One of the most timeless and beautiful meditations on reading comes
from the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788–1860).
Finding time to read
has never been an issue for me. I read different books at different
levels — you don’t put the same effort into Harry Potter as you
do Seneca. Reading is the best way to get smarter. And while I’ve
always taken notes while reading to improve my ability to remember
what I’ve read, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I was missing
part of the work.
Perhaps, I’ve been
reading too much and reflecting too little.
As I reflect more on
the relationship between reading and acquiring wisdom, I discovered
Schopenhauer’s classic On Reading and Books.
For me, reading has
always been about this website’s tagline: Mastering the best of
what other people have already figured out.
In The Prince,
Machiavelli offered the following advice: “A wise man ought always
to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who
have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at
least it will savour of it.”
Seneca, writing on
the same subject, said, “Men who have made these discoveries before
us are not our masters, but our guides.”
So it makes sense to
start with the people that came before us. No matter what problem we
face, odds are someone has faced it before and written about it. No
need to start from scratch right?
We return to the
fundamental questions. What does it mean to read? Is reading the path
to acquiring wisdom? If not why?
These are the
questions that Schopenhauer attempts to address.
Schopenhauer: When
we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental
process.
Mortimer Adler
believed that reading is a conversation between you and the author.
On this Schopenhauer comments:
When we read,
another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It
is the same as the pupil, in learning to write, following with his
pen the lines that have been pencilled by the teacher. Accordingly,
in reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for
us. This is why we are consciously relieved when we turn to reading
after being occupied with our own thoughts. But, in reading, our head
is, however, really only the arena of some one else’s thoughts. And
so it happens that the person who reads a great deal — that is to
say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the
intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to
think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets
how to walk.
Such, however, is
the case with many men of learning: they have read themselves stupid.
For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more
paralyzing to the mind than constant manual work, which, at any rate,
allows one to follow one’s own thoughts.
Just as a spring,
through the continual pressure of a foreign body, at last loses its
elasticity, so does the mind if it has another person’s thoughts
continually forced upon it. And just as one spoils the stomach by
overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload
and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more
one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the
mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it
is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can
assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without
pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but
is for the most part lost. Indeed, it is the same with mental as with
bodily food: scarcely the fifth part of what a man takes is
assimilated; the remainder passes off in evaporation, respiration,
and the like.
From all this it may
be concluded that thoughts put down on paper are nothing more than
footprints in the sand: one sees the road the man has taken, but in
order to know what he saw on the way, one requires his eyes.
It’s important to
take time to think about what we’re reading and not merely assume
the thoughts of the author. We need to digest, synthesize, and
organize the thoughts of others if we are to understand. This is the
grunt work of thinking. It’s how we acquire wisdom.
This is how we
acquire foundational knowledge. The knowledge that allows us to pull
forth relevance when reading and bring it to consciousness. Without
this foundational knowledge, we are unable to separate the signal
from the noise.
No literary quality
can be attained by reading writers who possess it: be it, for
example, persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing
comparisons, boldness or bitterness, brevity or grace, facility of
expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic manner, naïveté,
and the like. But if we are already gifted with these qualities —
that is to say, if we possess them potentia — we can call them
forth and bring them to consciousness; we can discern to what uses
they are to be put; we can be strengthened in our inclination, nay,
may have courage, to use them; we can judge by examples the effect of
their application and so learn the correct use of them; and it is
only after we have accomplished all this that we actu possess these
qualities.
Reading consumes
time. And if we equate time with money, it should not be wasted on
bad books. In an argument that pulls to mind two filters for what to
read, Schopenhauer writes:
It is the same in
literature as in life. Wherever one goes one immediately comes upon
the incorrigible mob of humanity. It exists everywhere in legions;
crowding, soiling everything, like flies in summer. Hence the
numberless bad books, those rank weeds of literature which extract
nourishment from the corn and choke it.
They monopolise the
time, money, and attention which really belong to good books and
their noble aims; they are written merely with a view to making money
or procuring places. They are not only useless, but they do positive
harm. Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature aims solely
at taking a few shillings out of the public’s pocket, and to
accomplish this, author, publisher, and reviewer have joined forces.
There is a more
cunning and worse trick, albeit a profitable one. Littérateurs,
hack-writers, and productive authors have succeeded, contrary to good
taste and the true culture of the age, in bringing the world elegante
into leading-strings, so that they have been taught to read a tempo
and all the same thing — namely, the newest books order that they
may have material for conversation in their social circles. … But
what can be more miserable than the fate of a reading public of this
kind, that feels always impelled to read the latest writings of
extremely commonplace authors who write for money only, and therefore
exist in numbers? And for the sake of this they merely know by name
the works of the rare and superior writers, of all ages and
countries.
One can never read
too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are
intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
Knowing what to read
is important but so is its inversion— knowing what not to read.
This consists in not
taking a book into one’s hand merely because it is interesting the
great public at the time — such as political or religious
pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach
perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence.
Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a
large public: and only read for a limited and definite time
exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of
all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as
such. These alone really educate and instruct.
One can never read
too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are
intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
In Norwegian Wood,
Haruki Murakami makes the argument that “If you only read the books
that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else
is thinking.” On this Schopenhauer said:
Oh, how like one
commonplace mind is to another! How they are all fashioned in one
form! How they all think alike under similar circumstances, and never
differ! This is why their views are so personal and petty.
On the two types of
literature, Schopenhauer comments:
There are at all
times two literatures which, although scarcely known to each other,
progress side by side — the one real, the other merely apparent.
The former grows into literature that lasts. Pursued by people who
live for science or poetry, it goes its way earnestly and quietly,
but extremely slowly; and it produces in Europe scarcely a dozen
works in a century, which, however, are permanent. The other
literature is pursued by people who live on science or poetry; it
goes at a gallop amid a great noise and shouting of those taking
part, and brings yearly many thousand works into the market. But
after a few years one asks, Where are they? where is their fame,
which was so great formerly? This class of literature may be
distinguished as fleeting, the other as permanent.
It would be a good
thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but
one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of
their contents.
Commenting on why we
learn little from what we read, he writes:
It would be a good
thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but
one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of
their contents. To desire that a man should retain everything he has
ever read, is the same as wishing him to retain in his stomach all
that he has ever eaten. He has been bodily nourished on what he has
eaten, and mentally on what he has read, and through them become what
he is. As the body assimilates what is homogeneous to it, so will a
man retain what interests him; in other words, what coincides with
his system of thought or suits his ends. Every one has aims, but very
few have anything approaching a system of thought. This is why such
people do not take an objective interest in anything, and why they
learn nothing from what they read: they remember nothing about it.
But reading good
works is not enough. We must re-read important works immediately
because it aids our understanding, a concept that Mortimer Adler
echoes.
Any kind of
important book should immediately be read twice, partly because one
grasps the matter in its entirety the second time, and only really
understands the beginning when the end is known; and partly because
in reading it the second time one’s temper and mood are different,
so that one gets another impression; it may be that one sees the
matter in another light.
And the final part
of the essay I want to draw your attention to speaks to how
advancement happens in a flurry of false starts, and answers the
age-old question of why so many luminaries — whether scientific or
even artistic — fail to be recognized in their present age as they
will later come to be seen by the world.
… imagine the
progress of knowledge among mankind in the form of a planet’s
course. The false paths the human race soon follows after any
important progress has been made represent the epicycles in the
Ptolemaic system; after passing through any one of them the planet is
just where it was before it entered it. The great minds, however,
which really bring the race further on its course, do not accompany
it on the epicycles which it makes every time. This explains why
posthumous fame is got at the expense of contemporary fame, and vice
versâ.