Thread by @AgnesCallard

Why Difficult Old Books Make For Independent Minds:
A Long and Engaging Thread

I can teach philosophy w/o making use of any texts. So can @zenahitz, I bet. The students will love it, & walk away having learned. They'll also walk away being a little more like whichever of us taught them. That's bc--and now I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret...

--part of what makes @zenahitz and I such good teachers is that we are charming. (I'm allowed to make this scathing accusation of her because we're old friends) This is also part of what makes @philosophybites good at exposing the public to philosophy.

When you listen to people like us, you want to adopt our point of view on the world. You find yourselves trying to think like us. To say we are "manipulating" our audience is too strong but...we are kinda manipulating you. This is just part of what is meant by being "engaging."

(Yes of course, I'm doing it right now, in this tweet series. And you're going to keep reading, aren't you?) Writing that grabs your attention, is accessibly "public," entertaining, "fun," un-putdownable, is written by someone who knows where your buttons are.

Anyone you find riveting is "gaming your psychology" in some way. Humans are programmed to learn to anticipate how others will respond to us on basis of accumulated social-psychological cues & optimize our outputs for approval. "Engaging" people are talented at this.

More generally: all communication involves status games, flattery games, signaling games, etc--w/possible exception of certain kinds of logic/science/math talk. But such talk has also been purified of the human in such a way as to...throw out a lot of babies with the bathwater.

Is the answer "Go Contemplate The Forms Alone!"? The prospect of becoming an intellectual hermit uncorrupted by socializing might sounds appealing at first, but that life plan turns out to have a fatal flaw: no one can learn anything of humanistic value alone.

"What is your argument for that claim?!"
Instead of defending it I'm gonna call it "Agnes' Axiom" & bank on your accepting it on the strength of my charm. (The autodidacts won't like it but they don't tend to be very charming so I'm not too worried.)

Ok so that leaves us in a pickle: humanistic value is the most important kind of value there is, but we can't pursue it without being manipulated--and those of us passionate about helping others pursue it can't do *that* without manipulating them. Ack! What's a human to do?!

The answer is: a subset of the people out there available for you to "not be alone" with are Dead People. And a subset of those people have been dead a long time. Hundreds, thousands of years.
Old Difficult Books to the rescue!

The fact that it's hard to read those books--the long dead are unengaging--is a flipside of their not being in a position to manipulate you. Unlike me, Hobbes hasn't got a clue how to "game" a psychology shaped by mass media, capitalism, pop culture, the internet etc.

So even if a "Great Book" were being written now--surely some are--it can't do for us what the dusty ones can. The ancient Greeks only become more valuable as they recede into the past. The deader someone is, the better a study partner they make for.

None of that is to deny that most of us, most of the time, need help/handholding in order to Talk To Dead People. And that's where @zenahitz & @philosophybites & I come in--each of us doing so in different ways, with some infighting over method to be expected (& imo welcomed).

But it's not snobbery or elitism that motivates those of us who do so to romanticize Great Books. Our goal is the opposite of those who want to protect & perpetuate control over some tiny fiefdom.
Our goal is to liberate people--in the first instance, from ourselves.

cc @PhilipPullman