(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Schopenhauer was a German philosopher.
Our reading must always be subordinate to developing a coherent, connected system of original thought. We realise our own knowledge and gain power over it only after pondering it from all sides: assimilating it and incorporating it with our own thoughts. It is of far more value to think something out for ourselves than find it in a book because it is only our “own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them” (Schopenhauer 1974, 493). Truth “merely learned” is “without harmony, relation, and meaning” (p. 494).
We can only think over what we know, so learning is certainly necessary, but to read is to let the author think for us (pp. 491–2). We substitute their thoughts for ours. This can be helpful when the source of our own thoughts stagnates, because unlike reading and learning we cannot simply will to think (p. 493). Thought must be “kindled and sustained…through some interest in its theme”, so when we read we retain what interests us—what suits our system of ideas or aims (pp. 491, 559). Put another way, desiring that we should retain everything we have ever read in memory, is the same as wishing to retain in our stomach all that we have ever eaten (p. 559). However, when we would benefit from reading and find a book worthy of our time, repetition is the mother of studies (ibid.):
Every important book should at once be read through twice partly because the matters dealt with, when read a second time, are better understood in their sequence, and only when we know the end do we really understand the beginning; and also because, on the second reading, we approach each passage in the book in a mood and frame of mind different from that which we had at the first.
Too much reading, picking up a book whenever we have a spare moment, is inimical to the reflection on, and assimilation of, what we learn. We frighten away our original thoughts and deprive our mind of elasticity (p. 492). Our mind suffers total compulsion from without to “think first of one thing then of another, for which it has absolutely no inclination or disposition” (p. 491). In this way many learned people have “read themselves stupid”, paralysing their minds with scattered, second-hand, unconnected thoughts, that, lacking a personal origin, a relation to what they already know, are liable to be forgotten (p. 554).
An excess of reading can habituate us to substituting the thought of somebody else for ours, to forget our own course of thought, and distract us from “making direct use of the book of the world”: “That which is intuitively perceptual and real is, in its original nature and force, the natural object of the thinking mind and is most readily capable of deeply stimulating it” (pp. 492, 496).
To be able to read great books, we must practice the “art of not reading” bad ones; we have too little time and strength to read anything other than the works of great minds (pp. 557–8). These are the works that surpass all others and which the “voice of fame indicates as such” (p. 557). Only these truly educate. This is literature that endures: pursued by people “who live for learning or poetry” (pp. 558–9). Schopenhauer suggests that Europe produces “scarcely a dozen works” in a century which are permanent in this way (ibid.).
The art of not reading involves not taking up a book merely because it’s of current interest to the general public, whose folly is “of not wanting to read anything except what has just been printed” (p. 502). Literature of this sort is pursued by people who “live on learning or poetry”; it is fleeting, quickly forgotten, and should be rejected (p. 559).
In the main, novels are not to be read because they delude their reader about real life. When their lessons are credulously accepted “the place of mere negative ignorance is now taken by a whole tissue of false assumptions, as positive error, which afterwards confuses even the school of experience” (pp. 632–3). They perniciously give rise to expectations “which can never be fulfilled” (p. 633).
Reading can make us better writers by making us aware of our natural gifts, giving us courage to use them. But this requires that we assume these qualities are already within us, latent. Without them we learn nothing from reading but cold, dead mannerisms, and become mere imitators (p. 555).
Good books are “the quintessence of a mind”—the result of all of an author’s thought and study (pp. 559–560). They are useful to a thinker, then, as long as they are permanent and remain subordinate to the organic, relative unity of their insight.