How readers approach a piece of intellectual writing

By -
"the present writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head." -- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, p. 18

Comments

  1. Mike B.8:45 PM

    This is an insightful observation, and I think it applies even to "above average" readers who are knowledgeable about a subject but in the grip of ideology.

    This brings to mind something that happened to me some time ago. A Facebook friend posted a comment about a book entitled "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations." Based on the "collectivist"-sounding title alone, I immediately prejudged the book as being socialist drivel that had no merit. On a whim, I decided to look the book up on Wikipedia and discovered that (according to Wikipedia, at least) the author of the book was making pro-free market arguments somewhat along the lines of Hayekian notions about the benefits of decentralized knowledge in society. I immediately revised my opinion of the book to a favorable one and thought perhaps I might peruse it some day.

    Then I realized something. In the course of just a few minutes, I had completely changed my opinion about a book 180 degrees -- moving from unqualified condemnation to unqualified approval -- without even having read a single page of said book! I think this was what first made me realize the point you had been making for so long on this blog about the tendency of ideology to act as a filter that prevents people from perceiving information that challenges their preconceived notions. I wasn't really able to grok your point fully until I had had this experience that made me realize that ideology was preventing me from learning and growing.

    I have since relaxed my approach and no longer harbor the same inflexible attitudes toward my beliefs that I used to. In large part this was thanks to the posts you have made on this very blog, and I want to take the opportunity to thank you for that!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah8:53 PM

      Well, Mike, thank you for your kind words! And yes, you have grasped just what I have been getting at, and which I got from others like Voegelin and Oakeshott.

      Delete
    2. gcallah8:57 PM

      And it really is intellectually liberating: one can read, say, Marx, and realize that although he had hold of a very one-sided truth, there is a lot of insight in what he wrote as well.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more