Abstract

The balance between creative thinking and creative scholarship is a hard one to achieve, partly because the lure to be original is in conflict with the desire to be fair to the insights of past thinkers and partly because one can never be quite sure whether his scholarship is mere pedantry or actually constitutes significant discovery. In his essay, “On Books and Reading,” Schopenhauer distinguishes those who have “read themselves stupid” from those who take time to ruminate and set their own thoughts to work. “A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity,” he writes, “and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it.” Thomas Hobbes once observed that if he had read as much as other persons of his acquaintance he would have known no more than they. But the trouble is that if one does not read enough of what others have thought, he may repeat mistakes they made or turn down some cul-de-sac which is not worth exploring or is profoundly trivial. More common in philosophy is the arrogant upstart who has fastened onto some formula which he treats as a talisman enabling him to decide what to ignore and what to study. For a time, there were some philosophers who thought that anyone before Hume was not worth reading, and there are still a few who think anyone following in the footsteps of Descartes must surely be wrongheaded.