The Art of Digging

Years ago I watched a documentary called "DIG!" It was about two bands loving and hating each other, like two very different personalities attracting each other aesthetically but abhorring each other personally, dissing and competing all the time. In the American slang, to dig something means to really like it. So, the film surely tells something about "digging" when the director took over 8 years closely following the two rival bands and gathering over 2500 hours of footage, just to make a documentary about it.

But for me digging has very different meanings even within the "really like it" realm. The film itself was somewhat a result of my digging indie music. The fact that it won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival caught my eyes and introduced me to these two bands, especially the Brian Jonestown Massacre. To dig means not only to love, but to love effortfully, elaborately and progressively. To love something, like to have a hobby, you can do it half-heartedly, like fishing casually, reading spontaneously, or writing a blog like a public diary.

In terms of reading and writing, both of which are forms of thinking, to dig means literally to dig the author, and the author's author, and so on. This is the first mode of my digging technique. To use Nietzsche's or Foucault's term, it is to establish a "genealogy" or an "archaeology" of your favorite authors. This applies also to movies, music, painting, basically anything that has something to do with inspiration. The underlying presumption is, whoever it is, a creative person has to have some source of influence of his own; he/she's got to be deeply influenced or shaped by earlier creators. If you love his/her work to the point of wanting to know how it was created, you should probably go digging about the ones that influenced him/her. 

I established my genealogy of knowledge first by noticing a podcast talking about Wittgenstein, which seemed cool to me back then. Then I got the host's recommendation of a Chinese professor of philosophy called Chen Jia-Ying (陈嘉映), and while I was reading Chen's interview with Peking University students, I marked Chen's mentioning a name, Jacques Barzun, for being one of the most erudite scholar that Chen knew of. So I searched the name, was amazed by Barzun's life, and bought his book "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present." From this book I was shocked by Barzun's claim that the only philosopher worth mentioning in the 20th century was neither Heidegger nor Wittgenstein, but a Spanish philosopher called Jose Ortega y Gasset. For a very long time I highly doubted it, but I still wanted to know such Ortega, and as soon as I got my hands on Ortega's books, I was immediately won over. His writing was simply fascinating. The most readable philosophy ever, period. It was from Ortega, I believe, that I established my whole system of understanding, and from Ortega I got to know more names and read more books, i.e. Theodore Mommsen's "History of Rome."

The second mode, a much easier one, is called "finding a list." The examples are everywhere. From directors' favorite films of all time, to Pitchfork's top 50 albums of the year, to those "Top 10 Books You'd Want for a Desert Island," the variations are infinite. There is a book list that I am very fond of: 

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library. A very peculiar book list that contains The Apocryphal Gospels, H. G. Wells sci-fi classics, modern authors like Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, and even an unknown book called An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne, in which it was argued in a pseudo-scientific fashion that real time was not linear but circular. To Borges, it seems the most important thing for choosing a book is the novelty, the originality of the idea. Truth in both the scientific and the biblical sense is irrelevant here. This tells a lot about Borges' understanding of the world.

A third mode, if I may add, is quite advanced and should not be applied until one has some deeper understandings of the field. It is called "finding the conflict." I have noticed this since very young, that when people argue, however trivial things are, nah, the more trivial things are, the more surely the argue is about some deep divergence, and when you dig from there, you can always be sure of finding something valuable, something that tells you about humanity more than anything in the world. Hannah Arendt started her thinking precisely this way when she wrote "The Origins of Totalitarianism," in which she opened her book with the question, "how come so trivial a problem as the Jewish problem became the trigger for the two worst warfare of all time?" and arrived at the profound explanation of social atomization of the modern psyche. This technique requires the utmost sensitivity of the issues at hand, and is useless for people not devoted to the issues. 

With the help of LLMs, I believe the three digging modes have been a lot easier than before, which means, of course, that this to me is THE most useful way of using ChatGPT or Gemini, that is, to help you become a digger.