Who Cares What

From my experience, there are two things exceptionally important for any scholar or writer who wants to be serious about his career. They are toughness of mind and purity of heart to pursue intellectual depth. What distinguishes a good scholar or writer from mediocre ones should not be the number of publications or popularity, whether market popularity or a less artificial kind of popularity among sincere non-experts. And we know that no mortal can be entirely tough or pure (which is not regrettable for mortals qua mortals). What seems regrettable, however, is that most people who consider themselves serious about knowledge and art fall in love with their self-images rather easily. They care too much about them (“Oh I look so smart in front of these young people!”). Not just being impure, one’s heart can sink. 

Thomas Nagel on Philosophical Ability

“[S]heer brains—I.Q., logical speed, raw mental muscle—play a powerful role, even though they are not the same thing as philosophical ability. Philosophy is like basketball: being preternaturally tall doesn’t ensure that you’ll be a good basketball player, but it helps an awful lot, and in philosophy it helps to be supersmart. Such people can simply travel farther and faster than the rest of us, and I wish philosophy attracted more of them. But the effects of this sort of intelligence are complex: sometimes, if all that power is put to the service of harebrained intuitions, it yields logically dazzling but implausible results. Even when it goes off the rails, though, brilliance generates structures of thought that command attention and have a life of their own, and their impact on the field doesn’t depend on whether anyone thinks they’re right. This can be a nuisance, but I suppose the devaluation of plausibility is unavoidable in a field so dominated by argument.”
 
--- Thomas Nagel, Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969-1994

Always Make New Mistakes

Yesterday, at the moment I was about to click to submit the last version of a paper, I held back. Then I opened the file and glanced at every paragraph, feeling that I had to send my son to the kindergarten finally. He is not a good son, though: almost every paragraph struck me as quite boring, imprecise, tedious, or suffering from any combination of these demerits. But fortunately, I seemed to have some good ideas about how to improve every sentence (though I did not yet have any idea about what a perfect work is like). This seemed to me to be a good sign, and I was convinced that I should always make new mistakes.