From Thought to Text

On Learning to Write with John Lundstøl as Mentor

Some people leave traces within us long after the conversations themselves have ended.

Not necessarily through dramatic events or grand declarations. Sometimes it happens more quietly. A question. A passing remark. A particular way of reading what we have written.

That is how I remember my encounter with John Lundstøl.

I was young at the time. Restless, searching, and in many ways somewhat foreign within academic life. I did not yet have language for the difficulties I carried within me. Diagnoses came much later. But Lundstøl probably recognised early that I thought differently from many other students.

Not necessarily less clearly.

But differently.

I read intensely. Wrote intensely. I filled notebooks with reflections while reading philosophy, social theory, and existential thought. Gradually I began writing what Lundstøl called reconstructions. I attempted to rewrite the thoughts within the texts I read in my own words.

Not summaries.

More like attempts to think the text from within.

I wrote many such reconstructions. Perhaps thirty or more. Long texts in which I tried to understand thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, George Herbert Mead, Habermas, and others who at the time opened the world for me.

Lundstøl read them.

And then, slowly, he began speaking to me about the art of writing.

Kierkegaard, Gadamer, Lundstøl and Mead in a Hermeneutic Dialogue

I did not fully understand it then, but in retrospect I can see that he was actually describing several levels of understanding.

The first level was reading itself.

Attempting to understand the text as it stands before you.

Not forcing your own thoughts too quickly into it, but remaining long enough within what is unfamiliar for the text to begin speaking in its own voice.

This was, in fact, a deeply hermeneutic attitude, even though we did not use that word very often at first.

Later I realised how closely this resembled the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer writes that understanding is not a technique applied from the outside. Understanding occurs when we allow ourselves to be addressed by tradition and by the text itself.

We never read from a neutral position.

We always read as human beings shaped by experience, history, and pre-understanding.

Perhaps this was precisely what Lundstøl tried to teach me:

That genuine reading also changes the reader.

The second level he called reconstruction.

This no longer involved simply reading the text, but rewriting it in one’s own words. Grasping the movement of thought from within.

This was far more difficult.

For it required more than intellectual understanding. It required following the inner rhythm of the text itself. Attempting to understand why the thoughts emerged in the way they did.

Many academic texts analyse ideas without truly entering into them.

Lundstøl wanted something different.

He wanted one to think with the text.

Not merely about it.

When I read my old reconstructions today, I see both their strengths and their weaknesses. They are young texts. At times too extensive. At other times too theoretical. Yet I also see something else:

A genuine desire to understand.

Perhaps that is always where real thinking begins.

Eventually Lundstøl challenged me further.

Reconstructions were not enough, he said.

I had to attempt to write reconstructions in light of an idea.

This was where things became truly difficult.

For now it was no longer enough simply to understand the text. The text itself had to be set in motion through one’s own perspective.

An idea.

A question.

An existential concern.

I think this was where I first began to understand what hermeneutics actually means. Not merely the interpretation of texts, but the encounter between text and life.

In Gadamer’s language, horizons begin to merge.

The old text and the living human being’s experience gradually illuminate one another.

Suddenly one is no longer merely reading Kierkegaard.

One begins reading one’s own life through Kierkegaard.

Not as identification.

But as understanding.

Then came the final level.

What Lundstøl called Repetition.

Naturally, he borrowed the concept from Kierkegaard.

But in Kierkegaard, repetition does not mean repetition in the ordinary sense. It is not about copying something old. Repetition is something far more existential.

Something old must become new again from within.

Personally appropriated.

Lived.

This, Lundstøl believed, was the most difficult level in the art of writing.

To write something truly independent.

Not merely reconstructions.

Not merely interpretations.

But texts in which the thoughts had genuinely become one’s own.

I still remember him saying to me, with a small smile:

“You will never manage that.”

And perhaps, in one sense, he was right.

Because at the time I probably believed that independent thinking meant creating an entirely new philosophical system. Writing something radically original, detached from everyone else.

Today I think differently.

For when I now look back upon a long life of social work, teaching, reading, and writing, I begin to understand something else about repetition.

Truly independent thinking rarely emerges entirely alone.

It grows through long conversations with other people. With books. With experience. With suffering. With work. With encounters between human beings.

Perhaps this is precisely what happens when philosophy slowly becomes lived experience.

One no longer merely quotes the thinkers.

One begins continuing the conversation.

When I now write essays about dignity, shame, action, children, relationships, or human vulnerability, I still hear echoes of many voices.

Lundstøl.

Kierkegaard.

Gadamer.

Mead.

But I also hear something else.

The traces of my own life.

The years within social work.

The encounters with people.

Experiences of power and powerlessness.

Shame.

Responsibility.

Silence.

And perhaps this is where repetition truly takes place.

Not as theory.

But as existence.

Some teachers give us knowledge.

Others teach us how to think.

And a very few teach us how we may slowly find our own voice.

I believe Lundstøl attempted the latter.

Perhaps he recognised my difficulties long before I understood them myself. But perhaps he also saw something else: a way of thinking that did not entirely fit within academic standard forms.

It took me many years to realise that this was not necessarily only a weakness.

Some people think more associatively.

More holistically.

More existentially.

Not always linearly.

Not always systematically.

But sometimes with an ability to perceive connections others overlook.

Today I sometimes open those old reconstructions again.

The papers have yellowed.

The language bears traces of a younger man.

Yet I still recognise the same longing for understanding.

Perhaps that is why I continue writing.