A friend and I have begun a pair reading of The Faith of a Heretic by Walter Kaufmann. It's the second time through for both of us and we have mutual admiration for Kaufmann, so we're excited about digging into this most personal of Kaufmann's books on philosophy and religion.
Here in the early going, I was struck by this paragraph in a section on intellectual honesty:
Perhaps the single best example of the common lack of high standards in questions of honesty is our tendency to think in labels. Terms like existentialism, pragmatism, and empiricism, liberalism and conservatism are, more often than not, so many excuses for not considering individual ideas on their merits and for not exposing oneself to the bite of thought. For less educated people, words like Jew and Catholic, Democrat, Republican, and Communist do much the same job. These labels have some uses that are perfectly legitimate, but frequently they function as an aid to thoughtlessness and permit people to appear to think when they are merely talking.
There's an awful lot of "merely talking" in the world, isn't there? In my life I've been just as guilty as the next person, but I've been striving to leave labels, isms, epithets, and slogans behind me. It's surprisingly hard work!
One of my methods is what I call encountering - deeply reading and considering the complete works of particular thinkers from the past. A good example is Thoreau. Having read everything he wrote, I have to wonder: Was Thoreau a transcendentalist? What does the label even mean? Could it be that, despite some similarities (what Wittgenstein might call "family resemblances"), lumping Thoreau in together with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Swedenborg, Böhme, Carlyle, Coleridge, and the like actually lessens our understanding of Thoreau's individuality and multifarious insights?
Although encountering in my sense is a number of steps beyond steelmanning, unfortunately it takes extreme discipline and dedication - one might have time for only half a dozen encounters in life. I'm hopeful that Kaufmann's example and suggestions might help me discover thinking practices that aren't quite so intensive.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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