My Take | The splendid futility of reading philosophy
- For some of my old and former friends, their favourite method of self-pleasuring is reading big fat books. It’s a perfect habit during pandemic lockdowns
The great Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into foxes and hedgehogs. He was inspired by Archilochus who said, “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.”
Looking back on some academically oriented acquaintances I made along the way, it seems habitual readers are like that too. Some read promiscuously, across genres; others have only one really big book. For sure, they may be avid readers who read many other books and authors, but there is always that one book, one author and one moment that kind of defined their life and gave it direction.
I know people don’t read nowadays. Social media, virtual reality, the metaverse … whatever! I make no judgment. If you like to play computer games and make money off YouTube by live-streaming your plays, I perfectly respect that. Totally.
But I am ageing and old-fashioned, and very bad at computers.
A long-lost friend from college was mesmerised, in his youth, by Alexander Kojeve, a Sorbonne lecturer, mid-level bureaucrat at the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union, and a suspected Soviet spy. Kojeve was the guy, incidentally, whom Francis Fukuyama stole from in The End of History and the Last Man, a book that was excruciating for both of us to flip through, let alone read.
From the first paragraph of Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, a collection of his legendary lectures at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, my guy was hooked. My ex-friend would go on to marry, then divorce a French girl, and translated another major work of Kojeve, which is widely used today.