Try to read philosophical text

>try to read philosophical text
>too hard to understand
> only end up reading books about guys interpreting these texts

How do I end this cycle?

Unironically start with the greeks

I don't see how this is a problem?

I feel like you suffer from a sort of 'appeal to authority'.

Philosophy is about ideas and truth, not authors and their books.

Take heidegger for example, most people would do far better and understand far more about his thought and ideas if they simply read the SEP article. Who cares about slugging through his needlessly complicated verse, if you can more easily comprehend the ideas another way?

Do you just want the 'tick' the philosophical work of a list you have of books you think you 'ought' read to be a learned man? Do you just want to be able to say you've read the book?

That's something to be said of having your own interpretation. Especially if you are ambitious in your goals as an intellectual.

>Do you just want the 'tick' the philosophical work of a list you have of books you think you 'ought' read to be a learned man?
You say that like this notion would have come from a vacuum, and that it doesn't reflect a valuable goal.

You should discover those things for yourself without the need of aid though.

So it's true, just like I said: none of you read philosophy for the ideas or for truth, you read philosophy *instrumentally*, philosophy is nothing more than a tool for you, in order to reach some self serving goal like 'being an intellectual', 'gaining recognition', 'proving I am smart'.

Why even pretend to read philosophy? Because that's all you're doing.

Heidegger himself would consider you all *inauthentic*.

>Read obtrusive overly complicated texts for months
>Carefully avoid others interpretations
>Form own interpretation
>First article you read to compare interpretations is the same as the one you formed
>Realise you wasted months when a 2000 word article sums up your interpretation
>Cry about wasted time and lament the fact that you just lost 3-6 books from your life time maximum of xxx

How do you know the SEP entry is a proper representation of Heidegger's ideas? For all you know it might just be a faulty outline of his thought.

It's always better to interact directly with the philosopher through his works, that way you can obtain a far more clearer picture of his ideas.

>How do you know the SEP entry is a proper representation of Heidegger's ideas?

But again, this is just the 'reverence' for the author I've been arguing against. I don't care about *Heidegger's* ideas, or *his* thoughts, only the ideas themselves.

You're not gonna get much out of anything without putting in the effort.
You've read the essay, congrats, now you're an idiot with more information.

Most people are idiots, the trick is to seem intelligent which is far more achievable. You can get to the same places as intelligent people just by pretending. It's the path of least resistance and therefor most logical way to go about life.

This is interesting and I think I belong in that group. I don't really know why I'm so desperate to prove that I'm smart. It's upsetting that a lot of my incentive to learn is built around ego and boredom. My thought process is often me explaining cool ideas to others and them going ooh (this is not entirely true but it features a lot throughout my day).

Really, I think that it is just a matter of building up enough background knowledge of other thinkers, common methods of reasoning found in the tradition and developing an
understanding of terminology which may change otherwise innocent passages into something more.
I

Also, there is no shame is using secondary lit as a way to get acquainted with context and terms; if the person you are studying really resonate with you, there is no reason to
afterwards go back to the primary source.

Also, do you take a lot of notes? I find most works easier to tackle if I even copy verbatim certain passages.

You realise that you are hardwired that way right? By telling others of what you have learned it is a way to help the species survive. If we didn't have a drive to teach others then the species would be at a disadvantage to other species which do teach.
Stop being upset that you are human.

Why would you read a work of literature if you can just get the summary from wikipedia and sparknotes? There's something in the prose and writing that can't be cut apart neatly into 'the ideas' and 'the themes' etc.

You especially went wrong choosing Heidegger, whose writings are related to his thoughts in such a way that the 'journey' is more important than the 'destination.' His "verse" isn't "needlessly complicated" if you take the time to sit down and study it.

It seems like your problem isn't with the difficult books themselves, but people who read difficult books. What intimidates you so much about those who read difficult books? It should be of no interest to you what people read and whether what they read is of such-and-such difficulty, and of whether these people read for authentic or inauthentic pleasure.

I've actually spoken to a few people who get their philosophical knowledge from SEP articles, and from my opinion they aren't very intelligent at all. If you had read Heidegger, you would know about his ideas of poetic and meditative thinking; modes of thinking the type who gets their philosophy from Encyclopedia websites often have a problem with, which is of no surprise, because to have the patience to sit and read a book is to have the same patience to seriously meditate on the ideas, and those who cannot do the former will most likely be unsuccessful in the latter.

>So it's true, just like I said: none of you read philosophy for the ideas or for truth
From what I understand, you don't read philosophy for ideas or truth either. In fact it seems you aren't very acquainted with reading at all, philosophy or otherwise.

I worked my way through Ancient Greek philosophy using 2ndary lit.

Read Plato's Republic first.

Theres a steep learning curve. Once you read up on the basics of philosophy via videos, articles, intro books etc; and you push through a couple of earlier philosophy texts like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes etc, you will start to imporve your comprehension.

This is assuming you aren't literally a brainlet with a sub 130 (or at minimum 120) IQ, and just lack reading comprehension skills from lack of experience.

SEP is good, but barely captures what an author can say. Encyclopedia articles are meant to be a jump off point into further research, not an end. Compare the SEP on Lakatos, to the chapter on Lakatos in Chalmers' book What is this thing called Science? Then go and read Lakatos. The SEP article captures his ideas in a meager manner compared to a better secondary source and the primary source. You aren't really getting a deep comprehension of the ideas by an SEP article.

Read some of the Socratic dialogs. They're philosophical texts, but they also interpret other philosophies. They're also pretty easy to understand.