How to Live an Intellectual Life (part 2)

Good books about thinking are scarce. That’s what I argued in the first installment of this series (which you might want to read before this essay, if you haven’t already). There, I discussed one of the best such books I’ve ever read, On the Intellectual Life by Antonin Sertillanges. The essay received such an enthusiastic response that I’ve decided to follow it up and share another good book about thinking.

But actually, the text I want to tell you about today is not a book. It’s a 33-page appendix to a book. You can find it at the back of The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills.

Those 33 pages are pure gold. They’re called “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.”

C. Wright Mills lived a short but highly productive life in the first half of the 20th century. He died when he was just 45, but he still managed to publish many essays and at least three influential books of sociology: White Collar, The Power Elite, and The Sociological Imagination. He had a crusading notion of the power of scholarship to change the world. He delighted in polemical combat with friends and enemies alike. In other words, he was very different from Antonin Sertillanges, the Dominican monk and Aquinas scholar who wrote On the Intellectual Life. But their respective thoughts about the life of the mind might as well have been written at the same desk. I think they complement each other very well.

Most of Mills’ advice centers around using a “file.” This is a repository of private writing.

As an [intellectual], you have to [...] capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a file, which is, I suppose an [intellectual’s]1 way of saying: keep a journal.

He illustrates what he means by showing how his famous book The Power Elite grew out of such a file.

The core insight of “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” is that you should organize your mental life into projects. This is not about imposing external constraints on what you read and think. It’s about noticing the trends that bubble up from your interests and curiosities, raising them to consciousness, and purposefully developing them.

Why bother? “By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake.” A good file “encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.” In other words, organizing your intellectual life this way induces a mental state in which the world around you comes alive with relevance: “You do not really have to study a topic you are working on; for [...] once you are into it, it is everywhere.”

But how do you organize an intellectual life into projects? The key is to turn vague interests into specific questions. “Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape.”

In my experience, there are two kinds of ‘feelings’ that are especially worth capturing and turning into questions. The first is when I discover I have a strong opinion about something. Perhaps I’ve read an op-ed and surprised myself by fervently disagreeing with the writer’s argument. Strong opinions give rise to a natural refining question: am I right about this? That’s the start of an intellectual project. The second feeling worth capturing—and for me the more common—is strong curiosity. Curiosity is harder to turn into specific questions than opinions are. But without the structure questions give to it, curiosity has a tendency to gather and then dissipate in a frustrating manner. You begin to feel like a dilettante, interested in one thing until it bores you, then another. By refining curiosity into a specific question (or questions), you give yourself permission to move on without feeling that your curiosity was in vain. Or perhaps you won’t go on, because the depth of reflection you attained thanks to the guidance of specific questions reveals a world of further questions that are absorbing enough to consume your whole life! That can happen. (It’s a good thing.)

Thus, one’s list of projects is essentially a list of questions. The input parts of your intellectual life—reading and listening and watching things, observing the world and contemporary society, talking to people—can then be shaped to answer those questions. You follow your nose and make your way through vast quantities of information and lots of ideas, but it doesn’t overwhelm you because you have a strong sorting principle to guide you through it. More on that in a second.

Mills recommends regularly reviewing your whole set of projects. “A practicing [intellectual] ought periodically to review ‘the state of my problems and plans’.” In my case, I literally keep a document uppermost in my file entitled ‘The State of My Problems and Plans.’ It’s a list of my interests converted into specific questions and concrete plans for answering them and the writing projects I hope all this work will issue in. I rewrite this document four or more times a year (saving old versions just because they’re interesting).

I’d note here something Mills does not discuss, because he is ostensibly addressing only aspiring sociologists: Organizing your intellectual life this way works for artists and not just researchers. I write a lot of stories, for example, and every story begins with what Henry James called a donnée—some germ, a character, situation, or image, which I can sense will unfold into a complete story if I work with it long enough. This feeling is just like a strong opinion or curiosity, in that it can easily be turned into an input-guiding question. The question is very simple: where is the story in this donnée? It’s amazing how the world comes alive to answer that question once I’ve asked it: suddenly everything seems magically relevant.

Projects come and go, combine and divide, but once you’ve got at least one, it helps you identify the bulk of what ought to go into your file. That is to say: projects determine note-taking.

There’s a lot of chatter out there on the interwebs about note-taking. (I’ve contributed to it, myself.) I think many people ask too much from note-taking. But it’s very useful for intellectual craftsmanship. Mills has simple and effective advice on the subject:

Your notes may turn out, as mine do, to be of two sorts: in reading certain very important books you try to grasp the structure of the writer’s argument, and take notes accordingly; but more frequently, and after a few years of independent work, rather than read entire books, you will very often read parts of many books in which you are interested and concerning which you have plans in your file. Therefore, you will take notes which do not fairly represent books you read. You are using this particular idea, this particular fact, for the realization of your own projects.

To put this more simply, Mills advises choosing when to take notes by their potential relevance to your projects. Sometimes that’s a careful summary of a whole text, and sometimes it’s just a fragment of information, a fact, anecdote, definition, or minor argument.

An intellectual craftsperson ought to be aware of why they are reading a book, and they ought to take notes to suit that purpose. (Which might sometimes mean—not taking notes at all! Sometimes you’re reading for fun; that’s the purpose.) There’s a difference between trying to summarize and understand the overall structure and argument of a book and using it, or part of it, for some external purpose. For instance, when I was putting together my thoughts for my little essay on Simone Weil, I dashed through every biography I could get my hands on, just skipping along hunting for observations about her handwriting. I already knew about her life and thinking, I just wanted concrete details to answer my question (“why did Simone Weil change her handwriting, and what did it mean to her?”).

That kind of highly pragmatic research reading is surprisingly fun in a way very different from more leisurely reading for literary pleasure. I wouldn’t want to read that way all the time, but I’d also be sad to never read that way. It’s only possible if your intellectual life is organized into projects that are in turn organized into clear questions. Your project questions guide you in choosing what to annotate during your rapid perusal of large quantities of text. Does something you’ve noticed contribute to answering one of your questions, and are you liable to forget it if you don’t write it down? If so, write it down. If not, let it pass.

But what is all this organizing and researching for? What does intellectual craftsmanship add up to?

At the end of his advice, Mills drops a very important paragraph:

If you write solely with reference to what Hans Reichenbach has called the ‘context of discovery’ you will be understood by very few people; moreover you will tend to be quite subjective in statement. To make whatever you think more objective, you must work in the context of presentation. At first, you ‘present’ your thought to yourself, which is often called ‘thinking clearly.’ Then when you feel that you have it straight, you present it to others—and often find that you have not made it clear. Now you are in the ‘context of presentation.’ Sometimes you will notice that as you try to present your thinking, you will modify it—not only in its form of statement but often in its content as well. You will get new ideas as you work in the context of presentation. In short, it will become a new context of discovery, different from the original one, on a higher level I think, because more socially objective. Here again, you cannot divorce how you think from how you write.

In other words, the natural conclusion to an intellectual project is to share your results in writing.

Formulating questions gives your intellectual life energy and direction, and writing up your answers completes the circuit. This is why writing is so important even for private intellectuals. For example, Paul Valéry kept huge private notebooks for 50 years (eventually accruing over 250 of them!), in which he wrote daily reflections early in the morning about his preoccupations with consciousness, mathematics, and philosophy. This writing was completely private, but the writing itself was a crucial component of his life as a thinker. Writing was how he moved his thinking forward. Many other interesting thinkers did their best work in private notebooks as well, including many who are better known for their public writings—Coleridge and Leopardi come to mind. And again, this is as true for makers as for thinkers. For example, here is a review I wrote about the private notebooks of the great psychological thriller novelist, Patricia Highsmith. As I say in that essay, these notebooks “have a claim to be her life’s major work”—they were the file out of which all her novels grew. You might also peek into the notebooks of the painter Delacroix—even artists whose medium is other than words can benefit from private writing.

The projects that structure the life of the mind begin when you refine feelings into questions. They end when you express the answers you’ve arrived at in a text, even if that text remains private.

(Here is where I might be expected to go on a long rant about how letting AI write for you, as an intellectual craftsperson, amounts to never entering the context of presentation, and therefore cheating yourself of the final stage and outcome of your intellectual projects. I think that’s true, but I’m bored of the entire subject. Feel free to pause here, perform your own rant about how futile and self-defeating it is to outsource one’s intellectual life to AI, and imagine me nodding along in agreement.)

The production of texts is the incrementing marker of your progress as a thinker. Each text becomes the new context of discovery and may give rise to new projects. The intellectual engine revs; the wheels turn.

I’ve conveyed only a fraction of the good advice Mills offers in his 33-page appendix. It really is an amazing, concentrated dose of good sense about living an intellectual life. For instance, he has many intricate and useful suggestions about how to mull over, organize, and piece together the notes you take in order to answer one of your project questions, and his in-depth example of how he conceived and researched The Power Elite is fascinating. The work that happens between formulating projects and producing texts to complete them is the bulk of one’s time as an intellectual, the greater part of the labor and the pleasure of that life. I hope you’ll go ahead and read the whole of “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.”2

This is how it’s done by virtually every serious intellectual, whether their aspiration is avocational or vocational, professional or amateur, public or private, scientific or artistic: It’s a process of reading and writing that feed into one another and achieve a circuit of life-giving energy, between input and output, reflection and expression. The most crucial skill of the intellectual life is balancing these things. I’ll let Mills have the last word.

Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same time for comprehensiveness. You must not stop thinking too soon—or you will fail to know all that you should; you cannot leave it to go on forever, or you yourself will burst. It is this dilemma, I suppose, that makes reflection, on those rare occasions where it is more or less successful, the most passionate endeavor of which the human being is capable.