Being Intellectual Is the Toxic by-Product of Becoming Educated

Sascha

Halfway through processing How to Read a Book by Adler/van Doren (approaching the end of “analytical reading”).

A decade ago, I didn't like the book too much because it seemed to be just another reading formula (similar to SQ3) that doesn't get applied by the very people recommending them (e.g. my professors). This judgement still holds true to some extent. But perhaps, I am failing again a principle that I myself recommend adhering to, when you learn something: Shuhari

But there is a very specific obstacle in entering the Shu-stage that is encapsulated by this quote (rough translation):

This principled appreciation and the ideal of the educated person are precursors of ideological stubbornness and have failed in their claims: Intelligentsia has become a derogatory term because words take on the character of their underlying reality.

According to my interpretation, one of the implicit goals of reading is to become educated (“gebildet”) which is an embodiment of a moral I oppose. This is realisation that came by reading Dietrich Schwanitz' “Bildung. Alles, was man wissen muss” (“Bildung. Everything you need to know”). The Bildungsbürgertum was and are mostly snobs.

In part, this is a psychological-biographic judgement. This is just one example of many conflicts I had as a blue-collar kid with a migration background.

The father of my first girlfriend was a successful, highly educated lawyer (he would just see the architectural features of a film and then know where it most likely was filmed). He didn't seem to like me because of the combination of me coming from a blue-collar class (strangely, like his own upbringing) background, my rejection of school and my hefty rebellious behaviour. A typical class conflict. He tried to “dominate” me with obvious demonstrations of his cognitive capabilities in debates. But he would beat me on factual knowledge, not in quality of reasoning or in natural sciences. I also gave his daughter tutoring in physics even though she was already studying at an elite subject in university while I was still in school. This seemed to bother him.

He had back problems and was physically weak, which violated the values I grew up with (a man has to be strong in all demands of life, even excelling in all the traditionally female demands like cooking and cleaning). It also gave me an impression of disingenuity, as I thought that he tried to compensate for his physical weakness with his cognitive capacity. (He couldn't carry heavy. But instead of asking me to do this as a favour, it was somehow just expected that I take care of such things)

I can't remember if I actually did it. But it would be my style, to recommend reading Jack London's work, especially “Whitefang”, as a big middle-finger back then.

I liked him because of his unapologetic style. Perhaps, because he was the first adult, I could truly debate without holding anything back, which was not possible with my parents. In my family, I was just the smart aleck, when I engaged in intellectual debates.

This is just one example of many events and situations of similar type, albeit the other were more ruled by hostility from both sides.

The authors seem to have a positive relationship with the intelligentsia, even a personal one. Therefore, it is only natural for them, to stipulate a moral obligation towards books and their authors.

However, this is one of the core weaknesses I see with the book “How to Read a Book”: The basic currency of knowledge work are ideas, individual thoughts, knowledge building blocks. Not books. I don't owe anything to a book, like I don't owe anything to the inventor of a hammer.

So, my criticism of this book as two major points:

1. I disagree with the formula itself, especially in the context of having a Zettelkasten. I don't care about the author or the book as a whole. Fairness as a concept doesn't apply. ( @ctietze “geripped und geschlitzt”… ), unless I am in a personal interaction or relationship with the author. Therefore, I use the book to break down into the atomic ideas on how to read a book, and rebuild them into a new whole.
2. I disagree with the spirit of the book. I think being intellectual is the toxic by-product of becoming educated, which needs to be counter-balanced. (Hat-tip to Jack London)

Andy

There is a lot that I love in this post by @Sascha, especially the lengthy psychobiography of himself.

@Sascha said:

The authors seem to have a positive relationship with the intelligentsia, even a personal one. Therefore, it is only natural for them, to stipulate a moral obligation towards books and their authors.

However, this is one of the core weaknesses I see with the book “How to Read a Book”: The basic currency of knowledge work are ideas, individual thoughts, knowledge building blocks. Not books. I don't owe anything to a book, like I don't owe anything to the inventor of a hammer.

My psychobiography is very different from Sascha's, but my personal dislike of How to Read a Book is very similar to this. I don't have time right now to go into details, but I can say that this book has to be understood together with the Great Books movement in the United States, a history of which is in Tim Lacy's book The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (2013). I quoted Lacy at length in the previous discussion "Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon: a topically arranged collaborative slipbox", especially regarding the contradictions in the Great Books movement:

Would the Great Books and the ideas the set celebrated, as consistently discussed topics in Western history (i.e. the Great Conversation), arise inductively from a circle of very good and great books themselves? Or would the set and the Syntopicon's discursive nodes deductively result from the particular ideas of a relatively small community of discourse (i.e. Adler and his colleagues) about what constitutes excellence and the liberal arts? Could a balance be achieved? Could notions of a democratized culture and cultural greatness coexist?

I regret that I don't have time to write more, but if I had time, I would add commentary on this quotation from Gary Snyder's "The Real Work" (1976):

Get back in touch with people, with ordinary things: with your body, with the dirt, with the dust, with anything you like, you know—the streets. The streets or the farm, whatever it is. Get away from books and from the elite sense of being bearers of Western culture, and all that crap.

I have always thought that Gary Snyder is an exemplar of an educated literary person who is not a Bildungsbürger snob who thinks of himself as "being bearers of Western culture, and all that crap".

ZettelDistraction

Mortimer Adler's Great Books program aimed to develop an "educated electorate" through intellectual engagement with the Great Ideas, empowering them to participate in democratic processes. However, the program didn't specify how the Great Books would encourage active political participation. One could hardly accuse the Great Books program of inspiring activism. The contrast with Marx's famous statement, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it," is stark. The practical effect of the Great Books program is a passive appreciation of decisions made on behalf of the educated electorate by their more deserving political and economic leaders. While the Great Books program originated at the University of Chicago before the McCarthy era, it gained prominence during this period of leftist purges (late 1940s to late 1950s), which likely influenced its focus on intellectual over political engagement.

Nido

@Sascha said:
Therefore, it is only natural for them, to stipulate a moral obligation towards books and their authors.

However, this is one of the core weaknesses I see with the book “How to Read a Book”: The basic currency of knowledge work are ideas, individual thoughts, knowledge building blocks. Not books. I don't owe anything to a book, like I don't owe anything to the inventor of a hammer.

Adler and Van Doren write:

[W]hen you read a book analytically you put yourself in a relation to it of disciple to master. When you read syntopically, you must be the master of the situation (309).

Syntopical reading involves the synthesis of ideas from multiple sources and thus is more relevant to a Zettelkasten than analytical reading. I read Adler/Van Doren as denying that masters owe disciples anything.

ZettelDistraction

@Nido said:
I read Adler/Van Doren as denying that masters owe disciples anything.

Conversely, disciples should never pay their masters.

Andy

@Nido quoted Adler and Van Doren:

[W]hen you read a book analytically you put yourself in a relation to it of disciple to master. When you read syntopically, you must be the master of the situation

This explains why an analytical reading of How to Read a Book is so insufferable.

Nido

@Andy
To your other point, I agree that the Great Books Idea was flawed from the get go , but this does not diminish the power of reading parts of multiple books, which I take to be the essential kernel of syntopical reading.

Andy

@Nido said:

@Andy
To your other point, I agree that the Great Books Idea was flawed from the get go , but this does not diminish the power of reading parts of multiple books, which I take to be the essential kernel of syntopical reading.

I don't disagree. There are useful ideas in How to Read a Book, even if Sascha and I (due to whatever psychobiographical causes) find something "off" about the spirit of the book. By the way, Gary Snyder had something like a Zettelkasten, though it may have been mostly from his university years:

From The Paris Review interview (1996):

Interviewer: I gather you have some complicated system of file cards, even for the poems. Can you describe that? Snyder: Most writers I know, and certainly prose writers, have a well-organized shop. There are moves in longer poetic projects that are very like the work of researchers. I tell young would-be poets not to fear organization, that it won't stultify their scope. I use some systems I learned from anthropologists and linguists. Now I use a computer too. A friend who's a professional hydrologist gives a good caution, "Write up your field notes at the end of each day!" And then get them into your hard disk fairly soon and always back that up. The main thing though is to give full range to the mind and learn to walk around in memory and imagination smelling and hearing things.

From Mark Gonnerman's "Fieldwork: Gary Snyder, Libraries, and Book Learning" (2015):

I was interested in approaching Snyder's intellectual biography through attention to his books and reading on the model of Robert Sattelmeyer's Thoreau's Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue. For this, I spent five weeks at Kitkitdizze [Snyder's home] during the summer of 1998, perusing the stacks and cataloguing parts of Snyder's library. I was also able to browse neat files of 3×5" index cards—mostly notes from Snyder's reading and research in college and graduate school—that remain in his collection. From this, I got a good, though by no means complete, sense of Snyder's lifelong learning from texts.

So when Snyder says "Get away from books", he's advising against a certain toxic kind of intellectualism, not advising against all book learning.

Sascha

@Andy said:
My psychobiography is very different from Sascha's, but my personal dislike of How to Read a Book is very similar to this. I don't have time right now to go into details, but I can say that this book has to be understood together with the Great Books movement in the United States, a history of which is in Tim Lacy's book The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (2013). I quoted Lacy at length in the previous discussion "Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon: a topically arranged collaborative slipbox", especially regarding the contradictions in the Great Books movement:

Would the Great Books and the ideas the set celebrated, as consistently discussed topics in Western history (i.e. the Great Conversation), arise inductively from a circle of very good and great books themselves? Or would the set and the Syntopicon's discursive nodes deductively result from the particular ideas of a relatively small community of discourse (i.e. Adler and his colleagues) about what constitutes excellence and the liberal arts? Could a balance be achieved? Could notions of a democratized culture and cultural greatness coexist?

I am not so sure about that (my highlights). My current position is that the historical context is more often than not just a distraction from the value creation that should take place during the digestion process of books. But my position is not firm, oscillating between "pretty sure" and "just my focus".

It seems to me to be just another academic custom to relate to the author and his intentions, which themselves are separate objects of interest.

So, in my particular case: I process this book to lay the groundwork to enrich certain areas in my Zettelkasten which then will be the basis of both improvements of my own workflow, my coaching and substance for a course with the goal of providing training material. I don't see how the context of the book aids to this.

The historical contexts seem to provide a framework of interpretation which can enhance understanding, if one doesn't have a sufficient framework of interpretation. I have multiple frameworks ranging from my methodological axioms to utilitarian one's.

I will put this assumption to the test, when I will process books that are connected with insanity and vileness (e.g. the Una Bomber Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, some of the French philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, de Beauvoir, manifestos of high school shooters etc.) and see what happens. (The nature of evilness and vileness is one core research objects)

@Nido said:

@Sascha said:
Therefore, it is only natural for them, to stipulate a moral obligation towards books and their authors.

However, this is one of the core weaknesses I see with the book “How to Read a Book”: The basic currency of knowledge work are ideas, individual thoughts, knowledge building blocks. Not books. I don't owe anything to a book, like I don't owe anything to the inventor of a hammer.

Adler and Van Doren write:

[W]hen you read a book analytically you put yourself in a relation to it of disciple to master. When you read syntopically, you must be the master of the situation (309).

Syntopical reading involves the synthesis of ideas from multiple sources and thus is more relevant to a Zettelkasten than analytical reading. I read Adler/Van Doren as denying that masters owe disciples anything.

I did not reach the section about syntopical reading yet. But most likely, I will dispute the power of it. I think it leads to a rather scattered way of working and is in conflict with a harmony of the mental state and the desired output.

This opinion gets more and more consolidated the more I have contact to academic researchers. There seems to be a high correlation between syntopical reading practices and the dissatisfaction of both the input (learning) and the output (texts, knowledge).

In short: I don't think reading syntopically leads to the good result we're after, but sequencing phases of highly focussed processing (the second half of analytical reading) of individual texts, while at the same time having a high volume of "inspectional reading".

It looks to me like the same fallacy done in physical training: Assuming that specificity means that you need to train the very thing that you want to improve only, instead of asking what the end goal is and then use highly specific training methods for each operative goal.

Example: If you're a fighter, you shouldn't train your endurance mainly by punching, kicking and grappling. The cost to benefit ratio is not good, especially if you do a lot of sparring. Instead, you train your endurance with methods that allow for a richer stimulus and demand low inputs. This is the benefit of low intensity running: You can provide a good stimulus for your aerobic base, while being mentally relaxed, perhaps, even use running as a relaxation technique. Additionally, if you run slow with proper technique, there is almost no strain on your joints, ligaments and your brain. You can also use circuit training to combine higher intensity endurance training with supportive exercises to decrease risk of injury.

If you do knowledge work with the goal of having a high level of skill and expertise in a specific field, you don't need to mush everything together. Instead, you focus on specific inputs (e.g. learning about systems theory by focussing on a specific book at a time for a couple of weeks each, instead of reading a couple of books at the same time). It is way less strain on the mind to be able to focus on a single topic for days at a time, instead of jumping around.

Having a Zettelkasten results in the desired end goal: Structures that represent an interconnective understanding of the matter.

Andy

@Sascha said:

My current position is that the historical context is more often than not just a distraction from the value creation that should take place during the digestion process of books. But my position is not firm, oscillating between "pretty sure" and "just my focus".

When I said "has to be understood", that phrase would be too strong if interpreted universally; I was just giving my interpretation. But, as I recall from a past debate we had (if it is relevant to the point at hand), you emphasize present-moment hyperfocus whereas I emphasize assessing what it all means in light of my knowledge of the past and future.

I will put this assumption to the test, when I will process books that are connected with insanity and vileness (e.g. the Una Bomber Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, some of the French philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, de Beauvoir, manifestos of high school shooters etc.) and see what happens. (The nature of evilness and vileness is one core research objects)

Please start by processing Foucault's "What is Enlightenment?" and share your results. I would like to see what "vileness" you identify in it. Personally, I thought it was pretty good.

Nido

@Sascha said:
. . .
I did not reach the section about syntopical reading yet. But most likely, I will dispute the power of it. I think it leads to a rather scattered way of working and is in conflict with a harmony of the mental state and the desired output.
. . .
In short: I don't think reading syntopically leads to the good result we're after, but sequencing phases of highly focussed processing (the second half of analytical reading) of individual texts, while at the same time having a high volume of "inspectional reading".

It looks to me like the same fallacy done in physical training: Assuming that specificity means that you need to train the very thing that you want to improve only, instead of asking what the end goal is and then use highly specific training methods for each operative goal.

. . .
If you do knowledge work with the goal of having a high level of skill and expertise in a specific field, you don't need to mush everything together. Instead, you focus on specific inputs (e.g. learning about systems theory by focussing on a specific book at a time for a couple of weeks each, instead of reading a couple of books at the same time). It is way less strain on the mind to be able to focus on a single topic for days at a time, instead of jumping around.

Syntopical reading is more like Zettelkasten reading in that it has a focus broader than a single book. I agree with your assertion that multiple qualities of a sport are best trained separately, not together. Do a training block focused on aerobic base-building and then one focused on building power. But even when building your base, you might schedule two short session per week of strength and one short session of sprint intervals.

So, you don't give equal focus to everything every week. And you don't scatter your focus over lots of sources every week. But you also don't train only a single quality (base, strength, speed, power, agility) in a week and you (probably) don't look at only a single text.

With my parenthetic "probably" you can see that this looks to me like a (relatively uninteresting) question of degree.

What did interest me was your criticism of putting "yourself in a relation . . . of disciple to master." Both the specificity perspective and the periodization perspective on syntopical reading make the text subordinate to the requirements of the trainee.

Sascha

@Nido said:
What did interest me was your criticism of putting "yourself in a relation . . . of disciple to master." Both the specificity perspective and the periodization perspective on syntopical reading make the text subordinate to the requirements of the trainee.

To me, this is statement

[W]hen you read a book analytically you put yourself in a relation to it of disciple to master. When you read syntopically, you must be the master of the situation (309).

is a contradiction to the introductory description of the two situations of learning: Learning by discovery vs learning by instruction.

Reading a book puts you in a situation in which you learn by discovery. It is a non-personal situation. Applying the idea of a master-disciple-relationship doesn't make sense.

There is another quote that shows this contradiction:

The great writers have alway been great readers [...] Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. (164)

You cannot become a peer to an author because reading doesn't put you in a personal relationship, according to their own framework.

Normally, I'd be a more forgiving reader and let this master-disciple-idea slip as just a metaphoric description. But here, this contradiction is oozing out of the book, showing a pollution of their thinking by the idealization of being well-read.

---

My current hypothesis is that they don't contextualize the act of book reading properly. They put the book as a unit of knowledge front and center. Instead, it should be the idea. Reading a book sits in a strange hybrid position between a habit and a tool to (re-)construct an idea.

My hypothesis might change, when I finish the chapter on syntopical reading. But I doubt it.

JoshA

In short: I don't think reading syntopically leads to the good result we're after, but sequencing phases of highly focussed processing (the second half of analytical reading) of individual texts, while at the same time having a high volume of "inspectional reading". @sfast

Reading for a Zettelkasten is syntopically reading anyway, since if you process two books expressing a similar idea you will connect/compress them as you deal with the idea generally. Unless I missed a caveat to syntopically reading.

Inspectional reading = filtering a book for ideas. Or just figuring out if it is worth reading, and the analytical phase is the filtering/processing.

I am not a huge fan of How to Read a Book because of idealisation of authors/Western Canon as a pathway to intellectual Enlightenment. It is also repetitive.

Sascha

@JoshA said:

In short: I don't think reading syntopically leads to the good result we're after, but sequencing phases of highly focussed processing (the second half of analytical reading) of individual texts, while at the same time having a high volume of "inspectional reading". @sfast

Reading for a Zettelkasten is syntopically reading anyway, since if you process two books expressing a similar idea you will connect/compress them as you deal with the idea generally. Unless I missed a caveat to syntopically reading.

I agree on the result, but disagree on the process. The Zettelkasten Method results in similar thematic access that the syntopical reading aims for. But the process is very different.

Inspectional reading = filtering a book for ideas. Or just figuring out if it is worth reading, and the analytical phase is the filtering/processing.

I am not a huge fan of How to Read a Book because of idealisation of authors/Western Canon as a pathway to intellectual Enlightenment. It is also repetitive.