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In one of my most recent interviews, I got a compliment that I’ve received several times, which I think is kind of telling. It doesn’t often come up when I’m having a conversation with somebody who is directly within, let’s call it, the world or discipline of philosophy But it does happen quite often when I’m talking with people from other fields. Most commonly it has come up when I’m interviewing an author who has not written a philosophy book, rather something that I think has philosophical depth, but is better classified as literature or something else within that spectrum.
I suspect that this has to do not just with the disciplines themselves or the discourses, but with the sorts of people and platforms on which somebody will typically get interviewed. And it does happen to me to some degree in philosophy as well. Not so much with people in philosophy interviewing me, but people coming in from the outside, from other areas such as entrepreneurship or the world of ideas more broadly speaking, where they’re trying to advocate for doing things like that in a very public way.
So let me tell you what the compliment in general tends to be. Obviously I’m putting together kind of a composite. It’s not verbatim from any one of the compliments. But it’s something like usually after the interview, in an email, or before we actually log off and stop recording. The person will say to me: You know, I really enjoyed this interview because you asked really good questions, and had follow ups that weren’t the sort of thing that I’m usually getting.
I’ve come now to ask another follow up myself when they say that sort of thing, like: Well, are you usually getting questions that are somewhat stereotypical or banal, like where do you get your ideas from? or what is your book about? Oftentimes they’ll also say to me one other thing as well, which is: I get the sense that you really closely and attentively read the book that I wrote.
So I think there’s something to unpack here, and it’s not something that I want to say philosophers are automatically good at. I think that it’s something where the sort of work that we do, the sort of things that we study, the texts, the discourses that we get in, although they have plenty of their own sorts of failings and what the French call a “professional deformation” of your mind or character. There are some things that philosophy-interested people, and I won’t just say people in academic philosophy, but people who are studying philosophy, often get quite good at.
I think one of those things is reading attentively, and correlating things together, and looking for when things make sense, and when they seem to be in contradiction. And then probing a bit to see whether the contradictions are apparent and are merely tensions which are often quite rich, or when there’s something really problematic there that you would want to push on.
Philosophers as opposed to other disciplines are probably geared on their own, and then within the discipline, to asking hard questions of other people and not being too squeamish about doing that sort of thing, which can be actually refreshing to people who don’t get that sort of treatment most of the time. That said, philosophers can sometimes be too adversarial, and maybe we’ll talk about that some other time, because I do want to come back to his main comment.
So these sorts of experiences and encounters show you there’s something going on, because the author, the interlocutor is responding in a spontaneous, unguarded, genuine way. And they’re comparing their experience with you, and the approach that you take, with the more common sorts of interactions that they’re having, which we could describe as, I don’t want to say simply superficial, as if everything else is superficial and philosophy is deep. That would be going way too far.
But we can talk about superficiality, or banality, or generic-ness, whatever we want to call it. You know, we could use the term basic that has become a pejorative in recent years. And all of these convey a sort of lack of fuller, deeper, richer engagement which was possible. If it wasn’t possible, nobody would actually miss it. But it is possible.
So somebody who is coming at a book an author a topic in a way that’s not just different from how other people are doing, but having been trained or practiced, however you want to put it, in digging deeper and seeing connections and asking questions and following up, is going to be able to do that more often, more reliably, more sustainably than others who might actually blunder their way into it or happen upon it from time to time.
And this has got me thinking that, you know, I’m I’m pretty fortunate in that I have spent the majority of my life at this point in time in the field of philosophy, either as an academic, as a student, as a professor, and an instructor. But also in all sorts of other ways that go beyond the academy and bring it into ordinary and real-life with the kind of people who aren’t necessarily going to college or even went to college, but can certainly can find value in the intellectual life in particular in philosophy and its myriad different subjects and approaches.
That’s fortunate on my part because I get to experience not depth or interest or richness all the time because there can be, you know, boring stuff within philosophy. If you’re doing academic things, you’ve got the activities of grading, which are not always mind-blowing. Or setting up a curriculum, which isn’t always a treat. But you get to do more of that than the person who doesn’t get access to that regularly. And I sort of take it for granted. But I forge how many people out there are, you might say, starved for something that they’re not even sure they have a taste for, a hunger for. They just know that they’re not getting everything that they want.
And so to come back to these experiences with authors in particular, but also with many other people, where they say that they really got something out of the interview, or conversation, or even just engagement. I think there’s a phenomena there that calls out to be explored in greater depth, but I don’t think can be easily turned into something like a full-blown theory. And we have to be very careful when we’re making these sorts of distinctions not to draw claims that are too generalized and sweeping about it. So I’m not sure exactly what I want to do with it, but I have a sense that there’s something important here that certainly goes beyond just my own personal anecdotes, that is well worth mulling over and exploring. And so I thought it would be great to share with you, and see whether perhaps some of you have similar experiences, or what you think ought to be made of this one.
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Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.
