You know, it’s amazing. Back in high school I took a philosophy class and started telling people – half jokingly – that the famous philosophers got famous mostly because they promoted their particular idea to the point of absurdity. Now I’m reading Made to Stick (by Chip & Dan Heath) and they are making the case that this is exactly right – ideas that “stick” lastingly do so primarily because their promoters focus on a single core argument, subsuming the details and excluding all other arguments.
In high school, the absurdity of the philosophers’ prose became readily apparent because of the juxtaposition of viewpoints that we would read, sometimes in a single homework assignment. Philosopher A would say “X absolutely must be true; for these reasons there is no way I could possibly be wrong.” Then Philosopher B would come along and say “here is why X is completely impossible; there is no way it could possibly be true.”
Philosophers A and B obviously could not both be correct. Yet both sounded 100% confident that they were. Thus I concluded that all famous philosophers stuck with an idea and sounded 100% confident about it.
Needless to say, Made to Stick refines this observation considerably. It’s not usually enough just to have an elegant core argument and sound authoritative; there are other important features such as “unexpectedness” and “concreteness”. Looking back, the philosophers did these things pretty well too.
So I guess my saying remains half joking – but really only half.