/lit/ - Literature

>>14408983
By reading and thinking

>>14408983
>I think part of the problem is that I really don't have any passoin for this
then why do you bother? you won't gain much from reading philosophy, history, etc if you don't care about the subjects and just want to appear smarter on some underwater basket weaving forum

Read history books and history of ideas books. No one reads history books anymore, least of all history majors. A history major who focuses on French history for 4 years will probably write his senior thesis on some shit like Impromptu Classical Style Dramas in the Perfumers' Guild in the Pre-Revolutionary Years, but not actually know the basic chronology of French history for any century. So he spent four years working up to writing a think-piece on some shit nobody cares about. Same goes for most grad students. If you want to actually know history, read history books. Get a knack for identifying magisterial and well-regarded general-level books on topics that interest you (hint: search for "[topic] syllabus" online, learn to use JSTOR and similar sites to search for reviews) and then, most importantly, layer your reading that topic by reading several books. In the time it takes some dipshit undergraduate to complete a year in "studying French history," you could have read the three great classic surveys of French history that everybody educated read prior to 1950, read a dozen more great classic books on major topics like the French Revolution, and read a few modern scholarly tours de horizon, all at a leisurely pace while doing many other things. By the "second year," the undergraduate will be forcing himself through classes like Dissident Transgender Cinema in Vichy France while you are now reading more and more classics, essentially reading what a graduate student should be reading for their comprehensive exams, sans the "you need to be au courant with the latest developments in the field!!!" fluff like "Towards a Lesbian Biopolitics of Eco-Criticism in French Literature Studies." Try to find one modern graduate student who has read Michelet. Go read Michelet right now and you'll already be ahead of most graduate students, then.

For the history of ideas, just do the same thing, although it's a little harder. Take an objective interest in the concrete intellectual content of some era, set a research question ("how is it possible that people were so enthusiastic about mechanism in the natural and even social sciences during the Enlightenment?" or "why did medieval philosophers find Aristotle so convincing? why weren't they platonists? what did it mean to be an Aristotelian in 1280 in Paris?" ) and then go read magisterial studies on your topic, which will lead you to preliminary readings necessary for full understanding. Go find the Isaiah Berlins.

Once you do this in a few areas, you will learn to do it in any area. Once you do it in a few areas that link together and lead to particular depth in some particular area, you are now essentially a graduate student, possibly one of the few good ones.

>I really don't have any passoin for this
Then you're fucked. Just don't end up being one of those guys who has a passing interest in history for ten years and always assumes he'll get more into it, but all he ever does is listen to podcasts.

>>14408983
Accept that you're a brainlet and move on

>>14408983
>he doesn't have debates wit himself to fuel the need