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

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.