What Was Read This Week: Jan 26-Feb 1

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Struggling to Get Back Into Reading: The Mental Blocks

It seems that since I fell out of the reading habit last week when I binge-watched The Sopranos, I’ve been having a difficult time getting back into it.

I remember when I finished my PhD program, the last thing I wanted to do was read.

I had gone from reading around five to six books a week for years and then was just done. It took a while to get back into reading.

After my ex left, it was almost impossible to sit down and read from all the PTSD.

As a mentor of mine always says, first you must quiet the disturbance.

And that is so true in life—for instance, if you are consumed by anger, you cannot get to the clarity needed to take responsibility for the situation.

You must first be free from the actual feeling of anger. You must quiet the disturbance because it clouds your judgment and reasoning. Only then can you begin to see the situation clearly.

I guess this is all to say that I’ve been in this position before, where reading has fallen out of fashion, and I must make a concerted effort to get back into the groove.

And that was what this week was about—pushing myself back into sitting down and doing the work of reading.

Revisiting Heidegger and Wittgenstein: Two Paths to Thought

I wrote a series of three posts on Martin Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?, so you can find a more thorough examination of the book there.

But this preoccupation I’ve had with Wittgenstein lately has made me think of Heidegger again.

The two of them seem to arrive at the same conclusions—or maybe arrive at the same point in their thinking—but from totally different avenues.

Heidegger was completely steeped in philosophy and had this preoccupation with going backward to move forward.

He felt like, since Plato, something had been amiss in philosophy. So, he went backward to the Presocratics to get the needed ideas to begin again.

He was someone who had the entire history of philosophy in his own head, engaging with each of the major thinkers, pulling what he could from the tradition.

Wittgenstein, on the other hand, didn’t really know anything about philosophy or its history. He never read Aristotle or Plato and could not have cared less about their conclusions.

He was simply interested in logic—a completely contemporary or modern logic at that.

He was the Messiah that Russell had dreamed of, someone completely pure in coming to logic through mathematics rather than philosophy, who would deliver the world from superstition.

Both of these major philosophers—Heidegger and Wittgenstein—arrived at the idea of language itself holding a problem for thinking very early in their careers.

Heidegger saw the etymologies of words themselves disguising genuine thinking, while Wittgenstein saw the use of language in different contexts leading to issues in thinking.

But it is their later thinking where the two converge, seeing something like poetry as holding the real beauty of thinking rather than philosophy.

I think What Is Called Thinking? offers a really great introduction to Heidegger’s mature thought, and you can really see him in this work come to similar conclusions as Wittgenstein on poetry and thinking.

Chiefly, the work is concerned with what Heidegger terms a call to thought, where we disengage from our everyday type of thinking—which Heidegger calls calculative thinking—and engage in a deeper type of thinking called meditative thinking.

The difference between the two is their engagement with the world: where calculative thinking seeks to control and categorize, meditative thinking wants to listen and let the world come forward.

Heidegger goes on to show how poetry forces someone into this call to thought, where meditative thinking takes over.

For Wittgenstein, this is what he would term the mystical.

It is an experience in the world that cannot be described, and when we try to describe it, it only leads to more confusion. He is fine with leaving things unsaid, whereas Heidegger attempts to answer these questions.

I haven’t really engaged with Heidegger’s thinking since I wrote my master’s thesis on his ideas around poetry, so it has been nice this week to revisit an old friend.

As with any philosopher, if you’ve never read them, it’s best just to jump in wherever the water looks good and flail around until you catch hold of something.

So, if you’ve never read Heidegger before, this book is as good as any to begin with. Just know that Heidegger, like Pound in poetry, is a mountain that takes a long way to get around.

That’s from Basil Bunting’s poem on The Cantos, and I see Heidegger in the same light I see Pound.

Despite how you may feel about their politics, their impact on their respective disciplines is something that must be dealt with—or else you won’t understand it.

Related Posts:

• The Call to Thought: When Life Forces Us to Truly Think
• The Death of Deep Thought: How Poetry Saves Meditative Thinking
• Why We’re Not Truly Thinking
• The Writing Life: Lessons from Anne Lamott’s ‘Bird by Bird’
• Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Mystical Path Through Logic’s Limits

Mastery and the Path of Discipline: Lessons from Anne Lamott

Using the complete opposite side of the brain this week, I also revisited Anne Lamott’s classic primer on writing, Bird by Bird.

And much like Wittgenstein or Heidegger, there is something in one’s experience that simply cannot be named.

Lamott does a great job at getting at the same conclusions that those two thinkers came to but by a completely different pathway.

One of the insights—and it is truly something I have come to believe—that I had come upon when I was very young was from Paramahansa Yogananda, who said there were many different paths up the mountain, but only one top.

Meaning that all these different ways of engaging with the world are geared toward the multitudes of perspectives and personalities, but that there is one ultimate form of reality.

Lamott is right there along with all these thinkers.

The book—despite it being completely hilarious as well as refreshingly neurotic—is filled with the sort of practical wisdom that comes from a master. And I mean any master.

Think of the Zen koan of chopping wood and carrying water: after enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water.

This is where Lamott is.

She is the master, someone who has dedicated her life to refining a skill and has reached a pinnacle.

But much like the Zen student asking the master about enlightenment, we are sitting at her feet and asking about publication.

And her response is the same as all these masters: the destination isn’t the goal—the journey is everything.

For her and her students—and perhaps any sort of creative, or maybe anyone in the world—the idea of achieving something and finally feeling like you are whole or good enough or that you belong is so persuasive and alluring.

But in her final analysis, this achievement is empty. The things that really bring a sense of fulfillment are the actual process itself.

When I was reading this book again, I was thinking about Kobe Bryant—how, of course, he wanted to win, but his drive came from the love of basketball itself.

That was the only thing that allowed him to shoot thousands of practice shots day after day, year after year.

The book also made me think of one of my all-time favorite movies, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which showcases Jiro Ono, who is regarded as the greatest living sushi chef.

Each of these masters in their respective domains have reached the heights that Lamott has.

And once you reach that height, the mastery of the skillset itself becomes a mastery of life.

The lessons one has learned practicing a skill become life lessons that are applicable to anyone—if we choose to listen.

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