My Year In Review
Reflections on the Life of Thinking
“A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions.”
—Nietzsche
I.
I’ve been writing here at What Is Called Thinking nearly every day for a year. 18 of you have been with me from the beginning, when I started this in September, 2020. Some of you have just signed up. Thanks to your engagement, I’ve found the energy to make a habit of regular writing. In one year, WICT has nearly 1,000 subscribers, 125 of whom are patrons.
If you find this work meaningful, the best practical ways you can support it are by recommending it to friends, sharing on social media, and becoming a paying subscriber.
The best way that you can support this project “spiritually” is by writing yourself. Start a philosophical diary or a podcast and use your voice to find yourself, as Wallace Stevens says, “more truly and more strange.”
II.
What Is Called Thinking takes its name from Heidegger’s 1954 lecture course. There, Heidegger writes, “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
I find Heidegger’s proclamation vertigo-inducing, but also inspiring, a Socratic call to recognize that our attachment to the familiar is itself something that should perplex us. The task of thinking, more than it is the discovery of answers, is the illumination of problems, the renewal and reanimation of that which has become stale.
Walter Kaufmann says that philosophical works are records of the spirit in flight. We should read them not for their systematic rigor, but as monuments to the life of thought. The philosophical work is a snapshot, not the thing itself.
While my posts have been brief, I hope I have offered a sense of “spirit in flight,” a small example that a life of reflection need not be reserved for professional thinkers or public intellectuals.
Philosophical writing, in my view, can be like a kind of daily prayer or sacrifice, a ritual. It need not be a treatise or a fully formed argument. There is a power to making a fixed time for thought as opposed to thinking only when the mood strikes.
Yet going forward, I’d like to make this substack more experimental. Consequently, some posts will be longer and others shorter. Some weeks, I’ll continue to write daily, other weeks I might put out one longer essay. Some days I’ll write in a more expository style, other times I might write more associatively, even putting out the occasional poem. From time to time, I’ll post interviews with writers and thinkers I admire.
When I began, I found it helpful to stick to the form of asking a question explicitly. Over time, I found that implicit questioning—writing that lets the reader decide what to ask—can be far more liberating and penetrating.
In WICT 2.0, I aim to provoke thought, but not always to direct it.
III.
The Nietzschean view of philosophy is that the thinker’s task is not to uphold one’s beliefs, but to challenge them. It can be a kind of self-laceration, an ascetic discipline. But we should challenge even this conviction! Who says self-criticism itself is always noble, that a life of uncertainty is inherently preferable to a life of (moral) fortitude?
Some might say that uncertainty is a means to an end, a road of negation leading to a higher synthesis. Uncertainty is good because it saves us from false certainty, but the goal remains knowledge! Others might say that uncertainty is an end in itself. That the philosopher is distinguished by a willingness to refuse socialized dogmas and accepted norms. The philosopher is an outcast. It’s no fun, even if it’s meaningful. Do you think Abraham enjoyed placing his son, Isaac, on the altar? The first view is Hegel’s. The second is that of Leo Strauss. One sees philosophy as basically helpful to mainstream society, the other sees philosophy as fundamentally incompatible with mainstream society.
Where do I fit in on this question? I don’t know. I want it both ways.
I think philosophy which sets itself up in opposition to society is irresponsible and escapist, perhaps unfairly pessimistic and anti-worldly. But I accept the tragic insight that great thinkers often need to refuse the lures of accepted piety if they are to say something new and interesting. It seems inevitable that philosophers, like Biblical prophets, are often doomed to be ignored. It takes a certain kind of madness (or self-righteousness) to love God or truth so much that you could prefer them to the approval or even just acknowledgment of peers. To care only for one’s peers’ opinions seems the basic sin of sophistry. To care only for truth seems the basic sin of prophecy. Should prophets not also have a responsibility to build something, to change something? Is it really enough just to put the message out, regardless of whether or how it is received?
Maimonides writes that it is forbidden to rebuke one’s fellow if it will be misinterpreted. Drive for other people.
But which other people? Straussians think it’s enough that philosophers address other philosophers and their initiates. Hegelians imagine a future in which every citizen is fully rational and philosophy becomes unnecessary. Post-Wittgensteinian thinkers who engage in “ordinary language philosophy” seeks to restore the prestige of common sense, turning the average person into a philosopher who simply doesn’t know it.
“It is not in heaven,” says Moses, referring to the Torah. No great effort is required to grasp the divine law. And yet if this were really so, why would study and commentary become such a fundamental Jewish practice. The same might be said of philosophy. Is philosophy “all around” or is it a very difficult thing, an aspiration so high that none can reach? Paradoxically, it may be both. If philosophy were only easy, there could be no flight of the spirit. If it were only difficult, we would give up. If philosophy were the same as any old questioning, it’d be mundane. If it were some esoteric thing, it would be irrelevant.
IV.
How we find the relevance of ideas without reducing ideas to relevance is a great challenge. It is one of the great challenges of our time in which, by and large, we can only justify the value of something in utilitarian terms. “Read this because it will get you a better job, make you smarter, happier, richer, etc.”
Aristotle knew that philosophy could be enjoyed only in leisure, in a state of retreat. But we are not meant to live in retreat only. And Aristotle’s is only one model. We do not live in Aristotle’s world, but in Weber’s. In our world, “work will set you free.” And so even philosophy has become a form of “knowledge work.”
The thinker is but one member of “the creator economy.”
V.
There is no right way to do philosophy, no topic or style that is principally foundational or correct (in my opinion). But philosophy should be self-reflective, which includes being reflective about the limits of self-reflection.
To restate the above, then, let’s put it this way:
Is the philosopher a foreigner, an anthropologist, gaping at the non-philosophical natives? Or is the philosopher a native who moonlights as an anthropologist?
My own view is that the philosopher is a native and an anthropologist. The philosopher should not be—and should not consider herself to be—a tourist or an alien. In Plato’s cave allegory, the philosopher returns home.
Whatever their limits, this is the core achievement of phenomenology and existentialism—the acknowledgment that the philosopher is not “above it all” just by being a philosopher. Rather, the philosopher can only be a philosopher by embracing who he is, fully.
For me, this means that being Jewish, being a U.S. citizen in 2021, and being a thinker, are not three different levels of existence, but three aspects of the same phenomenon: Zohar-Being.
To think, for me, is therefore to think about what each of these means, and how they interrelate. Theology, philosophy, politics, culture, and language are not autonomous fields, but interpenetrating forcefields. I do not stand above these forcefields, but speak them. If I only bring more of one element into view of the others, I’ll consider myself a success.
In Heidegger’s sense, my task is: to let them be.
I must start by acknowledging the ways in which they are implicit, part of my “thrownness,” concealed from view. Only then can I say that I hope in the coming days, weeks, months, and years, to reflect on what is called thinking.
Yours,
Zohar Atkins
What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.
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