Doctrines, Lenses and Traditions
On Reading Plurality
The allegory of the chariot in Plato’s Phaedrus is one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. Two winged horses pull a charioteer up to the heavens, where wisdom is found. But neither horse cares for wisdom - the first is interested in pleasure, while the second is interested in praise. The charioteer needs to get these horses to help him find wisdom. If he starves them to force them to submit, they won’t be able to help him. But if he concedes to their every demand, they will never take him up there of their own accord. He has to find an appropriate mix of discipline and persuasion to get the horses to help him as much as possible. The need to convince the horses means that he will never get up there as often as he would like. But if this makes him bitter and resentful of them, he will see even less.
So much of life is like this - you take something bad (i.e., insufficiently good) and you do the best you can with it. If you grow frustrated with its badness and come to hate it, to view it as evil (i.e., opposed to the Good) - the classic Gnostic mistake - you find this limits what you can do. But if you forget that things are bad and become uncritical of them, you become confused about where wisdom lies, apologizing for falling short until you forget you once dreamed of going higher.
The allegory of the chariot has greatly shaped the way I read. Every text that has been written by a person is bad - it is less good than it could or should be, because it was written by a charioteer who had to look after winged horses. While the charioteer could not have written the text without the horses, the horses inevitably distracted them. Sometimes, they got all upset because they were hungry or tired or had trouble with their spouse or partner. At other points, they worried about their reputations and said things for the wrong reasons. These issues affect every text, but the private lives of writers are poorly understood, often even by the writers themselves. We will not be able to map these influences in any precise way. All we can know is that they are always there, and because of them, written texts are always bad.
But if you say that written texts are evil and you don’t read them, that won’t do you any good. No, even though texts are bad, you still benefit from reading them. But the knowledge that texts are bad should change how you read them.
When you read a text, you should not be asking whether it is “right” or “correct”. Texts are not simply right or correct - they are not simply good. Texts do not contain true or false doctrines, even though sometimes their authors believe, in their moments of hubris, that they contain precisely these things. Readers who are devoted to particular texts, who think texts contain doctrines that can be evaluated principally in terms of true/false, are mistaken. They have come to treat these texts as crutches or as fetish objects. Readers should not rely on texts; readers should be inspired by them.
A text should motivate you to think with it. To think with a text, you have to judge it. But that is not to say that you have to determine whether it is good or evil - we already know that it is bad, that it is insufficiently good. To think with a text, you have to try to make it better. To improve something, you have to be able to distinguish between better and worse elements within it. How do you distinguish between better and worse elements in a text if you do not already, yourself, have the concept of the Good and the capacity to conceptualize it in relation to specific situations?
To benefit from a text, then, it is already necessary that the reader’s judgement be sufficiently cultivated. The capacity for judgement cannot, therefore, be acquired through reading alone, though we might find that reading exercises the capacity and therefore strengthens and refines it. For instance, when I was supervising at Cambridge and regularly giving undergraduate students detailed feedback, this was extremely helpful - it greatly strengthened the capacity for judgement. If you don’t have a strong capacity for judgement, you’re likely either to dismiss texts as evil or to be overawed by them, to take them up in a doctrinal way. It’s for this reason that children are given simple texts that 1) can be misread with limited consequences and 2) will seem to them to be obviously bad when they get older. It is generative for children to criticize the texts of their youths.
For the same reason, it is pivotal that the first book a young person reads seriously be well-chosen, for this book is likely to always be treated with an excessive reverence, even by those young people who subsequently claim to dislike or reject it. It is the work that is most likely to be treated as simply good or evil, even if the person grows into someone who can reflect more deeply on subsequent texts.
In the academy today, it’s common to try to avoid these kinds of mistakes by teaching students that all texts have the same value - that they offer a variety of lenses or frames. It might sound as if that’s what I’m saying. After all, I said that all texts were insufficiently good. But I also described reading as a quest to improve the thing being read, as involving the exercise of judgement. When texts are simply so many lenses or frames, the reader does not take any one text up as a doctrine or hate object, but the reader also refrains from judging. The texts turn into so many discrete alternatives, all incommensurable with one another. The relationship of the reader to the text is non-committal curiosity. There is no possibility of being motivated by the text. The methodology sanitizes texts, protecting the reader from them via castration.
Instead, we can read texts as instantiations within literary traditions. Texts serve as invitations to participate in the traditions of which they are a part. Traditions are distinct from one another in so far as they involve different names, places, and key terms. But traditions are unified in that the people who participate in them are charioteers with horses to manage. The aim of every tradition is therefore the same, but different traditions will suggest different means, appropriate to different contexts and expressed through different languages.
When we read a text, we are potentially inspired to take up its tradition’s particulars in the service of the universal. But we will also find that we are the very first people engaging with that particular tradition in our present situation. No one has ever been in precisely the situation we are now in, because the present is never precisely like any other moment. So, we will face two problems:
Even the texts that greatly inspire us remain bad - the people who wrote them were distracted by their horses, and therefore we cannot simply defer to them.
Even in so far as the texts that inspire us were appropriate for the situations in which they were written, our situation will never be quite like that one.
So, the invitation is for us to try to improve the text, in two senses:
To spot the precise moments in the text in which it falls short, in which there are lapses in its quality.
To adapt the concepts to our situation or to determine that some of the concepts are no longer appropriate.
If we swear off doing either of these things, we cannot participate in the text’s tradition. We therefore reject its invitation. If, however, we continue to go on and on praising or condemning a text, insisting that people use its concepts (or refrain from using its concepts), we reduce it to a doctrine. And if we distill it into some rote formula and trot it out at parties, we reduce it to a lens or frame.
When I engage with traditions, I aim to engage with them as traditions (though of course, I will inevitably fall short). So, when I talk about Plato or Hobbes or Marx, I am trying to participate in Platonism or Hobbesianism or Marxism rather than simply defer to Plato, Hobbes, and Marx as authorities. And, when I try to discuss Plato, Hobbes, and Marx together, I am not treating them as a set of interchangeable lenses. I am trying to genuinely make these traditions intelligible to one another, to find an approach that makes the universal more visible in all of them. To take up more than one tradition at a time, sincerely, involves not merely taking each tradition up on its own invitation, but inviting the traditions to participate in one another.
It was in this spirit that I wrote my most recent piece for the Platypus Review - I have been inviting the members of Platypus to the Platonic tradition, not as an alternative to the Marxist tradition but as a way of deepening their engagement with it.
