I grew up believing that the Bible was the only book I needed to know and that King Solomon (of Israelite history) was the wisest person who ever lived....
I'd grown up without much emphasis on academics. My mom didn't care if I brought home As or Fs on my report card. "You're a smart kid, you'll figure it out," she'd say. And until I started studying theology, that's exactly what I did, even in college. I had no concept of money or time or anything. Almost overnight, my theology classes had transformed me. I read constantly. First, I read the Bible cover to cover repeatedly. Then, I turned to theology and church history. I researched topic after topic and found myself spending hours online reading texts from www.earlychristianwritings.com, which is, as of this writing, still a great repository for primary sources from church history.
On account of my studies, I could tell you why the early Christians didn't believe in the ascension of the soul. I could tell you why any progressive who claimed to love the Gospel of Thomas clearly hadn't read the whole thing. I could explain Paul's doctrine of the Fall based on what was commonly believed by Pharisees of his day. I had gone from nearly failing out of college to being a rigorous academic.
One fall semester, at the advice of a friend, I took a Critical Writing and Literary Analysis class from a man named Tom. Tom was supposed to be one of the most challenging teachers on campus. Really, he just made students think. He scared away half his students with a syllabus full of assignments. After half the class dropped the course, he'd reduce the work load and have us focus on digesting the readings. I still wonder if the school's administrators knew that he did this. We loved it.
Tom had us read Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche and so much more. We analyzed the world from their perspective. Tom played the Devil's Advocate, making sure that we both understood the author's perspective and took it seriously. We wrote a lot.
The exposure to primary philosophy documents reshaped my mind. At once, I fell in Love with Aristotle, Nietzsche and Hume - so I read them, especially Aristotle. I read his Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics and more. His insights were so much deeper than Solomon's. It was undeniable. The realization slowly led me away from believing that the best knowledge to be had came from scripture.
Reading philosophy was more than just a ideological shift for me. Not only was I openly embracing reason over faith, I was subjecting myself to scrutiny. I began to use the perspectives of the authors I'd read to deconstruct myself. I found myself compelled to criticize my own perspectives as if they were those of an intellectual adversary. Deeply held convictions frequently changed overnight. It was a terrifyingly stressful experience that gave me panic attacks for months. It changed me forever. Even now, when I consider an idea, a multitude of voices challenge my evolving perspective from a variety of angles. I bring friends and authors into the perspective and even past versions of myself. It's exhilarating. It's bad sleep hygiene too.
One of the most important documents I read was a short essay by David Hume entitled A Standard of Taste. The essays asks how people know what they know. It changed the way I looked at knowledge. We never have it all. We learn bits and pieces. We become experts in tiny fields of large subjects. Information can make us less ignorant, but it never really makes us smart. I came to distrust teachers who didn't see their own knowledge this way. How could they teach me to think if they didn't understand the limited nature of human knowledge? What could they show me if they thought that seeing one painting made them as much a connoisseur of art as analyzing a thousand?
The same thing happened when I read Emerson's American Scholar, an essay that tells us to read dead authors poetically, to be inspired by them rather than reading them like French Neo-Classicists. If Karl Marx were alive today, he would say something different than he did in the 1800s, so we shouldn't apply his words directly to our situation. We don't know what he would say, so we shouldn't pretend. But, we can take his work and the situation to which he was writing and take inspiration. We can extract things from the text and reapply them. This is true of all dead authors. It's true of living ones too. It's even true of past versions of ourselves. The lessons we learn in one situation rarely directly apply to situations that follow. If we think they do, we may be led to apply the right lesson to the wrong situation.
I'd grown up without much emphasis on academics. My mom didn't care if I brought home As or Fs on my report card. "You're a smart kid, you'll figure it out," she'd say. And until I started studying theology, that's exactly what I did, even in college. I had no concept of money or time or anything. Almost overnight, my theology classes had transformed me. I read constantly. First, I read the Bible cover to cover repeatedly. Then, I turned to theology and church history. I researched topic after topic and found myself spending hours online reading texts from www.earlychristianwritings.com, which is, as of this writing, still a great repository for primary sources from church history.
On account of my studies, I could tell you why the early Christians didn't believe in the ascension of the soul. I could tell you why any progressive who claimed to love the Gospel of Thomas clearly hadn't read the whole thing. I could explain Paul's doctrine of the Fall based on what was commonly believed by Pharisees of his day. I had gone from nearly failing out of college to being a rigorous academic.
One fall semester, at the advice of a friend, I took a Critical Writing and Literary Analysis class from a man named Tom. Tom was supposed to be one of the most challenging teachers on campus. Really, he just made students think. He scared away half his students with a syllabus full of assignments. After half the class dropped the course, he'd reduce the work load and have us focus on digesting the readings. I still wonder if the school's administrators knew that he did this. We loved it.
Tom had us read Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche and so much more. We analyzed the world from their perspective. Tom played the Devil's Advocate, making sure that we both understood the author's perspective and took it seriously. We wrote a lot.
The exposure to primary philosophy documents reshaped my mind. At once, I fell in Love with Aristotle, Nietzsche and Hume - so I read them, especially Aristotle. I read his Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics and more. His insights were so much deeper than Solomon's. It was undeniable. The realization slowly led me away from believing that the best knowledge to be had came from scripture.
Reading philosophy was more than just a ideological shift for me. Not only was I openly embracing reason over faith, I was subjecting myself to scrutiny. I began to use the perspectives of the authors I'd read to deconstruct myself. I found myself compelled to criticize my own perspectives as if they were those of an intellectual adversary. Deeply held convictions frequently changed overnight. It was a terrifyingly stressful experience that gave me panic attacks for months. It changed me forever. Even now, when I consider an idea, a multitude of voices challenge my evolving perspective from a variety of angles. I bring friends and authors into the perspective and even past versions of myself. It's exhilarating. It's bad sleep hygiene too.
One of the most important documents I read was a short essay by David Hume entitled A Standard of Taste. The essays asks how people know what they know. It changed the way I looked at knowledge. We never have it all. We learn bits and pieces. We become experts in tiny fields of large subjects. Information can make us less ignorant, but it never really makes us smart. I came to distrust teachers who didn't see their own knowledge this way. How could they teach me to think if they didn't understand the limited nature of human knowledge? What could they show me if they thought that seeing one painting made them as much a connoisseur of art as analyzing a thousand?
The same thing happened when I read Emerson's American Scholar, an essay that tells us to read dead authors poetically, to be inspired by them rather than reading them like French Neo-Classicists. If Karl Marx were alive today, he would say something different than he did in the 1800s, so we shouldn't apply his words directly to our situation. We don't know what he would say, so we shouldn't pretend. But, we can take his work and the situation to which he was writing and take inspiration. We can extract things from the text and reapply them. This is true of all dead authors. It's true of living ones too. It's even true of past versions of ourselves. The lessons we learn in one situation rarely directly apply to situations that follow. If we think they do, we may be led to apply the right lesson to the wrong situation.
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