Steps towards a clear mind: Why everyone should start writing
Begin with contextualizing your thoughts
This is the first of a series; a written one here on Medium and primary an audiovisual one which I will soon launch on YouTube. It’s about approaching the concept of essay writing – something that is better off being hash-tagged with #philosophy #self-awareness and #productivity than with #literature. It’s mission can be put quiet simple:
how to live?
Originally founded in the 16th century by the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, the essay aims to observe and request its writers individual life. It is a method for philosophical reflection and self consciousness. When writing an essay, we must not dedicate to any aesthetic or scientific criteria, nor to any certain topics. In fact, we shouldn’t even aim for a specific outcome.
It’s qualities lie in it’s process of construction. The momentum of writing is the magical core of each essay. While doing, the author enters a state of free thinking and critical reflection that changes his understanding of the initial question or thought.
“That experience […] feels very pure because the whole movement of essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out. That’s the thing that moves an essay forward, that inquiry. […] It’s thinking and sharing the experience of thinking.” – J. d’Agata
Montaigne was quiet consistent in what he initially called an ‘attempt’ (fr. essais). For years, he observed himself thinking and acting and contextualized what he perceived. Doing so, he himself became a different too. The essay is not only a tool to reflect on our individual identity, but to further construct it as we keep writing. Montaigne showed us why writing is such a crucial practice for personal growth.
Writing extends our memory and organizes our mind at its highest and most abstract levels.
As the psychologist J. B. Peterson stated, it broadens our capacity to consider several ideas in little time, to select, organize and link these ideas and to eventually communicate them. This was applied 500 years ago and can still be. Considering todays rapid growth of knowledge construction and its disorientating effect, the unbounded act of thinking which results from writing might even be what is needed to counterbalance that shift.
A method to understand reality while constructing it.
Historically seen, human species diligently invented strategies to handle the above mentioned question of how to live: religion, law, political ideologies; rawly summed up. Then Nietzsche happened, and we learned that god might be an to easy excuse for what can’t be answered otherwise. Again, we were left with the ever same struggle to anchor our individual lives in this complex world of uncertainty.
There is a last character I will introduce for finishing these thoughts, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. He denied any certainty, any absolut theory or higher order.
In fact, our perception of the world is contingent, which means that whatever we perceive could also be otherwise.
When swimming in a river for example, I might focus my attention towards the water’s surface and it’s cold temperature while you listen to the birds singing. As our experiences differ, I will never be able to consider what your perception might be like. My world is a different then yours, unpredictable. When the two of us enter communicate, our two worlds collapse, and the question of understanding each other enters a sphere of extreme uncertainty.
Luhmann concluded that communication always contains risk, the risk of being misunderstood, and that communication duplicates reality, because our both perceptions collapse. People live in their individual worlds, they do not merge. “They concentrate on what they can observe as input and output in the other […]. They can try to influence what they observe by their own action and can learn further from the feedback. In this way an emergent order can arise that is conditioned by the complexity of the systems that make it possible but that does not depend on this complexity’s being calculated or controlled.” Every new step will still appear as ‘being also otherwise possible’.
To summ up his thoughts, communication is what causes uncertainties and complexities in our social environment and simultaneously functions as the only method to deal with them. We will never find certainty. We can only keep trying. Step by step we will then approach a shared symbolic system and common culture, that will facilitate our mutual understanding.
We can only keep observing, trying and failing – in continuous repetition.
It is here where Luhmann’s theory acts as theoretical framework to my thoughts on essayism: the loop of observation, trial and error through communication as a mean to construct social order. This is what I see being practiced when writing.
It will facilitate sharpening our thoughts, raise our ability for abstract thinking, for communicative efficiency and help localize ourselves within the world we live. It’s practice begins with a moment of stillness: when we start formulating whatever enters our mind. And as we write, we might keep going.
This Medium article features a guide on essay writing, for those who want to start right away: https://medium.com/practicecomesfirst/dr-jordan-b-petersons-10-step-guide-to-clearer-thinking-through-essay-writing-1ab79a94937
Schärf, C. (1999): Geschichte des Essays von Montaigne bis Adorno. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht
Lewiton, A. (2016): John D’Agata: What We Owe History. In: Guernica. https://www.guernicamag.com/what-we-owe-history/
Vanderstraeten, R. (2002): Parsons, Luhmann and the Theorem of Double Contingency. In: Susen, S. & Turner, S. T. (Ed.)(2002): Journal of Classical Sociology Vol 2(1). S. 77–92