Blog 3: Reading Philosophy as an Undergrad

I imagine that it can be easy for us professors to lose touch with what it was actually like to encounter all these thinkers for the first time. I also imagine that it’s easy to overestimate how well and quickly we picked things up. If I’m honest, I think that I’d have to say that I felt that I understood what I read, but it was only later, as I advanced, that I came to realize how simple my understanding was and how often it would, upon closer scrutiny, have been found incomplete and perhaps not entirely correct. But that is one of the primary lessons of a long-term relationship with philosophy: the humility that arises as you learn more and realize that you never actually knew as much as you thought you did.

 

My first encounter with reading philosophy was in a year-long mandatory Western Civilization course at the University of Kansas. I loved it. I read voraciously. For instance, when we were assigned bits of two of Plato’s early dialogues, I ended up reading all five dialogues in the book in their entirety. I was this way with pretty much everything that was assigned. I also took copious notes. I’m not sure how fully I understood everything, but I was able to get by with those notes – I found that the professors liked to have what they said repeated back to them. I had also gone to a good college prep school and so could write well without understanding how I did it. I think that most humanities professors like it if you are clearly excited about the material, have read it, and have thought about it; if you can then describe what you thought clearly, you’re set. So for me, the tests and the papers were the relatively easy part, and it freed me up to think about what I was reading on my own terms.

 

What were my own terms? I think that I found that the readings stirred something deep inside me – some dormant side of me that I wanted to get to know better – and so I would take things that seemed suggestive and mull them over in terms of my everyday experiences and struggles and crises. Again, I’m not sure that where my thinking went matched up at all times with what the philosophers said, but it seemed to me that they would be most interested in me thinking more fully and deeply about my life as opposed to ‘correctly’ about what they said. Granted, I wanted to understand what they said on their own terms – I found it tremendously interesting and I like to know how theories work – but that was not my main motivation. Perhaps because of this sense of self-discovery, I was most attracted to the ancient thinkers, such as Plato, Augustine, and the Stoics, and to existentialist thinkers such as Sartre, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche (who is not, technically, an existentialist, but I was taught that he was).

 

My classes were largely lectured-based ones. When I was in small discussion groups, I was terrified of speaking. It wasn’t until my senior year that I began to ask questions and make comments in class. And we never applied anything we read to literature or movies or everyday life. It was all very abstract. But I loved it.