Theoria

A common problem many doctoral candidates face when writing their dissertation is knowing when to stop reading. Hence, reading replaces writing and all that accumulates are piles of half-read books and stacks of misconceived notes. Not being much of a notetaker myself, I tend to avoid, at least, the stacks of notes. (Although I have my fair share of half-read books.) My problem isn’t so much the reading – a well selected topic, at least as far as I’m concerned, has a limited secondary literature associated with it. Sure, there’s a lot to read, but there isn’t that much to read. Even if one discovers that an entire new secondary literature needs to be acquired (e.g., in my case, animal studies), that literature should be learnable in about two months. So, cutting off the reading isn’t my problem. My problem is cutting off the writing. It isn’t so much that I think I have a lot of important things to say. I likely don’t. After all, this is a dissertation and not a magnum opus. Should it be my great work, then my career will have peaked before it began in earnest. (Greatness, of course, is relative in this case – I don’t mean to say that I have a Being & Time coming fifteen years down the line, but I’d like to at least have something better than a dissertation.) The problem, therefore, isn’t one of genius, but one of methodology. That is, how explicit must one be? Or, perhaps, how explicit can one be? How much can be reasonably said, for instance, on the differences between bees, cranes and humans in Aristotle, between bees and humans in Charles Butler’s Feminine Monarchie, and between bees and humans in Hobbes? This is the question of being explicit. Aristotle’s work presupposes fewer works than Butler’s and, accordingly, Hobbes’s work presupposes more works than either Aristotle and Butler. There are many assumptions that can be brought out; there are many meanings that can be unpacked and deciphered. Worse, given that any explication of language itself rests on language, that explication can, in turn, be explicated there is, in principle, no end to the practice of explication. At some point you have to give up.