I have always been very adamant about the irreplaceable importance of reading primary texts.

For a very long time, I could not say why.

Then, I slowly began to defend this view in the name of empathy. Refusing to engage with a text face to face, I would say, eyes ablaze, is simply impolite. So is seeking shortcuts and summaries, and slyly skimping. These are not very nice things to do to an author of a text — this once living, breathing person with feelings, whose eyes you are refusing to meet.

This defense of the “purity” of a text (which, I must insist, is very different from gatekeeping purity, which is not applicable here, because, of course, reading does not automatically imply agreement) is often lazily described as elitist in everyday discourse. It is very true, I admit, that echoes of my stance are often used by gatekeepers, racists, casteists, and awful, awful people — but I refuse to believe that there is something inherently undemocratic about complexity!

The accusation of elitism at the first whiff of complexity, especially from students who themselves come from extremely elite backgrounds, has always struck me as hollow and manipulative. These students are people with no skin in the game, who, if you tell them to read a book, will get off on describing how knowledge is hoarded in ivory towers by scheming, self-obsessed academics — those misanthropes who despise everyone, including themselves. Oh, those deluded morons, in their quaint, shaky little towers!

Those towers must be demolished, and its treasures brought down to the masses!

Then they will pause, and wait for applause. They will usually get it, too.

Yes, there absolutely is a space for this argument to be made in precise terms. But this particular “liberatory” argument is so imprecise, so self-serving, that it detracts from genuine criticisms that are made by marginalised groups — groups who actually struggle on the margins of exclusionary academic spaces.

For there are many privileged students, given every opportunity and subsidy, who lazily think: if immediate translation into simple language is not possible with a certain text, is it even worth engaging with? This argument comes, I think, from self-serving inertia, and not a final, realisatory climax of rigour, as it is often presented.

Students in universities all over the world — people who are being granted access to the ivory towers, mind you — are struggling with reading. Yes, reading in general, let alone the reading of primary texts. Most undergraduates, in my experience, go their entire degree without ever reading a single primary text. An astronomical amount of energy, equivalent to the ejecta of a small sun, is dedicated to not reading.

Every possible justification for this lack is brought forth in full force into this battle, every possible hack and replacement — AI generated papers, AI generated summaries, Wikipedia skimming, text scramblers, the panicked, convoluted plagiarism of secondary sources. As a result of this evasive culture, I get into heated conversations with many, many people. “But academics are terrible writers”, “I got the same information in simpler language from an AI Summary”, “Everything I needed was in the Secondary Literature”, “these ivory tower academics are incapable of writing simply”.

In this context, I will always remember a tweet from Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, posted by a young Tech CEO:

“Books should be shorter and more efficient. It’s unfortunate that the world doesn’t reward conciseness more. Making books shorter would effectively increase the rate at which we can learn. Or, put another way, the broken incentives today are probably *halving* (or more) the rate at which you can learn. Be mad!”

Like Wiener, I find this way of thinking infuriating, having encountered various “efficient” variations of it in my life. To me, it seems that many, many people are very good at “being mad” about this apparent injustice, but not doing very much else!

Over the years, it feels like pretty much everyone I’ve ever known has run away (very, very fast) from the possibility of ever reading a primary text.

Very honestly, this stand is perfectly fine and understandable, if you don’t want to read, or don’t have the time — but the inane justifications for failing to do so, combined with the expectation of applause for this “brave” stand, never fails to annoy me. The same amount of respect for “mastery” over the subject is demanded, without even an iota of the work.

The fragile illusion of hard work in this meritocratic world can never be shattered, of course.

To be perfectly and inconveniently honest, I struggle with the same complex — while also, of course, being quite smug and obnoxious about never being in with “those” people. Which is probably why I am so harsh, so immediately curt when it comes to this logic of elitism. The cushion of this glib accusation is an easy, automatic haven, whose charms I struggle to resist. It is a masturbatory urge I have to constantly quash within myself. To be encouraged in this behaviour, to see someone else make these arguments, is to be encouraged like an addict.

Let me also admit that reading anything in these times is very, very hard. Leave aside impenetrable texts full of obscure jargon and frustrating Latinate constructions that are so long they fall screaming off the page — a single pamphlet is an Odyssey. Most days, it is borderline impossible to convince myself to get started with works like these. But, on occasion, I have pushed myself through the inertia. Miraculously, I have managed to make it through a couple of such “complex” books. And you know what? It has always been worth it in the end. It is this very experience, of having been on “the other side”, that leads me to my defense of the primary text.

Yet, I must confess now, in the midst of my peacocking, that there has always been one particular primary text. Out there. Beyond. One behemoth lurking on the horizon of my reading. One massive, lurching testament to my hypocrisy. I have studiously avoided eye contact with this calamitous colossus for years and years. Dammit, it still scares me. To even invoke its name sends a shudder down my spine!

This monster of a book is, of course, the “Phenomenology of Spirit” by G.W.F. Hegel. With its unbeatable reputation for being abstruse, it is the representation par excellence of every gripe anyone has ever had with an academic work.

So, imagine my surprise (and mild annoyance) when I found, in the midst this very testament to my hypocrisy, the best, most comprehensive defense of the primary text!

I would like to share it here. I have reproduced it in full, from the Miller translation.

It might be difficult to make it through, but trust me, its worth it. I have italicised my favourite parts. I have also added some paragraph splits where I thought it appropriate:

“§2: The more [that] conventional opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or con­tradicted; and hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements.

The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead.

These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.

But he who rejects a philosophical system [i.e. the new philosopher] does not usually comprehend what he is doing in this way; and he who grasps the contradiction between them [i.e. the historian of philosophy] does not, as a general rule, know how to free it from its one-sidedness, or maintain it in its freedom by recognizing the reciprocally necessary moments that take shape as a conflict and seeming incompati­bility.

§3: Demanding and supplying these [superficial] explana­tions passes readily enough as a concern with what is essential. Where could the inner meaning of a philosophical work find fuller expression than in its aims and results, and how could these be more exactly known than by distinguishing them from everything else the age brings forth in this sphere. Yet when this activity is taken for more than the mere beginnings of cogni­tion, when it is allowed to pass for actual cognition, then it should be reckoned as no more than a device for evading the real issue [die Sache selbst], a way of creating an impression of hard work and serious commitment to the problem, while actu­ally sparing oneself both.

For the real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came about. The aim by itself is a lifeless uni­versal, just as the guiding tendency is a mere drive that as yet lacks an actual existence; and the bare result is the corpse which has left the guiding tendency behind it. Similarly, the specific difference of a thing is rather its limit; it is where the thing stops, or it is what the thing is not.

This concern with aim or results, with differentiating and passing judgement on various thinkers is therefore an easier task than it might seem. For in­stead of getting involved in the real issue, this kind of activity is always away beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and losing itself in it, this kind of knowing is forever grasping at something new; it remains essentially preoccupied with itself instead of being preoccupied with the real issue and surrendering to it.

To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.”

I love this so much! I was very surprised to find such lucid, beautiful language in this book. As ever, I am very sorry for giving into stereotypes about this book, and not going up and saying hello on my own terms.

“A way of creating an impression of hard work and serious commitment to the problem, while actu­ally sparing oneself both.” — this is exactly how I feel about people who refuse to engage with a primary text! Relatability and palatability are wonderful words, with very nice sounds. So is “democratisation”.

Isn’t that what AI is doing to information?

Man, these words have to be interrogated over and over again. This is the job of philosophy. Shiny, nice words cannot be allowed to proliferate simply because they sound nice. Behind the “democratisation” of information, of course, lies the idea of bringing information “down” to people. This obsession of always bringing knowledge “down” to the masses, I think, is a harmful idea to have in the mainstream, as it disguises the true horror of educational disenfranchisement across the globe.

This crisis is such a stark, depressing catastrophe. It is very, very difficult to fully fathom for most.

Which makes it all the more infuriating when those who have been blessed with the class and cultural capital to pursue learning, instead sit back down smugly, waiting for complex ideas to be boiled down to digestible little bite-sized chunks that they can promptly shit out the next morning!

I say that it is the masses who have to be lifted up into the halls of education! Not the heavens that must be brought down to them!

We cannot deflect responsibility away from this crisis with simple platitudes, teeth-grinding and self-serving inertia.

The simple education we receive at school, which is deemed “sufficient”, imprints extremely mechanistic understandings of “knowledge” within us. Books provide a very specific role within that bureaucratic apparatus, and so our entire idea of what a book even is, and its apparently listless function, is shaped forever within this stifling environment. Very, very few people unlearn these ideas, which take a great deal of effort to fully unravel and vanquish!

All is mechanised, robotic, lifeless in this world. Digestibility and reproducibility is all that matters. A static concept remains static as it is described. Static knowledge is then derived from this static concept. And so the plugging of a static hole passively waiting to be filled is accomplished within the pure, virtuous, and chaste edifice of Knowledge. This is an outrageously phallic, puritanical mode of understanding which does not conform whatsoever to the reality of the world we live in, yet proliferates freely in education systems the world over, in ever-multiplying, ever-mutating abandon.

This madness is not reflected in how the world, or knowledge of it actually works — neither in the Humanities, nor in the “Pure” Sciences.

At the centre of this aforementioned mode of seeking knowledge lies a narcissism, pure and simple. A form of faux investigation that “remains essentially preoccupied with itself instead of being preoccupied with the real issue and surrendering to it.”

It is the superimposition of your own aims and expectations, upon the (usually wrong) aims and expectations you extract from a primary text.

If there is a mismatch, you scoff, and abandon all curiosity. There is no room for difficulty, for interpretation, for being stumped. You subordinate everything you read to your own quest for freshness, for excitement, for relatability, as opposed to truly empathising with, and losing yourself within the ideas of an author.

This is a kind of learning that is forever stunted, for it does not respect this person, this human being you are engaging with, nor their choice of communication.

It is the equivalent to being a bad listener in a conversation.

Ideas proliferate through language. Ideas are not axiomatic truths that exist in vacuums. And language, especially simple, boilerplate language, is capable of being subordinated, subsumed, and captured towards nefarious ends. It is Literature that defies this encroachment. And though I do not agree with T.S. Eliot’s rather simple (to me, anyway) emphasis on difficulty, I respect and admire the task that the Modernists set out, and continue to set, for themselves.

What was once rebellious in simple language today is conformist tomorrow!

In a world where the ‘author is dead’, and the book is simply a consumerist product waiting to be pillaged — the logical conclusion of this process is the AI summary — it feels nice to engage and empathise with an author, to humanise them in ways that complicate and confound simple ‘relatability’, to be annoyed by them, and to respect their intent in the way that they convey their ideas.

If empathy seems only a fluffy moralisation to you, a goal that does not spark something in you to shift to this mode of reading, an ever-present narcissistic reward remains in it! Hegel’s insistence on summaries being ‘corpses that have left the guiding tendency behind’ has led me to it.

The mode of reading I am fighting for makes you feel like a necromancer of old, conversing with the dead, arguing unsurely with these long-gone spirits, falling in and out of love with them, interpreting their guttural moans, and ultimately embracing them in their spiraling, maddening complexity, as opposed to the neurotic act of that shameful self-obsessor, that simple pillager, that prisoner to elemental drives, that narcissistic satiater of his own lust — the necrophile.

Don’t be mad!