Reading and Freedom (I)

9,595 characters2008.06.03

In the essay “Reading as a Way of Thinking,” I said roughly this: if one merely sits there alone thinking desperately and turning things over and over, the effect is often counterproductive; one’s distress only sinks deeper and deeper, while the problem does not necessarily become any clearer. With the aid of reading, by contrast, one can both turn thinking into a pleasure and, with the help of books, carry out broader, clearer, and deeper reflection.

However, not only is it not always a good thing to sit there daydreaming in silence, but burying one’s head in books is not always effective either. In particular, when someone reads with too many preconceived notions and an inappropriate way of thinking, then even a huge amount of reading can become a bad thing.

We often see people who have read widely and deeply, whose reading is both extensive and exacting, who can even recite certain books from memory as if they were a catalog of treasured family heirlooms, yet in the end they have never grasped even the most basic spirit or purpose of the author. The most typical case may be a considerable number of older “Marxist-Leninist philosophy” scholars: they knew the original works of Marx and Engels so thoroughly that they could almost recite them in their sleep, but as for how much they actually understood Marx’s aims and his revolutionary character, I really dare not say.

Some people say that my foundation is still shallow and my accumulation still small; if I work hard and read for a few years, won’t I become more mature? Not necessarily. If one does not get the direction right from the beginning, then no matter how much effort one puts into thinking and reading, one will probably only stray farther and farther from the path and sink deeper and deeper into error. Although one can always make self-corrections in the process of thinking and reading, one has still taken the wrong road in the end.

Of course, there are different ways to read, and different people, at different times, reading different books, can all have completely different methods. I am by no means emphasizing one single correct way of reading here. But the key point I am emphasizing really is unanswerable—not the two words “freedom”~

First of all, it is worth noting that reading makes people free; the existence of books makes freedom possible. This is because books can carry history and can provide “possibility.” If there were no books to read, people would have no way of understanding the mental world of the ancients. But what does the mental world of the ancients have to do with the freedom of people today? A great deal! We say that a person is free if and only if he can make choices, if he can weigh options, think, and then judge, rather than acting purely on sensation like an infant or an animal; that is what human freedom is. But how is it possible for a human being to make choices? How is it possible for a human being to think? Aside from hardware conditions, there must be learning and memory.

And history is precisely humanity’s memory. Only those who possess history can acquire the ability to go beyond immediate intuition; only then can one stand from a higher (or, if you prefer, a lower—that does not matter) standpoint and reflect on the present. And only when it becomes possible to find a different standpoint and a different perspective can one open up multiple possible choices. For this, see: Another Piece Beyond “Relativism and Absolutism Are Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other”.

“History” here can be understood in a broad sense. The original meaning of the Western word history does not have to refer only to past events; it also includes things like local gazetteers and ethnography. The term natural history preserves this meaning. And in Chinese, the original meaning of the character “史” was also simply that of recording documents, recording all kinds of things.

In this sense, almost all books count as “history.” And the significance of history is still this: it can display differences and provide “possibility.”

Besides reading, of course we can also learn about “difference” through contact with the people around us, or through radio and television, but books are undoubtedly one of the most effective means. Books can easily break through the limits of time and space, giving us the chance to communicate in mind and spirit with thinkers far across the ocean, or with those who lived thousands of years ago. Every book can offer a distinctive perspective and way of thinking, unfolding before us an infinite array of possibilities.

So can television and video recordings—or, to put it in more academic terms, directly listening to a master’s lecture—replace reading? No. Of course, reading also cannot completely replace listening to lectures; this is especially true of some professors with distinctive temperaments, whose spoken language and written text are not the same thing. Even so, reading can still make up, to some extent, for the shortcomings of lectures, whereas the reverse is not negotiable.

When it is still someone else’s monologue, why can reading not be replaced by television? This is certainly not only because reading a speech transcript is often faster than listening to one; the key lies in the fact that when you read, you must participate actively to a considerable degree. The very drawback of face-to-face lecturing is this: the listener receives too complete a set of information. The speaker’s emotion, tone, emphasis, rhythm, and so on are all ready-made. Reading is different. Elements such as emotion and rhythm are stripped away, and what is presented before us is in fact an information stream that is too pale and monotonous. How to attend to it, how to pick out the key points, and at what rhythm to read—all of this requires your participation. The pace of reading can be fast or slow, passages can be omitted or skipped, and points can be repeatedly pondered; all of this depends on the reader’s strategy. Thus, the reader re-enters the “dialogue” in a special way: neither interfering with the author’s untroubled monologic discourse, nor failing to give full play to his own initiative.

But some people read not for freedom, but precisely for unfreedom. Either they do everything they can to make books serve their prejudices, or they let themselves serve the books. For example, many people, after finishing a book, summarize the author’s positions as one, two, three, four, five, as if that were the harvest and achievement of reading, as if readers who did not organize all the items were inferior to them. But if reading is for the sake of extracting the book’s conclusions, then why didn’t the author provide a ready-made outline? Or when the author has already provided a ready-made outline, why must later readers repeat the summary?

Traditional textbook philosophy reads classic texts in exactly this way: so-and-so advocates one, two, three—there, objective idealism! So-and-so advocates four, five, six—ah, naive materialism! … Extract the conclusions one by one, stick on the corresponding labels one by one, and that’s the end of it. Reading books in this way, even if you read through all the classics of Western philosophy, you probably won’t gain much benefit; you’ll only become more and more smug, and more and more lost, won’t you?

It is not that thinkers do not care about conclusions, but rather that they seek not simply conclusions, but reasonable conclusions. In other words, the key lies in giving an account of the “why”: not only knowing what to choose, but also knowing why one makes that choice. That is freedom. Whether for a thoughtful author or for a reader pursuing freedom, what matters is the perspective, the line of thought, and the reasons—not that final statement of position.

In reading, the meaning of “freedom” is two-way. That is to say, the reader should be free, and at the same time should regard the author’s thought as free. The reader is best off approaching the text with his own problems, his own rhythm, and his own concerns; however, he must never treat books as a repository of resources to be arbitrarily dismantled and taken apart. I am independent, and books are independent too. That is to say, one must treat the world of thought displayed by the author through the book as a whole. Only in this way can one say that it provides a “line of thought,” a “perspective,” or a “standpoint.” If it is merely a patchwork of unrelated fragments cobbled together, then it cannot be called a line of thought or a standpoint.

Some beginners’ own thoughts are still in a hazy state, relatively chaotic and ambiguous, unable to stand on a firm independent footing. That is not a problem; books are precisely there to help people learn independence. Yet even beginners should regard the author—at least those great thinkers or philosophers—as independent individuals, and should treat their books as wholes. One should not merely care about isolated conclusions and judgments, but should pay attention to the connections and structures between conclusions and conclusions, between assertions and assertions. In short, one must read a pile of words into a book, and read the whole book into a whole person. Only then can one appreciate the author’s independence and freedom, and thereby grasp the possibilities he offers us.

In this sense, I would say that the greater a philosopher is, the easier he is to understand. Of course, classic philosophical works are often obscure and difficult to read, but that is only a matter of detail. The reason many excellent philosophical works are obscure is simply that their authors invested great seriousness and rigor; every concept and formulation was deeply weighed and carefully considered, and so they inevitably become somewhat stiff. But this also means that their expression is more reliable and more trustworthy.<
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When you read a second-rate author who writes seemingly contradictory things in different contexts, then it is quite possible that he really has not thought it through and has made a mistake; and if he himself cannot express his thoughts very accurately and consistently, then his works will be difficult to understand. If his works are full of ambiguity and contradiction everywhere, then they are simply impossible to understand at all. But the classic works of philosophers are undoubtedly more dependable. If you see a great philosopher writing something that seems contradictory, then before assuming that he may have been confused for a moment, it is best first to consider whether you have read it wrong, or whether you have failed to notice certain special transitional devices or particular shifts in context, and so on. Once you have grasped one of a philosopher’s ideas, you can also say with complete confidence: this idea must run throughout the entire text. That is to say, for a philosopher who is “consistent from beginning to end,” understanding any one key point is enough to enter the whole line of his thought; but for an author who changes at the drop of a hat and vacillates constantly, even he himself does not know what he is talking about, and the reader has even less chance of ever seizing the core meaning. It is clear, then, that understanding a philosopher is much easier than understanding a second-rate author.

June 3, 2008