One of the more annoying and unhelpful tics one sometimes encounters in discussing books is the unrestrained urge to fight with them. This seems to be especially common in discussions of ancient books, of religious books, and of Marx. (All three of which are required reading at St. John’s College.) Thankfully, after a while of having conversations about books in every class every day, most people at St. John’s do eventually realize that this way of approaching texts rarely leads anywhere interesting, and that other ways do, or else they at least absorb as a kind of local cultural etiquette that they ought to go easy on it.
Over the years I’ve heard a few bits of advice, or assertions, or aphorisms, that seem aimed at ameliorating these tendencies. Sometimes they seem exaggerated, or not clearly true, or even intellectually risky in some way or other, but always formulated as ways of improving conversation and consideration, and I’ve generally found them to be of some use.
One popular one is alleged to have been said by Emerson about a paper criticizing Plato (though perhaps an invention of a biographer — and paraphrased by Omar on The Wire): If you shoot at a king, you had better kill him. Another one that gets around is that, when reading a book that is truly great, you should read it as though you agreed with it completely, as though its author were right about everything, give yourself over to it, and then feel free to change your mind once you’ve made it through to the end. Another was said by some religious figure, perhaps a rabbi, to David Daube — a legal scholar who wrote extensively on the Bible — when, as a young man, Daube left a religious Jewish community to study the Bible in a secular university: if you must study the Bible in this way, do it like a surgeon who must operate on his father. I find that this can be a helpful perspective with many other books besides the Biblical ones.
We students in the Graduate Institute at St. John’s were recently given a helpful letter by Mr. Venkatesh on writing St. John’s essays, which several people new to the College understandably feel some trepidation about. I find one piece of his advice especially helpful, on the subject of fighting with texts. I hope he doesn’t mind my reproducing it here:
Picking Bones. If you plan on picking a fight with a book, I would recommend to you the following tripartite scheme: a) First get clear what the book is saying, and see why it would be compelling to an intelligent person; b) then articulate your dissatisfaction with it, and argue against a); then c) return to the book, and ask how it would respond to your objection. This way of picking bones with an author helps you to see a question more fully.