Legitimate reason of reading?

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Why do we read after all? What utility is there in reading books? Can not we do without reading in life? Are we better off in terms of our level of thinking, in terms of culturing our mind, in terms of intensifyng our sensitivity to the world and its people? Have we been successful in finding the meaing of life and the purpose of living and in establishing mutuality and understanding with the rest of the world. Do we read to entertain ourselves?

I beleive both ends are not met with by reading books, ordinarily speaking. Yet we cannot do away with the habit of reading in this millennium. It has been in point of fact a very integral part of life, and it has pervaded our life deeply and profoundly.

The problem again does not cease. The problem is choosing good books from thosuands we come upon on boos shelves in public libraries or in book stores.
Some books simply confuse you and mist your vision and gets you astray and such misleading books need to be avoided.

There is no such idea as to which book to be preferred to which from thosuands there. It is your personal and private choice. Parents or teachers can be of help in choosing good ones from bad ones but the ultimate decision is yours and exclusively yours.

What I worte here afore sounds I am advising as if I am more knowledgeable in deciding. No. This is my view and you have yours and you can discard this idea.

Yes we must discard ideas, for there are millions of ideas and they siimply confuse and coomote us and at times they disillusion us.

No books have disillusioned me more than books of religions and spirituality. They have rather than wideniing my vision or horizon of thinking and undersnading human beings, narrowded down my scope of vision and delimited my range of thinking and constricted my perspective and mindsets. Yet I read them now more and more. They are really awakening. I may sound paradoxical . The fact is now I know the books I choose are really illuminating and they are bradening the path to undestanding the meaning of life. These books unlike those previous ones do not layer my mind, rather they disentangle me from vague ideas.

Books should be chosen in a way that keeps us clear of nets of things or out of boxes of prejudices and biases. We are normally programmed and are wired to certain patterns of thinking and we must de-pattern our thinking proccesses.

As far as the domain of truth or understanding the meaning of life I do not subscribe to the fact that I am better off in understanding it than any illiterate farmers of Asia and Africa. I equally wonder at the creation of the universe. Despite my level of knowledge, academic degrees or erudition I have greater heights compared with those illiterate ones, yet as far as understanding our destiny and the world we live in is concerned I am as ignorant as them, may be not better off than even animal beings about the the nature of things and the mystery of the universe.

These ideas are in fact not mine despite that there has been assimilation or fusion or profusion within me. These are programmed and processed the way computer programmings are done.

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@Ennui phil,

"Yes we must discard ideas, for there are millions of ideas and they siimply confuse and coomote us and at times they disillusion us."

The irony of such words being posted in a forum dedicated to philosophy, and the argument's self-defeating position, is noted.

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@jgweed,

Is it my bad mood or my head-ache? Slowly some doubt has crept into my heart: is this indeed a philosophy-forum?? I read Ennui's text and I see a "discours" as there are so many, sometimes asking an acute question, sometimes giving a bad answer, but overall with the na?ve sincerity of the layman, overall genuine, simple, "true" because of being honest and authentic. I'm moved in fact; it is a beautiful try, it even dares to utter some modest and na?ve blasphemy. It reminds me of my grandmother, she was so sweet and loving; she also tried to think, and she said such silly things, and she was such a racist.. No Ennui mon cher, I'll tell you how to think. You read a book on The Phenomenology of Hermeneutics or the concept of the Dasein in the early Heidegger, you remember the difficult words (no real need to understand them), you choose an opponent and you crush him with your science. Why bother us at all with your simple reasonings, with your awkward conclusions? One must shine here, one must win the disputatio, it's victory or the stake! It's obvious why your posting has so few replies, what is personal, problematic or important to somebody simply doesn't matter here (in his "answer" I see Jgweed clean his monocle). In the "Briefe an Kant" a woman in crisis writes to the Great Philosopher, she feels she's in big trouble but she has quite some difficulty with spelling; after all it's the 18th century and illiteracy is widespread. Now the Great Philosopher gets really horny! He sends her a discourse five times as long as her letter, choosing each word with great care, making it impossible to understand for her, completely irrelevant to her, thinking the woman herself completely out of the equation (jaja, das Moralische bei Kant... ). No help from him, no listening, no merci, not even a gentle correction or some useful education, just his own bombastic egotrip. A fortiori no dialogue, why should he even listen to her, after all he knows best. Conclusion: to be a philosopher here you must be smiling and cooperative. Walk around, see the wacko's (waw, what an Ego), and then save yourself, get the hell outta here. I'm thinking about doing that. Of course I send everybody my thanks. it was sooo exciting, so fulfilling. Yees yees...

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@Ennui phil,

"and then save yourself, get the hell outta here"

Excuse me, but last time I checked your name was Catchabula and not Justin. Who are you to tell someone whether he or she should be denied the right of expressing his or her views? Sure, maybe the question contradicted itself, maybe it was not very well written, but everyone flaws from time to time. Do you know why? Because THAT'S HOW WE LEARN! About yourself leaving, that is your choice, but I must say that's fine by me, the last thing that we need in this forum is another flamer.
:thats-enough:

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@averroes,

For some dark reason (?) I was completely pissed when I wrote my reply. What it taught ME was the influence of moods and emotions on what we say and how we say it. And it was not my first lesson :listening: . I often confuse philosophy with justifying my own weaknesses, as so many did before me. Gimme the whip, I'll handle it on myself.

"Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor", I see the good and I appreciate it, but I follow the bad (Seneca)

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@Ennui phil,

"Gimme the whip, I'll handle it on myself."
I am being absolutely sincere when I ask you this. Was that an apology or were you just trying to be a smart ass when you said that?

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@averroes,

I was in a bad mood, so I produced rubbish. It often happens to me. I am sorry.

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@Ennui phil,

In that case, it is quite alright.

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@Ennui phil,

"Yes we must discard ideas, for there are millions of ideas and they siimply confuse and coomote us and at times they disillusion us."

"Books should be chosen in a way that keeps us clear of nets of things or out of boxes of prejudices and biases. We are normally programmed and are wired to certain patterns of thinking and we must de-pattern our thinking proccesses."

I think you have, in a way, responded to your own question. What books, or education, for that matter, achieves in our lives is 1) presenting other ways of thinking and living for our consideration, and 2) helping us transcend the given around us by both encouraging questions that might never have been asked, as well as providing the means and tools to "depattern" the process by showing us different patterns and "wrong" patterns.

The peasant farmer may well share our wonder at the meaning of life, but without the experience of differing perspectives, will end up worshipping some god dwelling in the local spring or sacrificing another human being for a good harvest.

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@jgweed,

Now I read this thread again and I wondered if there was not some misunderstanding between Ibn Roesjd and me, perhaps due to my bad ingles or to some cultural factors. My reply was just irony, I have a huge respect for Ennui's text, as I had for my grandmother and for the woman who wrote to Kant. Ennui's text felt very sincere to me, personal, authentic, it is philosophy indeed, from head to toe. Of course it is not "academic" philosophy, and in my text I saw the last one as worse. In his text Ennui tackles things in his own way, seeking in his own way, finding in his own way, and that seems to me one of the main traits of philosophy, discovering the universal through the personal, finding truth in and by ourselves. If we see things from the Point of View of Eternity (actually meaning the short passage of humanity on Earth), Hegel and the bunch are just the beginning, or fragments, or works in progress... "the rest of the treatise is wanting" (somewhere in Spinoza). What had irritated me a bit though was the answer of Jgweed. In its laconic shortness I felt some contempt or arrogance, and maybe he felt it so too and was that the reason why he wrote another answer. Thank you for your interesting reply, Mr Weed, and my apologies for my feelings about your little note, they are entirely due to my own (lack of) perception. Now sorry if I go on with this but you know how students are, always conceited, always considering their own words better than the master's. And it's all about my main personal field of interest: reading! Imho the world of books does indeed have some kind of shadow, some kind of treachery, something that makes you loose your trust in books. And I'm not just talking about the limitations of individual words here, or about book's fixed and unilateral way of communication. I'm talking about the fact that the seductivity of books is often opposite to their truth. When you just discovered them books seem like the promised land, expanding your horizon dramatically, letting you participate in a dialogue that stretches across ages. For the young man I once was books were as fascinating as women, each of them being another revelation, each of them adding some depth to my life. But at least some books are just lies; there are not only bad books, there are even some very Bad Books of Deceit (*). Does this discredit all the books? Definitely not, but one does not have to take books for better than what they are, better than man himself, or better than their ultimate goal, the mind of the reader. My present view -as far as important here and trivial as always - is that we must find the truth in ourself somehow (call it "wisdom"), and that we must see books as some point of reference, as something to interact with during our own personal quest. Besides what are books really? As I said before there is so much to read...

Oh, that was precisely what you said? Well, then we agree no? :flowers:

(*) Taking one from my shelves now: "Blood and Myth as Life's Law", by Peter Emil Keuchenius, a faithful disciple of Alfred Rosenberg. No words for this...

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@Ennui phil,

The fact that some books are deceitful is a basic given, same as with all other information. What we don't know is how to sort between deceit and truth? Some would believe that the works of Karl Marx are lies meant to demolish our world, while others would say that they are shining beacons of truth. After all, what were books, news and the internet made for other than to overhaul one's opinion and to replace it with another? Quite a paradox that we'll have to sort out here...

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@averroes,

If we would know how to sort between deceit and truth we would indeed have found the Philosopher's Stone (sic). That's not an easy paradox to articulate and to explore, and certainly not to overcome. It has to do with the transcendance of the old dichotomy of objectivism versus subjectivism, in the field of values as well as knowledge. At first sight we are caught in the idea that there are just two alternatives, on the one hand the conviction that there is just One Truth and on the other the conviction that there is an infinite number of equally worthful "truths", both convictions being equally dangerous for books (they are either burned or ignored). Now one can easily conceive an Absolute Truth revealed by God, but that may be just dreamt of in our philosophy, the concept having died with God himself. One of the big dramas in the history of mankind is the discovery that for us humans the truth can only be something incomplete and temporary, it may be there but we have at most a blurred vision of it, it may be worth the quest though it may never be reached. I thought some start here might be an exploration of the dynamics of science, as it has emerged from the mediaeval world, and especially the notion of "hypothesis", having a subjective as well as an objective side, being like some bridge between both. A hypothesis being the "best truth available at the moment", a truth that has to be used in thinking and in daily practice, but always with the idea that it can be overcome at any time, that it's just temporary and partial and incomplete. Now of course science has its "criterion", something to match the hypothesis against, something which our moral opinions and more general ideas of good and bad have not. But I talked enough. Master Averro?s, can you be of help?

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