I went to the town library with the family today for the first time in ages, and it was lovely. The kids enjoyed browsing in the childrens’ section and beginning to realise that there’s a lot more beyond; my wife couldn’t decide whether to look first for fact or fiction, and if in the factual section, what, exactly, did she want to discover? She settled in the end on a biography, a baking book, and a novel.
I knew exactly where to go. The last time I had been, back then, in pre-pandemic times, I had curiously and cautiously browsed the philosophy section, alighting on books about and by Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer. After flicking through a few pages of each, I put them back on the shelf and left, with the feeling that I should first finish what I was reading before expanding out onto new stuff. This time around, I made a beeline for that same shelf, and grabbed Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode. The method in this new madness was that, from reading Back to the Rough Ground, Gadamer seemed more likeable to me than did Habermas; and, I wanted to challenge myself by reading a “real”, original philosophical text, rather than reading about them.
I was also genuinely curious about hermeneutics (the philosophical perspective of interpretation and understanding), and felt it would enrich rather than distract from my other current readings (more about that soon!)
As the rest of the family diffused around the library, I started on the introduction, contentedly taking notes on my mobile as I went… and swiftly realised that most of these notes were about how distracted I was (not by the phone, though, not this time!), and how I couldn’t take in the meaning; I actually wrote “reading the words, but not ‘breathing them in’”, noting that, whilst this phrase came to mind automatically, without a strategy, it felt non-random, influenced my glasses fogging up and that slight resistance in breathing from the mask I was wearing.
But slowly I was able to sink into the text and begin to grasp what it was Gadamer was trying to say - more on that later, too - and then distracted myself again by thinking: hey, wasn't one of the original points of my blog to chart my development in philosophy, not just writing fixed, monolithic-feeling essays that I keep drafting and not finishing?
Read, reflect, write
I’ve also not been charting my reading at all, nor reflecting sufficiently on it, passively or - better - by writing to express my understanding of it. Hence the title of this post: whilst I may not have been reading too much (but perhaps too widely), I certainly haven’t been writing enough.
So, in that spirit, this post: to remind myself that I wanted to be writing much more than I have been, and to be much lighter on my feet about it.
