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