Category: Sage Advice

Widely-Read or Well-Read?

This from a reader:

Mortimer Adler, in How to Read a Book, pointed out that being widely-read does not mean one is well-read. I've enjoyed reading some of your old posts about reading and studying, so I wanted to know your opinion on this matter.

Should I aim to read a lot of books? Or is it better to read and reread a few good books? I know some people say one should read widely but read good books deeply. But I've found that a hard balance to maintain. For example, deeply reading an 800-page selection of Aquinas's writings several times would consume almost all of my reading for the next 1-2 months. Also, it's hard for me to switch gears, you might say. If I'm accustomed to reading most of my books through quickly without pausing much to think, then I easily fall into that mode of reading when I'm trying to read deeply.

I imagine you would have some interesting thoughts on this topic, since you have a few decades of reading behind you. Which type of reading benefited you the most? If you could go back and change what you read and how you read during your decades of scholarship, what would you change?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

I will begin by reproducing a couple of the paragraphs from A Method of Study:

Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan.  Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them.  I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading.  Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a fine cigar . . . .

 If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought
to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game.  This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material.  The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it.  Here is where blogging can be useful.  Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.                          

To the foregoing, I would add, first of all, the magnificent observation of Schopenhauer: "Forever reading, never read."  If you want to be read, then you must write.  And even if you don't want to be read, you must write — for the reason supplied in the preceding paragraph.

Now on to your questions.  

Widely-read or well-read?  You can be both. And you should be both.  Switching gears can be difficult, but it can be done.

As for time that could have been better spent, I do not regret reading vast quantities of Continental philosophy, but some of the time spent on the more extreme representatives of that tradition, such as Derrida, was time wasted. 

Re-reading these remarks, I realize they are rather trite.  But they may be of some use nonetheless.

On Praise

We do not like to be praised if (a) the praiser is beneath us; (b) what is praised is something insignificant or common; (c) the praise is insincere, perhaps by having an ulterior motive; (d) the praise is mistaken in that we lack the excellence attributed to us.

Particularly annoying is to be praised for something insignificant while one's actual virtues go unappreciated. So be careful in your bestowal of praise: take care that you do not offend the one you hope to flatter.

Seize the Day

Horace advises that we seize the day. "Life ebbs as I speak: so seize each day, and grant the next no credit."  The trouble with this advice is that what we are told to grab is so deficient in entity as to be barely seizable.  The admonition comes almost to this: seize the unseizable, fix the flux, stay the surge, catch the wind. 

I do indeed try to seize the day, and its offerings, day by day, moment by moment.  Walking along the trail I stab my staff into the ground saying "This is it, this is your life, right here, right now, and it is good." Living in tune with this mantram, without wanting to be elsewhere or elsewhen, is obviously better than standing on tiptoes trying to make out the future or looking through memory's rear-view mirror. 

There is no full living  without presence to the present, without mindfulness to the moment.  But mindfulness is ultimately no solution since what one is minding is ultimately empty.

The passing moment is more real than the past and the future, but it is precisely passing and so, ultimately, unreal.  The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time at all.  The alternative, however, is present to us only as this blank sense of time's deficiency.

So, with unseeing eyes, we stand on tiptoes after all.

An Ideal Spouse

My opinion of Maureen Dodd went up a notch when I read this NYT column in which she quotes a Catholic priest.  He proffers good advice about marriage one piece of which is:

     Don't marry a problem character thinking you will change him.
 
Excellent advice, Schopenhauerian advice. You will remember his riff on the unalterability of character. It is true as a general rule: people do not change. What you are characterologically at twenty you are for life. If you catch your inamorata lying to you or engaging in any sort of duplicity, know that you have been vouchsafed an insight into an underlying mendacity that will manifest itself time and time again. If one time she racks up a credit card bill that she cannot pay in full at the end of the month, she will do it a thousand times. And so on down the line. Enter into matrimony with such a person if you must, but do it with eyes open and thoughts clear.

My wife has a wide range of virtues and no vices to speak of. But in point of punctuality, she falls down. I am by contrast punctual to a fault. So 29 years ago I tried to change her, to make her punctual like me, but soon realized my folly and changed myself instead. I simply gave up making precise dates with her, rather than courting vexation at her nonshowing at appointed exact times. Instead of: Meet me at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth at the stroke of high noon, this: I'll be at the Sufficient Grounds coffee house from 2 PM on writing and playing chess; fall by when you get a chance.

I also realized that part of her being such a sweet and agreeable person is her not being hung up on precision.  And I furthermore bore in mind Plato's point in the Symposium, namely, and to put it in my own way, that a partner should be a complement, not a copy.

As a rule of thumb: You can't change others, but you can change yourself. And you should. A bit more precisely: character is largely invariant but attitude admits of adjustment.  

Lavelle on Living in the Present

Louis Lavelle (1883-1951), The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. W. T.  Gairdner (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 153:

Life breaks the surface of reality and emerges at the present moment; we must not hold our gaze fixed on a future which, when it comes, will be merely another present. The unhappy man is he who is  forever thinking back into the past or forward into the future; the happy man does not try to escape from the present, but rather to penetrate within it and take possession of it. Almost always we ask of the future to bring us a happiness which, if it came, we would have to enjoy in another present; but this is to see the problem the wrong way round. For it is out of the present which we have already, and from the way we make use of it, without turning our eyes to right or to left, that will emerge the only happy future we will ever have.

Good, Better, Best

From the mail bag:

Is the way you interpret Voltaire's saying the way it was originally intended? I'm probably wrong here, but I always took the saying to mean this: a willingness to settle for what is "better" makes it likely that one won't acquire what is "good".
 
Good, better, best.  Positive, comparative, superlative.  "The best/better is the enemy of the good" means that oftentimes, not always, the pursuit of the best/better will prevent one from attaining the good.  The point is that if one is not, oftentimes, willing to settle for what is merely good, one won't get anything of value.  So I suggest that my reader has not understood Monsieur Voltaire's aperçu.
 
Example.  It will come down to Romney versus Obama.  If libertarians and conservatives fail to vote for Romney, on account of his manifold defects, then they run the risk of four more years of the worthless Obama.  Those libertarians and conservatives will have let the better/best become the enemy of the good.  They will have shown a failure to understand the human predicament and the politics pertaining to it.  He who holds out for perfection in  an imperfect world may end up with nothing.
 
You give the example of a spouse: try to hold out for a perfect wife, and you'll never marry at all. An example that would fit my reading would be, if one settles for a wife who's merely better than most of the available options, then one's apt to settle for a wife who isn't good. Sometimes it's better to refuse all the available options.
 
I agree that it is sometimes better to refuse all the available options.  If the choice is between Hitler and Stalin, then one ought to abstain! 
 
Maybe a better example would be, imagine I need to install plumbing in my house. Crappy plumbing is almost always going to be better than no plumbing. But should I (say, out of laziness) really settle for that, on the grounds that 'well, it's better than the nothing I had'?
 
Of course not.  Voltaire's point is not that one should settle for what is inferior when something better is available.  The point is that one should not allow the pursuit of unattainable perfection to prevent the attainment of something good but within reach.  Suppose someone were to say: I won't have any faucets or fixtures in my house unless they are all made of solid gold!  You will agree that such an attitude would be eminently unreasonable.
 
The Voltairean principle as I read it is exceedingly important in both personal life and in politics.
 
Perhaps you know some perfectionists.  These types never accomplish anything because they are stymied by the conceit that anything less than perfection is worthless.  I knew a guy in graduate school who thought that a dissertation had to be a magnum opus.  He never finished and dropped out of sight.
 
In politics there are 'all or nothing' types who demand the whole enchilada or none.  Some years back, when it looked as if it would be Giuliani versus Hillary, some conservative extremists said they would withhold their support from the former on the ground that he is soft on abortion.  But that makes no bloody sense given that under Hillary things would have been worse.
 
The 'all or nothing' mentality is typical of adolescents of all ages.  "We want the world and we want it . .  NOW!"

A New Year’s Resolution

I make it every year and I break it every year: Handle each piece of paper only once!

Let's say you have just come in with the mail. Without pausing to pour coffee or stroke the cat, fire up the shredder and open the trash barrel. Shred the credit card applications, pay the bills, file the financial statements. Deal with each piece of paper on the spot. When in doubt, discard.

Socializing as Self-Denial

You don't really want to go to that Christmas party where you will eat what you don't need to eat, drink what you don't need to drink, and dissipate your inwardness in pointless chit-chat.  But you were invited and your nonattendance may be taken amiss.  So you remind yourself that self-denial is good and that it is useful from time to time to practice the art of donning and wearing the mask of a 'regular guy.'

For the step into the social is by dissimulation. Necessary to the art of life is knowing how to negotiate the social world and pass yourself off under various guises and disguises.

Negative Thoughts

Squelching them is good in two ways.  It is good to be rid of them since their presence keeps the positive from streaming in.  And the very act of squelching them is a form of self-denial, something without which there can be no moral or spiritual progress.  Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens.

Short Views, Long Views, and the Feel for the Real

The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste.  If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.  They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views.

Is it best to take short views? Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by  William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that — sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.

How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the univere is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility? If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

Of course, with his talk of the superior and the shallow, James is making a value judgment. I myself have no problem making value judgments, and in particular this one.

Although prospects are dim for arguing the other out of his sensibility, civil discussion is not pointless. One comes to understand one’s own view by contrast with another. One learns to respect the sources of the other’s view. This may lead to toleration, which is good within limits.  For someone with a theoretical bent, the sheer diversity of approaches to life is fascinating and provides endless grist for the theoretical mill.

As for the problem of how to get along with people with wildly different views, I recommend voluntary segregation.

Suggestions on How Best to Study

Just over the transom:

Noting your desire to correct spelling, here are two that I spotted: "…gave an argment [sic] a while back (1 August 2010 to be precise) to the conclusion that there cannot, as a matter of metaphyscal necessity [sic]…"

Holy moly!  Thanks.  I just corrected them, and then found three more.

My current frustrations stem from mental mistakes, not typos.  Thinking clearly about philosophy is more difficult for me than writing about my thoughts, which makes me suspect that I should write more (summary papers, counterarguments) while I'm working through the material instead of just taking notes along the way.

Right.  Reading by itself is too passive to be very profitable even if done while alert in a quiet environment in an upright position.  So one ought to take notes and mark passages (assuming you own the book).  But even this is not enough.  The only way  properly to assimilate a philosophical text is by writing a summary and a critique of it.  The summary is an attempt to understand exactly what the author's thesis or theses are, and (just as important) what his arguments are.  Having done that, one advances to critical evaluation, the attempt to sort out  which theses and arguments you consider true/valid and which false/invalid.  Blogging can be very useful for this purpose and can lead to worthwhile exchanges and the refinement and testing of one's ideas.

As I see it, there is no point in seriously studying anything without a decision as to whether or not one should take on board the author's theses and arguments and incorporate them into one's own thinking.  The point of study and inquiry is to get at the truth, not to know what someone else  has maintained that the truth is.

I have just completed a semester of Searle's intro to the philosophy of mind via podcast. I worked through the primary readings and also studied his textbook.  It was very difficult and rewarding.  Now it is time to tackle his semester on language.

Searle is good.  You will learn a lot from him.  My posts on Searle are collected in the aptly-named Searle category.

Always enjoy your posts.  Occam's Razor is sorely abused by apologists from all corners of the debate.

Glad we agree, and thanks for the kind words.