I've had multiple arguments with people recently in which people have recommended not reading classic books on the grounds that the author held "toxic" views --- even when the work being recommended had nothing to do with these views, when the views were very common at the time (e.g., imperialism can be good), or when, upon closer inspection, the author didn't even hold these views at all, and just "lived in a structure that profited from them".
This anti-classics argument is distressingly common and it's impoverishing us intellectually. This style of argumentation is a lazy and formulaic way of dismissing practically any greater thinker. It's petty and shortsighted to cast aspersions over useful and influential work on the grounds of insufficient wokeness on the part of the dead.
These days, any argument featuring the word "toxic" is very likely flawed and should be ignored. There's far too much moralizing and far too little understanding going around.
Intellectual impoverishment is but one side-effect.
Ah, yes. I recall the first time I encountered this in the form of a trigger warning placed by Wilder Publications in Kant's Critiques (which collected Kant's Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgment). It advised parents to talk with their kids about the way we believe differently today than Kant did two centuries ago before allowing them to read the old German philosopher.
I've since seen and heard about so many more instances of this, that I wonder how on earth any allegedly adult college student can make it through a philosophy course anymore. Or history, psychology, sociology, literature, etc. I can't think of many significant figures in the whole of human history who didn't hold some kind of position that was a byproduct of their time that could be judged objectionable in some way by today's standards--and that now seems to be used as all the reason needed to completely disregard engaging with someone who is recognized as having had a transformative impact on history and thought. It's all very disheartening.
> It advised parents to talk with their kids about...
Was the implication that parent would read Kant for their kids? Or what is going on here?
Edit: A bit of googling shows that apparently this publisher only publishes texts old enough to be public domain and just include this warning as a standard boilerplate regardless of the content. So this have probably nothing to do with Kant or any book in particular.
What exactly is wrong with encouraging parents to talk to their kids about historical context? Isn't that something we should encourage?
I am utterly bewildered by the contradiction in your response. On the one hand you cite a warning that explicitly tells parents to talk to their kids about the text and in the next paragraph you claim that such warnings tell people to "completely disregard" engagement. These are logically inconsistent claims. Please explain.
First, kids don't read Kant. The volume in question was an assigned text in a college philosophy course. Second, I didn't suggest the Wilder warning mentioned in the first paragraph suggested anyone should disregard engagement. My second paragraph is talking about other instances of what I first encountered (in the first paragraph), and the act of holding up a historical figure's dated views as "all the reason needed to completely disregard engaging with someone who is recognized as having had a transformative impact on history and thought". There are no logically inconsistent claims being made here. Two separate paragraphs, two separate but related things being discussed. The first is not laying a logical foundation for an argument in the second.
Sounds similar to the kerfuffle over statues of and things named after people who owned slaves at a time when owning slaves was accepted by a large fraction of the population as fine.
I wonder how many of the people getting upset over those statues and names, and how many of the people who they suggest should be subjects of replacement statues or supply replacement names, do/did things that are accepted as fine now but will be considered terrible 150 years from now?
For instance, maybe the animal rights people win and a future Earth is all vegetarian or vegan, and then the statues we put up of MLK to replace statues of people like Robert E Lee come down, because MLK ate meat.
Decisions about who gets a statue or gets things named after them should be based on the things they did that were extraordinary in their time and that have relevance to our time (either because those extraordinary things have effects in our time, or because we want to inspire people to do similar extraordinary things). The ordinary things they did in their time should not be relevant, regardless of what we now think of those ordinary things.
Are you talking about the controversies regarding statues of Confederate war heroes? The thing they were celebrated for was fighting for the right of the confederate states to keep slavery.
> at a time when owning slaves was accepted by a large fraction of the population as fine.
I guess you don't count the slaves as part of the population then?
And it also ceases to address the fact that many of the Confederate statues were put up specifically to honor those who fought because the people who put up the statues didn't believe blacks should have civil rights and that the erections happened well after the civil war.
Though you'd need to know what you consider toxic, what better way to practice identifying toxicity than to identify it in literature or the arts, before it's part of your personal life?
As the productivity gap increases, unproductive people will become more and more obsessed with petty ideological judgements. Life will become more like high school where clique membership matters more than getting results.
"A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read." --Mark Twain
It's amazing how much low-hanging fruit there is in classics. When I read Darwin's "Origin of Species", I found that a huge amount of it was devoted to this thing called the "Knight-Darwin Law" which was extremely important to Darwin but which seemingly vanished out of all knowledge around the turn of the 20th century, as if no-one was actually reading the book since then. Then I wrote a couple papers related to that Law, which ended up being my most successful work so far.
For anybody else not familiar, the Knight-Darwin Law is the idea that plants do not self-fertilize exclusively (many plants have both male and female sex organs). Darwin goes on at length in On The Origin of Species about the mechanisms that plants employ to avoid self fertilization.
My own take is that this makes a lot of sense. Male and female sex organs are pretty sophisticated adaptations. Features which are that complicated generally don’t evolve unless they are useful and there are easier ways for an organism to clone itself than self fertilization.
Darwin actually articulates a much-more-precise law (which serves as a cornerstone of his whole book). I've argued in my papers that the KDL is in fact an infinite-graph-theoretical statement (remarkable because infinite graph theory was not a mainstream "thing" until well after Darwin).
Let G be the graph of all organisms (past, present and future), with an edge directed from u to v if and only if u is a biological parent of v. The spirit of the KDL is: "G does not contain any infinite directed path consisting entirely of vertices with only one parent". Or equivalently: "Every infinite directed path in G necessarily contains a vertex with two parents."
For its time, the above statement is astonishingly mathematically sophisticated. If anything, Darwin is still greatly underrated.
Darwin is fantastic. Not only did he bootstrap the field of evolutionary biology despite his lack of access to modern genetics, but he also wrote about it beautifully. On the Origin of Species is still a great read and a lucid explanation of a difficult subject. He's a great person to strive to emulate.
It reads like you are adding the mathematical sophistication to an intuitive idea. An "an infinite directed path consisting entirely of vertices with only one parent" is simply a chain.
Compare König's lemma [1] ("every infinite tree contains a vertex of infinite degree or an infinite simple path"), often considered the first example of infinite graph theory. It wasn't articulated until 1927, almost half a century after Darwin's death.
> Then I wrote a couple papers related to that Law, which ended up being my most successful work so far.
I have a serious hard time marking progress in the modern 'science' field.
There are too many people afraid of Industry, so they get a PhD, and to graduate a PhD you need to prove you are correct.
That means too often finding 'conclusions' in 'data' that you 'studied'. The incentive system in science is warping the scientific method to proving your idea by any means necessary. This is not an opinion, its been documented that many PhD studies could not be replicated. (psychology is particularly bad)
In Industry, this isnt true. If it doesnt work, your customer knows. Industry is my indicator of progress. There is no lying about data or stretching conclusions. When you leave the math of chemistry, these conclusions become more and more opinionated.
I agree that by reading I can more quickly understand some things but I try to balance my time by setting aside large blocks of time for thinking about my own philosophy.
I have never spent much time reading this Less Wrong web site but recently I did buy the 50 hour Audible book ‘Rationality: from AI to Zombies’ to list too when working in the kitchen, etc.
Among the many bad arguments this article makes, the most glaring to me is assuming that the "distilled version" of Newton is superior to his original works. Little known fact: Newton had profound insights in the philosophy of science, predicting, among other things, computational complexity,a and if these parts of his thought were heeded, maybe the "Enlightenment" wouldn't have made the terrible mistake of thinking (or willing) the world as a linear, rational place (it isn't.)
"Superior" is meaningless without context. It's all relative to what your goals are. A historian should be reading primary sources. A high school student learning calculus is probably better off with something more modern.
There is a difference between something being subjective and the ability of people to understand it. Subjectivity has nothing to do with how well something is understood.
I want to second the other response seeking elaboration. Will I need to read Newton? That sounds so fascinating.
And to your reasoning for it’s importance, it’s quite optimistic to think it would have made a.difference but nonetheless every bit would have been worth the effort. What a nightmare!
This article leans heavily on an analogy between philosophy and physics and/or economics. This analogy is not generally accepted by most philosophers. Briefly: philosophy is not a science.
>Again this assumes that the job of the distiller is to summarize the original author. A good analysis book doesn’t summarize Newton it digests his insights and presents them as part of a grander theory.
Calculus is certainly part of a more general theory. The works of e.g. Kierkegaard may have relevance to some theories of philosophy, e.g. existentialism, but the best analysis of how Kierkegaard contributed to existentialism is still not a real analysis of Kierkegaard. Philosophy deals with a person's most fundamental beliefs, and because of that we often want to look at the whole actual person whose life grows up around those beliefs. That is not the case in physics or economics.
>This analogy is not generally accepted by most philosophers. Briefly: philosophy is not a science.
Which philosophers are you referring to? I'd agree with "many" but "most" is an empirical claim I'd not be brave enough to make. Do you perhaps mean to say "economics isn't a natural science"?
Case in point: there is tons of kuhnians running around that think of science as a consent-seeking endeavor with agreed upon principles. They recognise that any hard delineation between say econ not being a science but physics being one, usually kicks out a lot of progress in physics as not scientific. Especially those theoretical physics whose predictions are extremely fruitful bbut where experimental data is out of reach right now.
>Imagine Keynes was really a highlander and was still alive and at the height of his intellectual powers. Who would it be more beneficial to read, the 1936 Keynes or the 2010 Keynes?
The "at the height of his intellectual powers" is sort of begging the question.
Imagine Paul McCartney was still alive and active. Who would it be more beneficial to listen to, the 1967 McCartney of The Beatles, or the 2018 McCartney?
Yes, I saw him live last year, he was great :) But it would be daft to think his recent works come anywhere near the importance of what he did in the sixties
IMHO, the archive article makes the better point -- that if a subject wants to advance (e.g. economics, biology, psychology) no scientist today should require the primary teaching texts in academia to be the first ever written on the topic, a century or even a millenium ago. But economics and philosophy, and even parts of cognitive science and psychology still do exactly this.
No, a more productive pedagogy should begin with texts written as recently as possible, perhaps to build on early principles but more importantly to add as much to them as possible while revising all errors and omissions.
Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates. But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment, and the fact that so few scholars read those texts today, is probably why we are heading into a new age of stupidity.
Obviously you can get great in the field of physics or mathematics without reading Plato, but you really shouldn’t, because the works and thoughts of Plato are the foundation of our free society. And that’s just Plato, you really should enrich your life by reading classics of your field as well as philosophy, classic literature, arts and history.
In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to describe it is: ”give people a broad, general basis for developing their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”. In my country, you can’t attend the university without a minimum foundation of classical philosophy, because you can’t do science if you don’t understand how knowledge is obtained, but I’ve never met an actual scientist who didn’t actually delve deeper into those aspects of life, because they offer so much in return.
Another example is programming. Who would you rather hire? Someone who is self taught, or someone who’s educated in best practices and patterns? The latter, because they won’t repeat the mistakes of the past 25 years. Every science is like this, and if you don’t educte yourself on the past, you’re really just wasting your time, making someone else’s mistake.
The real irony of the original story is that it excludes history from this. History happens to be my field, and unlike most other sciences, our classical works are mostly full of lies. Because they weren’t written to keep track of history, but to further the authors political agenda at the time. We use them only because we have to.
> I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment
The rediscovery of classical philosophy spurred the Renaissance, the Enlightenment was later and, though it built opon the Renaissance, not really directly stimulated by classical philosophy.
If you read "Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy" you'll see how this whole story of "Ancient Greeks were great philosophers but then their knowledge was buried during the Dark Ages by Muslim conquerors and when their knowledge was recovered during the Renaissance by Jesuit scholars the torch of wisdom lit bright again and the world found Enlightenment, yada yada" is the same sort of thing as tribal myths of "primitive" cultures
FWIW, I think the standard narrative is that knowledge of the great Greek and Roman works was lost in Europe as a result of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the immense reduction in civilizational complexity that it entailed, not as a result of Muslim conquest.
And further you'll find the standard narrative is that the Arabic world was responsible for preserving many of the great classical works and for advancing knowledge of mathematics and science during the middle ages.
>Ancient Greeks were great philosophers but then their knowledge was buried during the Dark Ages by Muslim conquerors
Don't be silly. It was Christian Europe that lost and discarded the non-religious philosophical texts, and the Muslim Middle East that preserved them and advanced from them.
Yeah, I mean, that's a even the standard narrative; the idea that they were lost due to Muslim conquest and rediscovered by Jesuits I've never heard before, and it isn't even superficially plausible since there was no general Muslim conquest for them to be lost in, and the Jesuits were formed too late to rediscover them and spark the Renaissance.
In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to describe it is: ”give people a broad, general basis for developing their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”
This sounds like the English term "liberal education."
>Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates.
They should. Not to get the technical details, but to understand the spirit and the spiritual adventure that got them their fancy degrees and labs. And also to not be uncultivated technocrats.
>But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
The fact they were "white men" doesn't mean anything, except if you're racist. Or anti-racist racist, which is also fashionable.
I'm as anti-colonialism as they come, but in Europe and the US the majority of the population ethnicity-wise and the founders were also "white" so why would they study something else? Those "white men" built their culture. In Africa and Asia, they can (and do) study their own people on those matters (e.g. Confucius, Lao Tse, Zuo Qiuming for China, and so on).
Besides, Philosophy, like literature is not some path towards "progress", as it's not a technical endeavour. It's a collection of ways of thinking about society, culture, ontology, ethics, politics, and so on. Those complement each other, they don't obsolete them. And often the best discoveries come earlier, rather than later. At worst, the philosophy of an era might not fit the cultural fashions of another. But that doesn't make the philosophy obsolete (and those fashions would change themselves with time).
And unlike with Physics, where you can use some random textbook to learn that f=ma without reading Newton, in Philosophy the full wording and context matters as well. What you're left with when you distill it is like Cliff Notes to War and Peace as opposed to the book itself (or "Functional programming for dummies in 24 hours" book as opposed to the "SICP" to use a CS inspired example).
"Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates. But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods."
Philosophy is more of a dialogue with great minds of the past and present, rather than some kind of "advance" or "progress" of the kind idealized in some views of science.
If you want to engage in a dialogue, it would be a good idea to try to figure out what the other people in the dialogue thought and said.
If you're trying to make better predictions, create more accurate models of the world, or build better bridges, you might not care what anyone else thought or said except in so far as they help you with your project. But that's usually not what philosophers are after.
Also, if you are ignorant of philosophers of the past, you are likely to reinvent the wheel or get bogged down in issues already covered at length by minds far greater than your own.
Finally, reading, analyzing, and discussing the philosophers of the past is great training in philosophy. It is in some respects analogous to doing exercises in mathematics, or maybe participating in a programming contest.
To call Hippocrates "white" is to be deeply ignorant of the history of racial divisions in societies -- which is forgivable for the average person, but not in someone making a specific argument about racial divisions.
> But economics and philosophy, and even parts of cognitive science and psychology still do exactly this.
Economics absolutely does not do this. Philosophy might, depending on the program, approximate it for a very loose understanding of “primary teaching text”. But philosophy isn't even in principal a discovery-of-the-correct-in-a-falsifiable-domain process (it once included that, but that part since had been split out of philosophy as empirical science.)
> But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
No, they don't; economics doesn't usually expect neophytes to read non-current texts at all, and philosophy might have you read ancient texts (or excerpts therefrom) early on, but only explicitly critically, not “as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.”
> But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
My understanding is that economics programs rarely bother to require a student to dive much into history anymore. There's little time spent understanding the many schools, their development, what they get right/wrong, or how they continue to provide helpful models of understanding reality. Instead, they seek to present economics as a science with an obtainable universal theory/model of everything, free of subjective value judgments--but a half-decent study of the history of the development of political economy would, much to the chagrin of the neoclassicalists who changed the term to economics, would quickly disabuse the students of such a notion.
As a former student who studied philosophy 20 years ago, there was zero suggestion that the dead white men's words were written on clay tablets by the gods. There was vociferous debate on those dead white men's words, none of which were divine, and then more debate when we found out what the next dead white man said to counter the first, and so on, until we started encountering notable dead (and sometimes not-dead!) white (and not-white!) men (and women!). Reading contemporary thinkers first would have been a rather frustrating and utterly counterproductive pedagogy because students wouldn't understand what newer thinkers were reacting and responding to if they didn't already understand what came before. I've never personally encountered a philosophy professor--or philosopher, for that matter--who even suggested anything in philosophy was written as if by the gods themselves (who very frequently are doubted to even exist, or don't figure prominently in notable works).
"Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates"
I don't think those three (or all dead white men in general) exist on an equal footing. An educated person should read Darwin, even though modern evolutionary theory has moved beyond. I think Galen and Hippocrates are less important, although I must admit I say that out of ignorance, as I know little about them besides their names, the existence of the Hippocratic Oath, and the general sense that Galen is not at all relevant to modern medicine.
The thing about reading historical stuff is that in trying to learn something, it is useful to know how the first human who understood it learned it, as well as how some people think you should approach it today.
Some things developed in the past have been completely overturned and are clearly obsolete, but some have not - calculus, Newtonian mechanics, etc.
I think you're ignoring the point of the article. In science you generally only want to build upon something when you are certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that what you're assuming is correct. Otherwise it is, at best, a waste of time. At worst it's something that could severely mislead people and undermine your entire field. For instance first let's consider physics. I can explain to you the math of acceleration, gravity, friction, conservation of energy, or other basic aspects of nature. In 30 minutes you can setup an experiment and confirm for yourself with practically 100% accuracy that this is all correct. This, these sort of first principles, can be very safely built upon. But then as you build new ideas upon these first principles and then new ideas upon these new ideas, you run ever greater risk of fundamental mistake. And so going back to the original sources is critical to understand how they came to their conclusions and where the risks might be.
Now let's consider psychology. Psychology itself lacks any real first principles. Different people, and sometimes even the same people, will act in different ways in the same scenario. At best it's a probabilistic science which introduces major and complex issues, when done perfectly. And it's not done perfectly. Outside of flawed logic, these sort of sciences also seem to attract unusually flawed scientists. For instance it's now completely clear that the Stanford Prison Experiment was literally fake. The students were coached on how to behave by the 'researcher', and saw the experiment as literally playing improv with one another. The 'mental breakdown' that caused the experiment to be cancelled after 6 days was fake. And we've now been teaching that experiment to kids for some 50 years, and ongoing. And it's not just older experiments of course. Recent research has shown that some 50-60% of major psychological studies in reputable journals cannot be replicated. You simply cannot build upon this in any meaningful way and to try to do so would turn the field into an even greater mockery of anything that purports to be science.
This anti-classics argument is distressingly common and it's impoverishing us intellectually. This style of argumentation is a lazy and formulaic way of dismissing practically any greater thinker. It's petty and shortsighted to cast aspersions over useful and influential work on the grounds of insufficient wokeness on the part of the dead.