Keep yourself within the draft of a strong book. It protects you. In discussion, it can speak through you. A magic circle: the books you show know well enough to allow them to speak through you. Let’s say (just a few): Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality, Heidegger’s Being and Time…. This takes a great deal of time, and many of us never reach the point strong thinkers achieved early on. We are commentators, many of us, lost in the forest.
Sometimes, close to a strong book, letting it guard me, an opening occurs and I am filled with confidence, I have the answers to questions…. But those questions were born and addressed in the strong book; just as, reading a novel, I imagine that I, too, could write a novel – or that writing would be as easy as reading.
The old problem in philosophy put so well by Socrates: you have to appropriate thought for yourself – you have to lay claim to it, to be able to defend yourself against objectors, and to transform what you think to meet new circumstances. Yes, this is the problem, and one I feel acutely when I leave the glade to which the strong book brought me. For then, I wonder, what have I kept from this reading? To where has this reading brought me? Confused, lost, there is only the sense of the overwhelming difficulty of philosophy and the hideous strength of strong thinkers.
Lars Iyer's Blog 