LOOK BEFORE LUNGING: Read, Study, Think FOR YOURSELF!

If you must disagree with them, if you must take a stance that differs with them, or from their own, I hope you do so after digesting their Ideas. If you must love or hate Marx, Marxism, Socialism, for instance (as is voguish to do), I suggest that you go over his Books and Ideas first. Quit adopting positions and making enormous determinations just on the say-so of garrulous folks. If you must criticize Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or Blaise Pascal, for instance, try reading their words first, then look into the works of minds that support them and add to their arguments and check for how they explain things, how they evaluate them, how they come to some findings on them, and why they say what they say in sum about them, for you to be acquainted with them intelligently and learn how appropriately to measure them. Don't journey an ocean of knowledge using others' opinions as reference points; learn to voyage the waters yourself. Read the works of the people said to have made certain statements for you to know what exactly those statements are, how they were meant, how they were illumined, and what frameworks of studying they wish set out, for at most, they've attempted either a fuller knowing or clarification. Philosophies aren't things you can choose from so capriciously; they are as much inductively as deductively crafted. They are built of theories that hope to extract the principles behind things, behind how things work, how they form, how they alter. They are as much explanations as they are verdicts on what things are and what things could be. The beginning therefore of understanding lies only and deeply in their reading. Read first, read, read. Don't read them through Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia, or any survey book. Read their material as they themselves wrote them. Read the books. If you could manage it, read them in their original languages, but if you can't at least read them as translations directly from the original. Read your philosophy between the lines of the books that actually create philosophy. If you want to know about Democracy, read about it, since its inception in Greece. If you wish to learn about Socialism, then read about its history. So you have a sense of what concepts can be; why Democracy is not absolutely tied to Vicious Capitalism, and why the notion that it is is in point of fact a vulgar objection to the meaning. Read and read. So you can gauge certain labels and practices against the philosophies. Read. Do not allow your media, your government, your teacher, your school, your parents, your friends, your class president, to shovel down your throats what Books are about, what Ideas are about, what the Thinkers are about. Read them yourself. Read them slowly, closely, and bravely. Not with an aim of adopting a convenient philosophy, or of picking from a multitude a system of knowing that you find easiest to comprehend. Read as much as you can. That I've come to love best Nietzsche (not Foucault), Marx, Herbert Marcuse, VN Volosinov, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philo Investigat'ns), Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Raymund Williams, and Blaise Pascal, is because I've read their Ideas for myself. And by "love," I don't mean approving of their notions wholesale. My formulations have as much disagreement as agreement with their own. They try to explain "how things are"; the right way to read them is to evaluate whether their conclusions have bases, or do not have adequate basis. They try also to further ambitions of evaluative conviction, like they seek to advance their own alternative design of what things could be. And so whenever one peruses Philosophy, one has to learn to read it for everything that it tries to explain, such as what it illustrates as its basic hope in terms of practical or life aspiration, and what it puts forth as theories, that are syllogistic claims of Law and Principle, whose goal is to thresh out precisely the way things operate, and by "things," I mean the subject of polemic, or the crux of discourse, say Knowledge, in the case of an Epistemology or the Philosophy of Knowledge or the Knowing of Truth and Reality, or Philology, or the Philosophy of Language, etc. You choose only on the basis of correctness, not on laziness, not on impatience, and if to the questions you want answered you encounter no clear answer, then perhaps you can help carry on the effort, the effort of explaining how things work, what things are, what things might be, how things might work, supplementing all that with your position on what is best to be achieved, what is best to work. That's what Philosophy and Theory are. If you do not bother to read them completely, then you will never understand or react to them appropriately. Don't just react because you feel like reacting; learn to react aided by a fuller knowing of what things are about, from the complexities, to the depth and breadth, and in the case of Ideas and Books, the raging need to get them written.

If more than half the writing there is that has been reacting to Ideas and Books and Thinkers and Evaluations is coached by gossip or impressionistic revulsion, then we do no one justice, not even our own minds.

These days, I notice an even greater need to engage many in the proper reading of concepts, realities, books and terminology. Read, read, read, and cogitate thrice more. If you want to know about Socialism or Communism or Democracy or Fascism for example, read about them. If you want, properly, to judge them, then know them, not only for examples set by those who profess them as beliefs or ways of life, but for how the concepts began and changed or can change for either the worse or the better. What do we mean by Democracy? Read about it, and think, think, think. What do we know about Nietzsche, besides the disdain there has been for having been the Idol of the ignoramus Hitler? What do we know about things? and Ideas and Truth and Reality? Read, discuss if you must or can, ask around, but best of all, learn to think, think, think. The best way to enhance thinking abilities is by reading voraciously and sparing moments in a day to really digest words.

Students old and young, Read for yourself. Cease obsessions with second-hand testimony. Learn for yourself. Put an end to this habit of going by other people's opinions. Form yours fairly on the basis only of your knowledge. Learn by heart what you're agreeing and objecting to. Don't become the unreasoning fools who spread the very foolishness that handicaps and ails them. Study, study, and study. Reason with Ideas, reason with yourself, reason with problems, reason with people, reason with issues. Use critical reason persistently so you can see its vastness and discover its limits. Think, think, think. Read, read, read. Observe, Observe, observe. Then think, think, think again. If we make decisions resting on what we believe things to be, then we must try to know things and sufficiently. Not as academic education urges, but as life itself obliges. Begin demanding and seizing your own education.