Anti-Climacus

LINK: Fascinating and interesting article by a philosophy professor at Rutgers on how he got hooked into philosophy. Not to imply that this is almost exactly the story of how I got interested in philosophy, though it is:

"The paperback British edition of my memoir The Making of a Philosopher has a photograph on the cover of a man sitting on a bench, placed in a grey and listless landscape. He is overlooking the sea on a misty grim day, and the atmosphere is bleak and melancholy. The man, hunched up, immobile, coiled almost, has a pensive posture, as if frozen in thought. This picture is based on a story I tell in the book about sitting on a bench in Blackpool, aged 18, pondering the metaphysical question of how objects relate to their properties. Is an object just the sum total of its properties, a mere coalescence of general features, or does it somehow lie behind its properties, supporting them, a solid peg on which they happen to hang? When I look at an object do I really see the object itself, or just the appearance its properties offer to me? I remember the feeling of fixation that came over me when I thought about these questions - a kind of floating fascination, a still perplexity. The photograph itself is an exercise in Cartesian dualism, presenting both the outer world of substance and drizzle, and the weightless inner world of thundering thought, so silent and so arresting. I had begun living in those two worlds, suspended between them, as my intellectual interests took root.

When I look back on this period in my late teens, I recall the harnessing of undirected mental energy by intellectual pursuits. Up until then, my mental energy had gone into things like reading Melody Maker, which contained fairly serious articles about pop musicians; I always knew the top 20 off by heart, and studied the articles about drummers intensely, hoping to improve my own technique. I suspect that this kind of swashing mental energy is fairly typical of boys that age. School doesn't seem to connect with it, and it goes off in search of some object of interest, often trivial, sometimes destructive. In my case, it was philosophy that seized that energy and converted it into a passion - though one that took several years to form fully. It is a delicate and fastidious energy that I am speaking of, despite its power, and it will only be satisfied by certain employments, which of course vary from person to person. I had had a similar passion for chemistry when I was ten, and for butterflies and lizards before that. How to harness such passions to formal education remains a great and unsolved problem: how to convert a love of Harry Potter stories, say, into a taste for good literature. The mental energy of young people is not to be underestimated, even when it leads to nothing but an elaborate obsession with piercing."