Episode 53 - An Occasional Compliment From Authors I Interview

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In one of my most recent interviews, I got a compliment that I’ve received several times, which I think is kind of telling. It doesn’t often come up when I’m having a conversation with somebody who is directly within, let’s call it, the world or discipline of philosophy But it does happen quite often when I’m talking with people from other fields. Most commonly it has come up when I’m interviewing an author who has not written a philosophy book, rather something that I think has philosophical depth, but is better classified as literature or something else within that spectrum.

I suspect that this has to do not just with the disciplines themselves or the discourses, but with the sorts of people and platforms on which somebody will typically get interviewed. And it does happen to me to some degree in philosophy as well. Not so much with people in philosophy interviewing me, but people coming in from the outside, from other areas such as entrepreneurship or the world of ideas more broadly speaking, where they’re trying to advocate for doing things like that in a very public way.

So let me tell you what the compliment in general tends to be. Obviously I’m putting together kind of a composite. It’s not verbatim from any one of the compliments. But it’s something like usually after the interview, in an email, or before we actually log off and stop recording. The person will say to me: You know, I really enjoyed this interview because you asked really good questions, and had follow ups that weren’t the sort of thing that I’m usually getting.

I’ve come now to ask another follow up myself when they say that sort of thing, like: Well, are you usually getting questions that are somewhat stereotypical or banal, like where do you get your ideas from? or what is your book about? Oftentimes they’ll also say to me one other thing as well, which is: I get the sense that you really closely and attentively read the book that I wrote.

So I think there’s something to unpack here, and it’s not something that I want to say philosophers are automatically good at. I think that it’s something where the sort of work that we do, the sort of things that we study, the texts, the discourses that we get in, although they have plenty of their own sorts of failings and what the French call a “professional deformation” of your mind or character. There are some things that philosophy-interested people, and I won’t just say people in academic philosophy, but people who are studying philosophy, often get quite good at.

I think one of those things is reading attentively, and correlating things together, and looking for when things make sense, and when they seem to be in contradiction. And then probing a bit to see whether the contradictions are apparent and are merely tensions which are often quite rich, or when there’s something really problematic there that you would want to push on.

Philosophers as opposed to other disciplines are probably geared on their own, and then within the discipline, to asking hard questions of other people and not being too squeamish about doing that sort of thing, which can be actually refreshing to people who don’t get that sort of treatment most of the time. That said, philosophers can sometimes be too adversarial, and maybe we’ll talk about that some other time, because I do want to come back to his main comment.

So these sorts of experiences and encounters show you there’s something going on, because the author, the interlocutor is responding in a spontaneous, unguarded, genuine way. And they’re comparing their experience with you, and the approach that you take, with the more common sorts of interactions that they’re having, which we could describe as, I don’t want to say simply superficial, as if everything else is superficial and philosophy is deep. That would be going way too far.

But we can talk about superficiality,