Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy. Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it’s very difficult to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving the words around without having internalized the idea.
philosophy, i find, is one of the forms where the shapeless thinking described in the article does a lot of the work for me. especially the phase of internalization. you take a sentence you don’t quite get, and then spend a bunch of time just meditating about it, rejecting the temptations to think elsewhere. and then, in time, it just clicks into making all sorts of sense.
it’s definitely not “purely linguistic” – one form of it is about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.
