>Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. Philosophy

>Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. Philosophy as a discipline makes more sense if you consider it as a form of literature. And it isn't true that "in no other field" beginners read primary texts -- literature scholars absolutely do this. I'm a philosophy enthusiast, but I've never really understood the claim that philosophers seek to understand what's true. Mathematicians do that, and some types of analytic philosophers focus on that, but at least from my perspective philosophy is more about idiosyncratic excursions into interesting questions and ideas, the same way that fiction is about idisyncratic excursions into interesting plots. IMHO no one rewrites Nietzsche because what would be the point? His headline ideas can be summarized in a rather short document, just like the plot of a novel can be summarized in a couple paragraphs, but it's the voyage that's the meaty, fun part, just like literature.