactly what I’m thinking of saying).
The closest I’ve seen to “what I’m thinking of saying” is psychologist Robert White’s 1959 article, “Motivation reconsidered: the concept of competence.” I found that via Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis — another great hub that also introduced me to Deci and Ryan’s “intrinsic motivation,” Dan McAdams’s work on “narrative psychology” and “generativity” (I don’t use this word a lot by accident).
Eventually I closed a kind of circle around positive psychology when I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millenium. Csikszentmihalyi is one of the founders of positive psychology and introduced the influential notion of “flow,” which everyone should know about. His other books are good too, but I especially liked and profited from The Evolving Self because it relates it all back to the sciences of evolution and complexity I learned about in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. As an added bonus, there’s a bit of Confucianism in there as well, and more than a little sociology.
Just by coincidence I happened to pick up Charles Taylor’s Malaise of Modernity (I have a habit of grabbing way more than I can possibly read at a time; occasionally I get lucky like and pick up a gem I might not have found otherwise). Taylor and Csikszentmihalyi both make liberal references to the work of Robert Bellah. Things were starting to come together. I picked up Bellah et al’s Good Society and found swaths of ideas developed from Dewey. And they all mentioned Alisdair MacIntyre so I sat down with After Virtue and things came together even more still.
I was no longer a lone speculator, I found — out of the whole history of ideas – a body of work I could trust, an area I felt I belonged in, a place to settle and ground the devolopment of my own ideas.
The other author I was reading at the same time as Csikszentmihalyi and Taylor was José Ortega y Gasset – a very underappreciated philosopher. If I had to tell you one “favourite philosopher” it would be Ortega (just beating out James and Whitehead). I immediately took to Ortega because we share much of the same intellectual background — he is associated with both existentialism and pragmatism (in fact he could be treated as a bridge between the two) — and the notion of narrative is essential to his thinking. History as well. Everything with Ortega comes from becoming.
Ortega’s influence can be seen in the title/subtitle of this blog: “thinking alive.” One of his core concepts is “vital reason” — ratiovitalismo – “thinking alive” is a reinterpretation of the same concept. I’m not going to get into it here, partly because I already try to demonstrate it in everything I write, and partly because I don’t want to misrepresent Ortega. I need to reread and study his work again before I make too many statements on his behalf.
You’ll see the word “vital” appear throughout my writing. Like “generativity” and “integrity,” ”vitality” is a word I use very deliberately after investing a few years in the development of an effective vocabulary. (Side note, “investing” and “effective” are two more invested-in words, and even “vocabulary” was carefully added to my vocabulary — the latter is owed to Rorty’s influence.)
“Vitalism” was once an influential movement in science, but is now in disrepute (though I’m inclined to say “out of fashion”). I’m building towards a defense and re-conception of vitalism — which, obviously, is beyond the scope of this bibliographical essay.
For now I’m just going to say that we tend to neglect the importance of time. It’s virtually impossible to define anything without sucking the temporal dimension out of it. I don’t want to give away the nut, but the gist of it is that we have to conceive life as a process of becoming rather than a state of being.
That idea is as old as philosophy. It’s essential to the ancient philosophies of India and China, and in Greece, a generation before Socrates, Heraclitus wrote about the world’s constant flux. But as Ortega illustrated in Origins of Philosophy, the more static philosophy of Parmenides won the minds of subsequent generations, and through Plato and Aristotle, Western thinking has since failed to appreciate the importance of time — which has been very effective in its own way. For example, we couldn’t have had Newton’s physics — and all the awesome inventions it spawned — without the assumption of absolute space that is part of Plato’s legacy.
Don’t take my word for it. I’m getting this right from Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World and Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead is the thinker most often associated with “process philosophy.” I managed to plug through the first section of Process and Reality – the book in which he lays out his system — but so far I’m only interested in developing my own ideas, rather than mastering someone else’s. That’s why I haven’t knocked myself out trying to finish it, or read Heidegger… Like the quote I already mentioned from Hobbes: If I read as much I’d be just as ignorant.
For metaphysics, I prefer Henri Bergson’s more artful, literary approach over Whitehead’s system. As with Ortega, his quality as a stylist can give the perception he’s not a serious, disciplined philosopher. That is false. William James, another great process philosopher, has the same problem. John Dewey and C.S. Peirce, the other philosophers in this ”family” who influenced me most, have different problems of their own. Bergson’s small volume The Creative Mind, James’s volume of Essays in Radical Empiricism, and Dewey’s Experience and Nature are my key metaphysical influences.
With all this high-flying stuff one might assume I have trouble keeping my head level and my feet on the ground. That’s where the great historian Jacques Barzun comes in.
Jacques Barzun is without any doubt my greatest living intellectual influence. Fittingly, I discovered him via William James. In the summer of 2005 I was in a phase of heroizing James. I noticed a couple of James biographies in a used bookstore. I’d never heard of either biography’s author. Despite the seemingly gimmicky title, I chose A Stroll with William James. I hadn’t even read it when I noticed the name “Barzun” on the spine of The Modern Researcher at another used bookstore. I didn’t think much of it, except that this Columbia Professor must be well-respected. That same week I was cutting through the library and the name caught my eye again, on A Jacques Barzun Reader, a collection of excerpts from his work, including brief remarks about Whitehead (which are so rare, I had no choice but to finally pay serious attention).
Barzun essentially brought everything together for me. Or rather, great teacher that he is, he helped me master all of these influences and master myself in the process.
Our relationship started out perfectly, built on our shared love, reverence, and intellectual debt to William James. Besides A Stroll With William James there’s Of Human Freedom – one of Barzun’s first books, written in 1939 – which outlines the pragmatism he has spent the rest of his career demonstrating.
His social commentary, specifically in The House of Intellect and The Culture We Deserve, were written in the same spirit as The Malaise of Modernity and The Good Society. The same spirit of pragmatism can be found in his cultural criticism (a practice he his is credited with developing with Lionel Trilling) in Darwin, Marx, Wagner, The Energies of Art, Science: The Glorious Entertainment, The Use and Abuse of Art, and Classic, Romantic, and Modern.
I don’t normally like books like The Modern Researcher. Their advice always sucks. They tend to be written by people who write solid grad papers and magazine articles (and books about writing solid grad papers) but are not accomplished intellectuals or confident stylists. They tend to be too step-by-step. Whereas Barzun understands the craft of teaching as well as anyobody ever has (see Teacher in America, The American University, and Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning). I found Strunk and White’s book useful too, but Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers is the only “how to write” book that I really submitted myself to. And Barzun’s book On Writing, Editing, and Publishing is a great supplement.
Above all, Barzun taught me humility. Every time I pick up one of Barzun’s books — even if I only read one page, even if I’ve already read it — he reveals to me some fallacy in my ideas, or some weakness in my thinking. Even when he doesn’t directly point out my flaws, the way he writes (which is a signal for the way he thinks) scares me. He compels me to continually strive for more discipline and rigour in my own work — as if it has to pass under Barzun’s famous blue editing pencil.
The book that looms largest in this regard is From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. Published in 2000, Barzun finished writing it in his 90’s and remarked he couldn’t have written it as a younger man. At over eight hundred pages, it contains more condensed information than some historians manage to convey in the course of their entire career. It isn’t just a history, it’s a bibliography of our civilization, narrativized by a true master of the discipline.
This is what life is about. If nothing else, it’s a story. The best stories are those that help others compose their own — and in turn, those help others, and so on. This is what it means to be “meaningful” and “effective.” Good stories are remembered. Great stories are remembered and used.
