5 ms·

This is actually a good strategy. I first came across a similar technique expounded in a book by Chaim Potok, "The Chosen" (good book, I really enjoyed it). O

by wenc 7y ago

This is actually a good strategy. I first came across a similar technique expounded in a book by Chaim Potok, "The Chosen" (good book, I really enjoyed it). One of the protagonists, Danny Saunders, was the son of a rabbi and a genius who was trying to become a psychologist, so he started reading Freud in its original form. He found the texts impenetrable even after months of trying. Then he had an insight: in the study of the Torah (his forte, being a rabbi's son), folks typically studied with the help of commentaries by rabbis over the generations who have disputed and explained the texts in different ways. Commentaries provide context and a jumping off point into the text. So Danny Saunders took the same approach to studying Freud -- instead of reading Freud, he studied commentaries on Freud and read what has already been said about him. This helped him understand the original work better. Many of us do the same instinctively: we read the Wikipedia article on a subject to get a lay of the land before jumping into a subject matter. Context is valuable in pedagogy, which is why it's often helpful to have an instructor for reading hard books -- otherwise anyone would be able to read any book in their language and "get it" -- which is not true. I read English just fine, but I don't think I'm able to understand Finnegan's Wake without any help. p.s. We often hear advice that we should study texts in their original form without commentary, so that we can approach the subject with an unbiased lens and interpret it for ourselves. But my take is our lens is always biased, and worse still, in subject areas we are unfamiliar with, our biases are uninformed. I think a much more productive approach is to read with commentary but to read critically -- to question and to explore alternative interpretive options. Without this kind of approach, most important works are just too difficult and we'd probably just not try.

dmreedy 7y ago
I agree that there's always going to be bias. I'd go one step further, even, with your comment about most important works being too difficult. Instead, I'd posit that most important works have a bias in and of themselves. An implicit framework of thinking that needs to at least be partially understood before the work can be understood. The original intended audience of the work, separated by however much time and culture and expertise, is at an advantage here, because in theory they already shared some of that framework with the author. But the further separated you are from the culture that created a work, the harder it's going to be to engage with it in any meaningful way; you just don't speak the same language. So commentary and criticism and analysis and so on can serve as a useful bridge into the way of thinking that you'd need to really grok the primary source. It's probably impossible to get there completely, there will always be a bit of a gap. But the more secondary material you read, from as many perspectives as you can find (I do think this is very important, in addition to the critical thinking mentioned in the parent; even a very critical thinker, in a strange land, can be deceived into believing there is consensus on a matter when presented only with a single side), the better chance you have at being able to focus the center of the thing, with all the various lenses you've been given. At least, the center of it relative to your own set of biases!
- wenc 7y ago
  Great point about distance in culture, time and expertise. I've always been interested in reading the Great Books, and some say the only investment you need is a library card, but it's not that simple. If all it truly takes to read the Great Books is just reading them, a lot more people would be doing it. But they're not. Having taken a sequence of courses on Western civilization, I realized there's a lot more to reading the Great Books than just reading them -- most of the time is spent in footnotes, commentary, research (to understand context) and of course, arguing with the text. Otherwise all you're doing is streaming words into your head. It's all in English, but it's also like a totally different language. And you're on point about critical thinkers being deceived when they don't have the full context -- Sherlock Holmes says to never theorize without data, which is all well and good, but sometimes your data can be incomplete in ways you cannot detect and you end up developing a perfectly coherent model of the world that is fatally wrong. This is often a problem when you theorize within a single work. Having more context from different sources doesn't fully solve this problem but it does mitigate it.

by wenc 7y ago

dmreedy 7y ago

I agree that there's always going to be bias. I'd go one step further, even, with your comment about most important works being too difficult. Instead, I'd posit that most important works have a bias in and of themselves. An implicit framework of thinking that needs to at least be partially understood before the work can be understood. The original intended audience of the work, separated by however much time and culture and expertise, is at an advantage here, because in theory they already shared some of that framework with the author. But the further separated you are from the culture that created a work, the harder it's going to be to engage with it in any meaningful way; you just don't speak the same language. So commentary and criticism and analysis and so on can serve as a useful bridge into the way of thinking that you'd need to really grok the primary source. It's probably impossible to get there completely, there will always be a bit of a gap. But the more secondary material you read, from as many perspectives as you can find (I do think this is very important, in addition to the critical thinking mentioned in the parent; even a very critical thinker, in a strange land, can be deceived into believing there is consensus on a matter when presented only with a single side), the better chance you have at being able to focus the center of the thing, with all the various lenses you've been given. At least, the center of it relative to your own set of biases!

wenc 7y ago
Great point about distance in culture, time and expertise. I've always been interested in reading the Great Books, and some say the only investment you need is a library card, but it's not that simple. If all it truly takes to read the Great Books is just reading them, a lot more people would be doing it. But they're not. Having taken a sequence of courses on Western civilization, I realized there's a lot more to reading the Great Books than just reading them -- most of the time is spent in footnotes, commentary, research (to understand context) and of course, arguing with the text. Otherwise all you're doing is streaming words into your head. It's all in English, but it's also like a totally different language. And you're on point about critical thinkers being deceived when they don't have the full context -- Sherlock Holmes says to never theorize without data, which is all well and good, but sometimes your data can be incomplete in ways you cannot detect and you end up developing a perfectly coherent model of the world that is fatally wrong. This is often a problem when you theorize within a single work. Having more context from different sources doesn't fully solve this problem but it does mitigate it.