Just a little bit earlier today, I had a very interesting, although short, conversation that got me thinking about something that could be turned into a decent analogy for philosophical study. And it wasn't directly about philosophy.
It was actually about taking different routes, whether you stay on the interstate highways, which are pretty quicker, more direct in many cases, but also kind of boring, even mind numbing to drive on. And the alternative is to take what we often call the scenic route, where you're driving through towns and perhaps you don't have as many lanes, but it's more interesting to drive in and to look around at as you are making your path.
And here's how the conversation went. Somebody was talking about driving up to Door County, which is a pretty ritzy and well-known vacation spot here in southern Wisconsin. It's actually past Green Bay. If you've ever seen the map of Wisconsin, you're going up that little finger that comes off. And it's very much, in my point of view, like Montauk and other parts of Long Island in in New York where the Hamptons are out there. It's really for rich people and the people who hold jobs out there working for rich people. That's the way Door County is.
And so it's got kind of a reputation of being there for the rich people in Wisconsin and then people coming up from Chicago to go there. Just like Long Island, the Hamptons in Long Island has the reputation of being there for people who who come down from Connecticut or drive from other parts of New York and they've got the money to go out there.
Anyway, they were talking about going up to Door County and what's the best way to go. So you can take the interstate for a good ways. Or you can get off the interstate, and take a more interesting and probably a lot more stimulating drive that gets you to see a lot more of the local foliage (it can be very nice during fall when the colors are all turning on the trees). But you also might go close to Lake Michigan, or drive through some scenic towns, and see some cool stuff.
So where am I going with this? I think you can probably guess. This is a philosophy focused podcast, so it's going to have something to do with studying philosophy. And I think that there's a great case to be made for spending the time to take the more interesting but time-consuming route.
I think a lot of people get themselves into, I won't say trouble, but they save time, but they also waste time by not going into the detours, the backwaters, the smaller routes that you're not quite sure exactly what you're getting into. And they think that they're being more efficient in learning philosophy by only focusing on what other people have told them is the most important stuff, or even taking shortcuts like, you know, having AIs summarize information for you, which we could probably do an entire discussion of covering why that's actually a terrible idea if your goal is to learn anything, not just in philosophy, but in history, in English, in the humanities in general. Probably not even great for doing stuff in the sciences either.
Anyway, back to the main topic. So I got to thinking about when I was doing my first full-time gig where I was, as many of you know, teaching up in Michigan City in Indiana, almost on the border of Michigan, at Indiana State Prison. And if I took the interstate, I had about an hour commute, but the interstate was very, very boring. And even with books on CD, I kind of got tired of that after a while.
And I would take that up in the morning to make sure I was there on time. But then coming home, I would often take state highways.So, for example, I might take 231, and go south a good ways, and get to see some cool stuff and go over some interesting bridges and go through some towns. Or I might take Highway 20 or Highway 12, which would roughly parallel the interstate that I was on. But there was a lot more to see, especially on 12. And it would take you longer, but it was more enjoyable and stimulating.
So what would the equivalent of that be in philosophy? So imagine that you're going to read Plato's Republic. You could easily say: “OK, I just want the bare bones of this. I don't want to dilly dally over some of these discussions, which to me seem a little bit off topic. I just want the argument or I just want the key ideas.”
Well, you can certainly do that. I mean, it's a free country. You can do anything you want with your reading. But are you really getting what you want out of it? You may not even suspect what you're missing if you're skipping over too many of the interesting features. If you're unwilling to go down side routes, into alleys where you're not sure what's there, or take a route and linger with Socrates as he seems to go off on a big digression, or even go into myth or something along those lines, you don't really know what you're missing out on.
I suppose you could have something like the guidebook where a great commentator could say: “Well, make sure that you read this part. You may be tempted to skip over it, but it's really the equivalent of a Michelin star restaurant. You have to stop in.”
Helpful for some people, I guess, if you think that you need somebody with some prestige to tell you: “Oh you have to stop here” or “You need to check this out”. But those of us who have enough judgment, or common sense, or whatever you want to say, experience perhaps, to know that much of the time we just need to explore, we need to see what's actually there for ourselves, and that might be the way to go.
And I think if you need somebody like me, who's not quite as prestigious as the people who write the big commentaries and get published with big academic presses, but you know, presumably knows a little bit about philosophy and its study. If you need somebody like me to say to you: “Hey, when you're reading Thomas Hobbes, don't just jump to the stuff about the state of nature. Read the stuff in the book one of Leviathan, where he's talking about words being counters for things and the different kinds of passions, even though it seems a little bit off-topic, or digressions, or a waste of time. It's pretty cool stuff, and it actually turns out to be quite interesting and important.
Or, I mean, Aristotle's prone to all sorts of digressions, as is Seneca. I mean it's almost endemic in ancient philosophy, I would say. But you could always check it out for yourself. I'm not saying you have to go down every single bywater and investigate, because who's got the time for that? But sometimes you probably do want to take, I won't say “the road less traveled”, invoking the Robert Frost poem, but one that certainly doesn't have quite as wide of a path, and doesn't seem to have quite as many people traveling that same way as you.
That could turn out to be quite interesting. And there are so many things. that you would discover along the way that you might not find in a guidebook, or in Yelp, or whatever else the equivalent is for these sources that we use for deciding what's worth actually digging into, spending time with, going to see and checking out. There's often a lot of things along the way that you just have to run across.
So I think that this is, of course, an analogy, a metaphor. Is this supposed to be something that you can use in every single circumstance? No, you have to have some good judgment about how to interpret and apply this. But I think this might be a very useful reminder for some people out there, about what they could be depriving themselves of, if they're only studying what turns out to be the equivalent of staying on the interstate highway, as they're working their way through philosophical texts and thinkers.
