i’m reminded of SA’s “read history of philosophy backwards”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-backwards/ https://slatestarcodex

i’m reminded of SA’s “read history of philosophy backwards”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-backwards/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philos... > My hypothesis – and I don’t know if it’s true – is that this is only cliched now because Sartre won. The point of studying Sartre is not to learn that you choose your own identity, but to read him backward – to start with this idea that choosing your own identity is obvious, and then read Sartre to learn exactly how controversial it was at the time and what sorts of arguments Sartre had to go through to get people to accept it, and eventually understand the position that the original reader of Sartre was supposed to have started with. If you succeed, you might still believe that you choose your own identity, but you’ll also understand that this isn’t an obvious necessary fact of the universe, that there used to be people who believed you didn’t and that they had some good arguments too.