Flash Philosophy

Hello! I’m Nick Gooding, and I teach in the philosophy department at Amherst College. In recent years, I’ve also taught at the University of California, Berkeley (where I did my PhD) and Deep Springs College. My academic work and teaching have generally focused on the history of moral and political philosophy. When I suspect that my audience is unlikely to know better, I try to pass myself off as an expert on Aristotle. But my interests, in fact, range across the entire discipline, and well beyond. Put simply, I love good writing in all its forms—writing that is a pleasure to read, and which gets you to think for yourself or to see something in a new way.

There are a couple of reasons that I created this Substack. The first is that it seems to me that philosophy has abandoned what should have been its audience and, in doing so, what should have been its aspiration—that is, to understand human life as it is actually lived. As a discipline, we seem to have given up on writing for the sort of person that Virginia Wolf called “the common reader”—that is, ordinary, intelligent adult human beings, who, however busy with living and loving, want to understand the world and their place in it—and instead write only for fellow academics. And this leads us to get so mired in the narcissism of small differences as to forget altogether the sense of wonder and curiosity that drew us to philosophy in the first place.

(Occasionally, it’s true, a professor of philosophy will turn outward, and report some of his findings to the wider world. Even this happens but rarely. And when it does, it has the character of a “Bulletin from the Interior,” filtered through the academic’s often condescending ideas about the capacities of “the common reader.” They are reports on the results of difficult thinking that has gone on in another context. He has to translate out of the jargon in which he’s done the real thinking, and (in his mind anyway) that already means to some degree falsifying it.)

And this means contemporary philosophy has for the most part also abandoned any real effort to write in a way that is enjoyable to read. We academic philosophers have become, to put it bluntly, very bad writers. (Needless to say, there are many important exceptions.) How could it be otherwise? Most of us are not really writing for readers at all, but to produce publications—the only readers that matter are anonymous reviewers for academic journals.1 (This is something of a cliché, but it is also true.)

I don’t think, by the way, that this is an incidental concern. Writing in a way that is enjoyable to read is not like adding a spoonful of (literary) sugar to help the (properly philosophical) medicine go down. To write well is to think well. And I have a vague sense that, in these late, strange times, doing something simply because it is pleasurable in itself could constitute a kind of act of resistance, however humble. (Perhaps that’s a foolish thought. But I like to think of it as a good-natured “fuck you” to everyone telling you how to “maximize your productivity.”)

Since this sorry state of affairs results from the incentive structure of the academic system (and the fact that philosophy is confined to the academy), it is obvious that one delinquent academic creating a Substack is not going to change things. But we have to start somewhere, and I think where we should start is by creating spaces, outside of the academy, in which it is possible to discuss philosophy in a way that is at once serious (that is, done with the care and precision that philosophy requires) and fun.

The title of my Substack is a nod to the genre of “flash fiction”—ultra-short short stories, often of a somewhat experimental cast, of the kind that Lydia Davis is so famous for. We have come virtually to identify philosophical writing with the argumentative or persuasive essay, but this too is largely a by-product of the fact that philosophy is confined to the academy—an academic journal article, virtually by definition, has to aim at convincing you of the truth of some thesis. But even a cursory survey of philosophy’s history reveals an astounding range of style and form: we find philosophy in the form of dialogues, letters, memoir, aphorisms, short stories, and what Wittgenstein called his “philosophical remarks.” In any case, my posts will not, generally, take the form of argumentative essays; they are brief and exploratory attempts to think something through, using whatever form or style seems most amenable to the topic at hand or my mood that day. “Attempts”: I believe that this is what Montaigne meant when he called his writing essais—a meaning that lingers in contemporary English: to “assay” something is to try it out, to test it. That is what I’ll do here. I do not have “a” philosophy, I claim no particular expertise, and I am not in the business of recruiting converts.

Often enough, I will be thinking things through in dialogue with the authors of Very Old Books—Plato, Rousseau, Hannah Arendt, and so on. This reflects that I think of philosophy as a fundamentally humanistic discipline—as continuous with literature and the arts as with the sciences. Perhaps at some point I’ll write something about what I mean by that (which is to say, I’ll try to come to grips with what I mean by that). For now, I hope you enjoy my “attempts.” My plan is to post every other Sunday. For the foreseeable future, all content will be free.