I wrote about Cal Newport’s newest book, Slow Productivity, for Commonweal magazine. The book is not good — don’t read it. My essay on it, however, is very good and offers interesting insights about work and burnout. I hope you will read it. It’s available right here.
This essay is the third in what you might call my “Kant cycle.” In this one, I get into the categorical imperative, subjecting Newport’s recommendations to its logic. The two previous ones had to do with aesthetics: I drew from Kant’s thinking on beauty in this essay for the New York Times Magazine about the World Almanac, and I drew from his idea of the sublime for this Commonweal essay on the recent total eclipse.
The three hundredth anniversary of Kant’s birth was April 22. A lot of people don’t like Kant, but most of them are just mad because they don’t understand him. It’s true that Kant is a challenging writer, but it’s also true that he was attempting a task with a very high degree of difficulty: remaking Western philosophy from the ground up (or, really, from the upper reaches of our understanding down).
I took a whole class on his Critique of Pure Reason, certainly the hardest class I’ve ever taken — harder than two semesters of quantum mechanics and even the dreaded “Applied Math,” which sounds straightforward but was all differential equations with imaginary variables. At the end of the Kant class, I felt like I still didn’t know anything. But then a year later, I took a class on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and everything made almost perfect sense. It took my brain twelve months to remap itself around the Pure Concepts of Understanding. I don’t know; that was a pretty cool experience, learning and all.
An advertisement for my services: I recently led a four-day workshop for Ph.D. students at Southern Methodist University on academic writing for the public — that is, on writing that draws upon academic research and thinking but is aimed at readers beyond academia. In other words, the workshop was on the kind of writing I do all the time, including for the essays I’ve linked to in this newsletter post.
If you would like Ph.D. students at your university to learn how to write for wider audiences, please get in touch (you can just reply to this email), and perhaps I can do something similar at your institution. Shorter workshops are possible, though these skills take time to learn. I think there’s a lot of benefit from working on them in a group over several days.