One of the most famous descriptions of the task of philosophy occurs in Plato’s Phaedrus when Socrates tells his interlocutor that he does not have time to speculate about specialities because: “I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that” (230a). The project of learning about oneself has been a basic program in philosophy in the almost 2500 years since Socrates’ death. However, the way in which Socrates pursues his philosophical program to ‘know thyself’ seems to me at least as important as his intention (that is to say, the form in which his philosophy is written). What is the form in which Socrates pursues self-knowledge? Dialogue. By why dialogue? How does the form of communication shape something’s philosophical content?

To get toward an answer I have three models of good philosophical form in mind that aren’t normally treated as philosophy: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (published between 1572 and 1588); Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 – 1638; Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary, (1773 – 1883 with a couple of breaks).

On the surface, what stands out about these three very different texts is there shared heterogeneity (diversity of parts). Montaigne’s Essays weave together a many-layered tapestry of citations from Ancient writers and early-modern stories, organized around a seemingly off-the-cuff theme with multiple layers of revisions; Burton’s Anatomy is a cavernous, labyrinthine mess of quotes and observations organized meticulously into partitions, sections, members, subsections, and various sub-sub-divisions; Dostoevsky’s Diary is a monthly periodical written as if the author were writing whatever came to mind–but in fact he carefully edited and organized thematically around fiction, non-fiction, semi-fiction, reporting, criticism, and autobiography.

Why describe these annoyingly opaque texts as ‘models of good form’? ‘Bad form’ would probably be something that contradicts its content by the way it is presented (an instance of bad form might be a story I heard once of a lecture given by a professor in which he told his students to think for themselves. The students immediately wrote down ‘think for myself’ in their lecture notes).

The philosophical concern that all three of these texts answer by way of their multitudinous forms is something along the lines of:

1. 1. If I interpret the world from a preconceived perspective and
   2. Learning means gaining a new understanding that I previously did not have,
   3. Then the acquisition of new knowledge requires taking on a genuinely new perspective, different from that which I commonly take to be my own.

Here is an example of this hypothesis from Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary:

The multitude of literary genres in the Diary allows Dostoevsky to communicate various, sometimes contrasting perspectives on topical issues to his readers and thereby circumvent his readers’ original beliefs. Gary Saul Morson frames this maneuver well in his introduction to Dostoevsky’s Diary: “Any ethical theory, not just the doctrine of the environment, will produce grotesque results when formulated as a universal law. Real moral judgment demands fine discrimination among apparently similar cases, and in such a process of judgment generalities play their proper role not as laws but as maxims, as reminders of earlier cases that may or may not be applicable to the one under consideration” (43). Dostoevsky’s communication in the Diary is often most effective in moments when he emphasizes the implicit judgments behind contemporary events. Dostoevsky presents the basis for judgment in evaluations which people make based upon their own deeply rooted ideas. In the 1873 article, “Environment,” he writes:

Some ideas exist that are unexpressed and unconscious but that simply are strongly felt; many such ideas are fused, as it were, with the human. They are present in the People generally, and in humanity taken as a whole. Only while these ideas lie unconscious in peasant life and are simply felt strongly and truly can the People live a vigorous “living life.” The whole energy of the life of the People consists in the striving to bring these hidden ideas to light (137).

Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank calls the principles Dostoevsky describes here “idea-feelings” and connects many of Dostoevsky’s most firmly held beliefs with their surfacing (for example, see Frank II 116). The main point of Dostoevsky’s article titled “Environment,” in which this concept appears, is to undermine the argument espoused by Dostoevsky’s contemporary liberals that a person’s environment voids their moral responsibility, if driven to crime because of difficult circumstances. On the contrary, Dostoevsky argues, the hidden life-ideas within people allow them to change their environment (Writer’s Diary, 138).

Perhaps one not-wrong way to phrase the philosophical idea undergirding the formal heterogeneity of the Essays, the Anatomy, and the Diary is to ask: how can we excavate these underlying ideas?

If the underlying ideas that fundamentally inform a person’s evaluations lie beneath the surface of their psyche, formed not only by that person’s memories and moral-cultural heritage but also by through the freedom of that person’s will, then the radical embodiment of a new perspective has a double meaning: learning as the process of  taking on a new perspective also allows access to the firmament of one’s own most deeply held beliefs.

Getting to the ground of these beliefs, perhaps digging beneath them, perhaps anchoring them, perhaps just learning how to anchor oneself in them, seems to me to be a way of response to Socrates’ program to ‘know thyself.’ The most common literary form in philosophy, indeed in academics as a whole, is the argumentative essay. The essay begins with the idea, the thesis, and creates a monologue around that single idea it is essentially homogeneous. The persuasive essay therefore eschews the multiplicity of perspective needed to gain knowledge of the idea-feelings undergirding one’s own values. It is not a very good form for learning. A heterogeneous form, on the other hand, brings many views together into one text. Plato seems to have had a similar belief and wrote exclusively dialogues. Burton, Montaigne, and Dostoevsky, too, seem to have intuited literary forms well-suited to inquiring into the psyche of the human being.

Works referenced:

Robert Burton. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Edited by Holbrook Jackson. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Writer’s Diary, Volume 1. Translated by Kenneth Lantz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994.

Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky, The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Michel de Montaigne. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Translated by Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958.

Plato. Phaedrus in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.