Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "reading"

Dear reader, I don't know about you, but when I go into someone's house I take the first civil opportunity to go through the bookshelf, if it's in a public area. It seems as if what is there is some clue to the personality of the books' owner(s), and more: what is there can be a plank for a bridge between us. "Oh, I see you have Being and Nothingness." "Yes, but I haven't had time to read it." "And The Open Society and its Enemies."
"Yes, great book." "Yes, though I think Popper is too mean to Wittgenstein." "You know, that's what I think too..." and you've enriched your association and maybe even started a lasting friendship.

Of course, a bookshelf in someone's lounge/living room may not exhaust a collection, any more than a meeting in a social gathering exhausts some one's real self. Hidden under the bed, or in a closet, or wherever, may be that collection of porn magazines that shows an entirely different side to the person; perhaps less interestingly but nonetheless revealingly, there are stacks of Reader's Digests hidden somewhere: the guilty secret.

What has been one of the great disappointments in my life, however, has been a different kind of revelation from a host's bookshelf. Many times, the collection reveals a striving intellect whose dimensions suddenly contract on finishing formal education - say, university. Sartre and Husserl and Wittgenstein, Popper and Marx and Plato, and Shakespeare and Donne, and Milton, and Shaw, all suddenly give way to pulp fiction of some sort or other, and it's obvious. As the years roll on, the dimensions of the mind have rolled up. Now, I write pulp fiction, and I am not denigrating it in the slightest: it has its role in life even for the most robust "intellectual". My aim in writing is to infuse my chosen genre with some intellectual fizz.

But that is only one aspect of life, of the life of the mind, and those who "go off" more serious reading are diminished as people. That doesn't mean they are not nice; they are. It doesn't make their lives less wholesome; they may indeed lead far more wholesome lives than mine. But it does mean - say I - that the potential of their intellect has been thwarted to some degree.

Is this unfair? Probably. But it's true too, or has its measure of truth. I don't own a television, and watch in others people's houses reluctantly, not because television doesn't have a place in our lives - it does - but because life really is too short for me to get through all the more satisfying intellectual (and by this I include emotional) adventures on offer, in particular but not only through books. I have spent getting on to thirty years now "exploring" Shakespeare, and I'm not done yet! I scarcely know many exciting writers, or know them less well than I would like - Donne, for example. And the thrill of reading Euripides, my previous post, knowing that this was a man who lived around 2500 years ago, whose mind is reaching across all that time, as an artist, an intellect, a philosopher, a human being...how can television stand up to that? It's an individual relationship, me and Euripides, Shakespeare and I, and the others. They speak to me - and I speak back.

So when I see that someone has dropped out of this adventure - and my experience is that this usually happens on leaving formal education - it doesn't mean I don't like them, but that I am a bit sad for them; I think they're missing out, not becoming the people they could become.

Is that arrogant? Maybe it is, but I hope it's not. Many of my best friends don't read at all and I don't judge them for it. It just seems to me to be sad for them, that they have never discovered the joys of reading. We still have a great time together on the planes of existence that matter to us, to our relationship.

Still, when I meet someone whose shelves are groaning from the weight, overflowing with a broad range of books with some intellectual grunt, I feel of frisson of pleasure, of anticipation: I think I have found a friend, and usually I have.

In the broader sense, a person's bookshelves do reveal something about them: their tastes somehow show something about who they are, just as their taste in music does: Mozart and Beethoven v Wagner for example. My book collection shows my ambitions, my past and my development, my pretensions and my failures in a very sophisticated way I think. Yes, there is something "under the bed" too, and there are gaps that are as revealing as what is there.

This series, these "blogs", does something similar. As I've gone along, I've begun to see how writing about my influences comprises a kind of intellectual autobiography: my mind's life's journey. I hope it's interesting in its own right, not because it's about my mind's predilections. After all, if I get fascinated by someone or something, I will be Kantian enough to believe it to be interesting to anybody, at least potentially.

The other side of that is being open to new interests, new tastes, new experiences, and reading as a practice ought to teach this, to each of us. If reading focuses the mind, it also opens it. So say I.

My next stop, I think, is Plato, but thought I might have a wee ramble through wider paddocks first. And you know that my other pastime - butterfly soothing - must get its due.

A screed. It is worth at least a dozen stars, mostly blue and yellow ones, but choose others if you wish.

Ludwig! What an amazing fellow! It may seem strange, dear reader, to jump from the ancients to a modern philosopher, but to me, Wittgenstein returned philosophy to the place it held for the ancients - not an interpretation of the world but a guide to how to live. And he did this in a particular if perhaps peculiar way.

Yeah sure - the interpretation of the world bit still matters. It's ok. For any real philosopher out there who may be reading this, I'm happy to admit that my take on Ludwig is my own. I'm writing about what he means to me, not about what he means.

The book that got me on Wittgenstein was Philosophical Investigations, a hot little number that was unfinished and obviously unpublished when Wittgenstein died. It lacked the craziness of Wittgenstein's first published work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; in place of the latter's arrogance there was an odd sort of calm, even serene sense of purpose.

What Wittgenstein did in this book, it seems to me, was to locate philosophy as "practice" in society, through his arguments about language, obviously a creation of society, and hence immersed in (as he put it in the forward) "the broad stream of social life". Before and while writing Investigations, Wittgenstein had had long discussions with a colleage at Cambridge, Piero Sraffa, a Marxist and friend of Antonio Gramsci. Sraffa tired of Wittgenstein, but nonetheless the key element of his contribution to Wittgenstein's argument is fundamental: we conduct our philosophy within language, a social construct that changes and develops, and as our language changes, our thinking changes with it: what is possible, what is not possible, how ideas can be expressed, what makes them sensible, or not...all part of some form of language or other. So there is something in our language which sets boundaries as to what we can think, and when those boundaries are reached, there are the limits of our thinking - till they are widened, or crushed, or altered.

Moreover, these rules, or lack of them, or limits or lack of them, are rooted in our society. They are not "out there" somewhere beyond us, but here with us and in us, in our "social gristle".

So while other philosophers were on about whether free will exists or not (for example), or syllogisms, Wittgenstein was on about the rules of thinking as rules of language, thinking as, if you like, the expressions of those rules.

Once this is understood, philosophy changes completely, and Wittgenstein was notorious in his Tractatus days for claiming that once philosophical practice is seen as a form of language "game", then the problems of philosophy others found vexing would simply disappear.

I don't think this is right: what they do, is to appear in a new light. But that light is truly different, revolutionary, a revelation. It is no surprise that "linguistic philosophy" is now the major philosophical approach in western universities.

Karl Popper took the Tractatus to bits in The Open Society and Its Enemies, and rightly so: Wittgenstein's method there was much less sophisticated than it was in Investigations. Popper, writing in New Zealand as a refugee from Nazism, may not have known that Wittgenstein had repudiated his early work, so that he was pricking at a balloon already punctured by its inflator.

What this has done for me is, as I wrote at the beginning, to return philosophy to the notion that the Greeks had of it: that it wasn't to decide if the world exists or not (for example), but to decide how to live, the right way to live. Systematic philosophy - that can be said to have begun with yet another of Socrates' pupils, Aristotle (via Plato), took philosophy by stages away from this, and while fields like ethics have been a concern of philosophy always, somehow it has not been the same.

With Wittgenstein, all the balls are back in play, on the broad pitch of our social life.

This is inspiring to me. It is not troublesome, even if it is wrong: I just like it, as I love language in general - the way we make and use words to communicate - and this language, this "English". I like the feeling that, when I am writing, it is not just me writing, that there is something bigger than me, that is pulsing through my feeble brain to create what "I" create. Of course this is true of everyone, of the most childish rant to the most sophisticated analysis, to the expression of abstract thought in symbols indecipherable by me. But it makes writing a really exciting thing to do: to consider, as I do it, where my words and expressions come from, and what they are likely to be taken to convey by someone I have never met, in another part of the world, perhaps (as I hope) in another era, long after I am gone.

And that makes me a terrific reader too! When Shakespeare reaches out to me, or Euripides, or Plato or Epictetus, any of these old fogeys from long ago, it stops being a one way street: these people are communicating with me, but the way they do it is creative, and their work is not just "as they wrote it" but "as I read it".

Maybe Wittgenstein himself would think this is all tosh. I don't know. I hope not, but if he were to suddenly appear in my lounge and commence laughing at me, it would be ok. He sifted through my thought, and gave me this idea.

When I was in Vienna on a cycling tour more than a decade ago, I visited the house he had partly designed (it was then an embassy), just to have a look...it was a modest modernist affair; it had combed through the architectural dictionary, added a few wrinkles, and moved on...

Thanks Ludwig!

Anyone who has got through this deserves more than stars - have eight of these, and add some lollipops from the local dairy...don't get through them all on the same day, hear?