impleri

I find that in my desire to understand “contemporary philosophy” and where it’s going, I am bound to understand its past.  Take somebody like Alain Badiou.  He’s really interesting….but to understand him, one has to understand Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (at the least).  To understand Deleuze, one must understand Nietzsche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Lacan, and Bergson.  To understand Nietzsche, one must understand Plato, Hegel, and Kant.  And the list goes on.  Sure, one could jump in and simply learn Nietzsche without understanding his trajectory, but that doesn’t help in understanding how people appropriate Nietzsche.  To be a good philosopher, I think one must know the history of philosophy intimately.  At times, I feel overwhelmed with all of it because there is no “good starting point.”  Unlike something like chemistry where one can start with atoms and move in both directions (macroscopically and microscopically), there isn’t really such a place in philosophy.  Some suggest Plato, but reading him before reading someone like Heraclitus (or what we have of him, anyway) skews the way one reads Heraclitus.  Starting with one of the recent philosophers (e.g. Badiou) isn’t good because one won’t understand him until one has gone through the “long tail” of philosophy and has a strong understanding of everything prior to today.  Derrida was one of these fellows who was popular in the US.  Yet very few people who read him recognized Heidegger’s influence.  Why?  Because they hadn’t read Heidegger.  Once one reads Heidegger, however, one can see what’s really original to Derrida and what isn’t.
Because of this dilemma, my reading list grows exponentially because as I read a single book, I become aware of how much I don’t know and how much I should know to understand that single book more fully.  My reading list of philosophy is 350 books long….and I haven’t updated it since December.  I think that if I took time to update it, I can hit 600.  I feel that even though I’ll be receiving my master’s degree in June, it really isn’t much because there’s just so much I haven’t touched upon yet that I should.  Will the 5+ years of a doctoral program resolve this?  I don’t know.