I was once parodied on a YouTube video (by whom I don’t recall) as holding that “people who are right and people who are wrong are basically saying the same thing.”  While I obviously wouldn’t endorse the claim in the form stated, the line does insightfully capture something about my approach – a suspicion of stark oppositions.   Suspicion, not invariable rejection: sometimes one side of an opposition is just completely and uninterestingly wrong.  But I’m regularly finding my way to angles from which supposedly stark oppositions can be seen as complicated or subverted by unexpected affinities – which is why, e.g., I was never fully satisfied, even at the height of my Randian period, with the cops-and-robbers approach to intellectual history that prevails in Randian (and not only Randian) circles, consigning all of e.g. Plato’s or Augustine’s or Hume’s or Kant’s or Hegel’s or Marx’s or Heidegger’s or Rawls’s writings to the Dustbin of Total and Irredeemable Worthlessness, rather than approaching them with the expectation that they might have something valuable to teach.

Hence my tendency to question such oppositions as libertarianism versus social justice, analytic versus continental, social anarchism versus anarcho-capitalism, deontology versus teleology, eastern versus western thought, theism versus atheism, Hayekianism versus Rothbardianism, and most recently, Randian discipline versus Kerouacian spontaneity.  (And no, it’s not a rejection of the law of non-contradiction to question whether positions presented as mutually contradictory really are so.)

One of the most important pieces of advice I would give to young scholars beginning their intellectual journeys is not to structure their conceptual landscape so as to close themselves off from the opportunity to learn from both sides of supposedly unbridgeable gaps.