Blogging as a path to self-knowledge

by Massimo Pigliucci

It is hard to imagine that I started blogging on August 1st, 2005, just a bit over seven years ago. And before that, Rationally Speaking had been a syndicated internet column for a number of years (it began in August 2000, to be precise — there must be something about late summer...), which makes — at last count — for a whopping 978 posts, 25,165 comments, and a total of 1,747,328 pageviews.

No, I’m not listing the stats in order to brag, but because of how humbled I am by the relative success over the years of something that I started for the same reason most people start blogs: to gratify one’s ego and to have an unimpeded platform to rant about things one cares about. Well, that may be a bit too harsh, actually. I am a university professor, and I care about teaching science and philosophy to others, so the blog began as a natural outreach effort to communicate with a public wider than my own students. That effort in turn had been catalyzed by my move to Tennessee in 1996, where I was promptly confronted with an attempt by the local legislature to introduce creationism in public schools. It was the shock of recognizing just what was routinely going on in the aptly named “Bible Belt” that made me take the first timid steps outside the ivory tower.

Blogging, however, soon became something much more interesting than just a new way to teach others. Indeed, it even became something more than just the experience of writing for a given public. The latter — which I have done and continue to do, and which has generated a good number of magazine columns and books — forces the writer to reflect on what he thinks in order to be able to explain it as clearly as possible (in essence, it’s another form of teaching). When you write, you are not just communicating your thoughts to others, the process of writing itself forces you to clarify in your mind what it is that you are thinking and why. Quite often, and quite literally, I think by way of word processing.

But blogging adds yet another layer, one that is usually missing when one writes for the print press, and that is only present in a limited sense while teaching (especially at the undergraduate or pre-college levels): feedback. See, blogs are highly interactive platforms, and even though there are plenty of useless comments, the occasional attempt at advertising commercial products, and even one or two death threats (been there, received that), a gratifyingly surprising number of my readers over the years have contributed very thoughtful, articulated, usually critical commentaries to whatever it was that I was writing.

This sort of feedback has sometimes forced me to re-examine some of my positions, to try harder to see what I was really thinking about certain subject matters, and occasionally even to change my mind. It is this unique combination of communicating one’s thoughts to others, being forced in the process to reflect on why one entertains those particular thoughts, and finally being sharply and intelligently challenged about the content of those thoughts that has turned my blogging into a long, sometimes hard, always welcome, and still ongoing process of self discovery and self knowledge.

As a result, I have just made available a new collection of essays, selected with two criteria in mind. First, they are among the most in-depth posts published at Rationally Speaking, all of them originally put out as multi-part series, each part being significantly longer than a typical op-ed piece. Of course, length per se is no assurance of quality, but it is also true that too often blog posts are so short that one only gets a glimpse into the subject matter and the author’s opinion about it. So, longer posts make for more serious intellectual engagement.

Second, the writings that I selected for the new collection concern topics about which either I changed my mind significantly, or represent instances where I started out with an opinion that was not well formed and yet about which I had deep intuitions, and the process of writing exposed, confirmed and elaborated upon those intuitions once the more sharply focused light of reasoned argument was aimed at them. Accordingly, each of the essays in the volume comes with a brief introduction to highlight why I included them and what impact writing (or reading) about each topic has had on my own thinking, my path to self-knowledge, if you will.

The subject matter covered here is varied, but the reader will easily pick up the common threads: all posts have to do with philosophical issues, particularly as they are informed by science. Whether we are talking about ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, or metaphysics, I believe that a philosophical understanding is paramount, but that such understanding simply cannot afford to ignore the best available scientific knowledge. I hope these entries — which have been edited and updated where necessary — will help people reflect on things and spur them to challenge others and be challenged in turn. As the motto of this blog says (quoting David Hume), “Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

* The new collection, entitled Blogging as a Path to Self Knowledge is available in a variety of formats at Smashwords, and for Kindle at Amazon.

You may also like to take a look at three other e-collections along similar lines:

* Tales of the Rational: Skeptical Essays About Nature and Science (various formats / Kindle)

* Thinking About Science: Essays on the Nature of Science (various formats / Kindle)

* Rationally Speaking: Skeptical Essays on Reality as We Think We Know It (various formats / Kindle)