I See Why You Think That (But You’re Wrong)
- Sep 7, 2020
- 4 min read
I recently selected Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy from the unread books in my collection. It’s 835 pages. It’s heavy and awkward and the binding of my used paperback copy cracked the other day when I knocked it off the table. It mocks me by reminding me how awkward it is to be a human, fumbling about trying to hold my highlighter and drink my coffee. It was published in 1945 and is aptly named “A History” and not “The History”, based on his introduction I would guess that is intentional. It is a history of the philosophical canon which was of course composed of men, so it is a work on what was included and less about what has been traditionally excluded. Imma let that slide for the moment, as this isn’t a proper review of the work, but rather a relation of my experience of reading it.
This morning I came upon a passage that spoke to me as related ideas float around in the culture and world at large. Sympathetic reading is a critical approach I was taught in my philosophy courses. Russell addresses many philosophers and theories that seem insane to us now (holy crap, Thales!), and gives this advice on reading them:
“In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When and intelligent man expresses a view that seems obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, we should understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.”
A sympathetic reading does not require us to accept or adopt all of the ideas we read, it leads us into a way of relating to them. A way that can allow us to be far less reactive to them. We live in a world of bullshit* and it can get overwhelming if you have to constantly throw up your arms in disgust. The constant level of highly emotional outpouring I see from some people isn’t sustainable. It will eat you alive, I know from personal experience. We can recognize the bullshit for what it is, maintain our inner stability, believe it is wrong, and even work to change it without emotionally exhausting ourselves. I have dumped so much energy into being pissed off by people who believe things that are to me obviously absurd. And I would grant that there are times at which getting angry is the right course. But when we are confronted with the levels of irritation available to us in the present it is necessary to pick and choose where best to put our righteous anger.
Russell also cautions us against reverence, the suspension of which leads us to a more critical understanding of our own beliefs. Some of which might actually need adjusting I hate to tell you.
This attitude of sympathetic reading isn’t just for philosophy and philosophers. It works with family members, cashiers, customer service reps, even your high school friend’s uncle who has it out for you on Facebook. You can hold this attitude even while setting boundaries with people or blocking them. You can approach them this way even if they are obviously dealing in ideas that don’t correspond to reality. It’s not about owing them understanding or compassion. It is not about them at all really. It is something you do for yourself. It is about how you operate in the world, how you understand things, and how you allow them to effect you. You get wisdom and inner peace, two for the price of one. Now I am guessing there’s a rabbit hole somewhere on the relationship between wisdom and inner peace that we need to find and fall down. Which is nothing less than I would expect from a philosophical musing, there is no end and as Russell points out none of us are likely to arrive on our own at a complete and final truth. Except Hegel.**
My impulse is to include so many qualifiers, such as the fact that this is not an argument for allowing everyone a platform, or where lies responsibility with each party to a communication, but in my experience reading into the text what is not there is much less common when you are reading to see why someone believes as they do. So I am relying on you to read this sympathetically. Sympathetic reading is still highly critical. It leads one to understand arguments in a way that allows for better refutation, so theoretically you could totally own those idiots after you’re done being sympathetic. It also leads one to better discern which arguments are worth investing in an which are worth walking away from. Not everything is worth commenting on.
*I highly recommend Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” if you are into philosophical treatises that are painfully relatable.
**That’s a really lame Hegel joke as a bonus for those of you who’ve read Hegel. There’s a long list of other philosophers who thought they finished up philosophy by solving all the problems. I read them sympathetically.
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