McGinn, Colin - Minds and Bodies: Philosophers and Their Ideas

Writing a philosophy book is an arduous and exacting task. One does not emerge from the experience unscathed. The mental burden lies mainly in the necessity of keeping a complex argument, or set of arguments, in one's head for a long period of time, constantly repeating and refining them, day and night--until they come to seem either like gibberish or platitudes or both. Bertrand Russell wrote somewhere that the problems of logic are so inhumanly abstract that the philosophical logician only manages really to think about them for five minutes a year. Russellian exaggeration, no doubt, but it gives some idea of the feat of mental contortion needed to sustain the abstracted state of mind required to complete a substantial work of philosophy. It is actually rather amazing that it happens as often as it does (ballet dancing perhaps provides a distant analogy). And then there is the unpleasant sense of insecurity that comes with it--the feeling of being constitutionally inadequate to the task.