thinking slowly...

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

philology,according to nietzsche is ‘the art of reading slowly’

philosophy then, is the art of thinking slowly?

the most popular topics for discussion are those which are inconcludable therefore much ‘philosophizing’ occurs. philophizing which means, redefining the problem so that it can be tackled easier, debating in circles, rhetorical statements, wordplay.

so, snapping up an answer quickly is a fine idea?
is wisdom not simple truth?
if the problem involved in a discussion does not have a solution, i.e. existence of god , is it even worth debating?

is philosophy a practical thing?
or is it,like its name suggests…a love for it and not for its usefulness,but for it,itself.

discuss!

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I’ve found that what you mention here seems to occur when the discussers are operating from bias that makes them susceptible to exhibting the extremes of absolutism or relativism in their presentations.

When an absolutist (someone who presents obvious subjective relatives as being objectively absolute) and a relativist (someone who presents obvious objective absolutes as being subjectively relative) hook up in a discussion, though the results can be lively and entertaining, there is rarely anything of rational philosophical value intrinsic to the material itself.

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“What a philosopher is, is hard to learn, because it cannot be taught: one has to “know” it from experience—or one ought to be sufficiently proud not to know it. But that nowadays all the world talks of things of which it cannot have experience is most and worst evident in respect of philosophers and the philosophical states of mind—very few know them or are permitted to know them, and all popular conceptions of them are false. Thus, for example, that genuinely philosophical combination of a bold exuberant spirituality which runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity which never takes a false step is to most thinkers and scholars unknown from experience and consequently, if someone should speak of it in their presence, incredible. They imagine every necessity as a state of distress, as a painful compelled conformity and constraint; [b]and thought itself they regard as something slow, hesitant, almost as toil and often as “worthy of the sweat of the noble”—and not at all as something easy, divine, and a closest relation of high spirits and the dance! “Thinking” and “taking something seriously,” giving it “weighty consideration”—to them these things go together: that is the only way they have “experienced” it. Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act “voluntarily” and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height—in short, that necessity and “freedom of will” are then one in them.”
[Nietzsche, BGE 213.]

Note that these slow thinkers are precisely those whose reading is a kind of racing. This is because they cannot afford to slow down, read well, and think about it. What they lack is the otium to enable them to learn to think:

“Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out. One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery—that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing…”
[Nietzsche, Twilight, Germans, 7.]

Now this learning process: that may be a slow and difficult process. To learn to think well: that goes slowly. But it is a prejudice to think that thinking goes slowly.