Reading classic works is a distinctive form of pleasure. It is both a deeply personal experience and a shared participation. I'm reading Wang Yangming with my students. This is a neo-Confucian Chinese philosopher who has generated a rich corpus of commentaries, thoughts, and actions in China, Japan, South Korea, and worldwide. My students, Americans in the twenty-first century, can approach this philosopher too with their unique backgrounds and add to the shared interpretation of his works.
The joy of first experience
There is, as Descartes already observed in Passions of the Soul (1649), something unique about first experiences that can never be repeated upon any subsequent reads. This feeling of first experience Descartes identifies as wonder. When I was in my late teens I decided to read all of Jane Austen's novels (there aren't many). A friend and great Jane Austen fan who had read them all at least six times expressed envy at what I was about to experience. Oh, to read Jane Austen for the first time! What wouldn't he give to have this experience of firstness again!
Once I had read some of her books I could think about them, gauge the social situations she sketches and her insights. Then, our experience became shared—my friend and I now both had read Austen. Since, she has become part of our shared interpretive world, the lens through which I consider relationships, choices, and risk taking. As
points out, reading is not disengaging from the world. This experience of reading but also contemplating and absorbing Jane Austen's work is wholly my own, shaped by my unique experiences, including prior reading experiences, and my temperament. At the same time, the experience is also fully shared. I participate in a community of Austen readers that stretches back in time, adding a unique dimension to my reading.In her book Spinoza's Religion: A new reading of the Ethics (2022), theologian Clare Carlisle provides the experience of shared reading as a means to explain Spinoza's third kind of cognition, scientia intuitiva. For Spinoza, there are three ways of knowing. The first kind is constitutes normal cognitive processes of sense perception, recollection, and imagination; the second is reason which proceeds by explicit steps; the third is a kind of intuitive grasping or apprehension:
Thus scientia intuitiva permits its own kind of repetition, though one might argue that the different spatial-temporal conditions of these intellectual activities (Spinoza in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, myself in London in the twenty-first century) are rendered so irrelevant by the immediacy of intuition that this is communion rather than repetition. And we form a community of readers, all of us, insofar as we understand the Ethics, sharing in the same reflexive intellectual activity—it is a great joy. Like Spinoza’s very first readers, we do not encounter the Ethics alone: as we read and understand, maybe by very gradual degrees, we are participating together in understanding itself—participating, inother words, in the attribute of thought, in God’s power of thinking — Carlisle, p. 43-44.
For Carlisle, the immediacy of intuition breaks the barriers of culture, gender, class, time, all those different things that separate us, and it generates a genuinely communal experience. It was certainly like this for me with the Ethics. After several failed reading attempts decades earlier (I was very put off by the format, and having to go back to earlier propositions all the time, I didn't have the patience for the work then) I finally managed to read it a little while ago and I was completely gripped by this piece of philosophy, which is also (as Carlisle points out) a masterpiece of literature. It's like an austere, intricate Bach composition, with its frequent forcing the reader to go back, and the clear and simple prose. By the time I got to part V I felt deeply moved, and regretted I didn't specialize in history of philosophy when you get to do this the whole time.
Vibing with the Ethics
I'm not alone in being so moved by this work, intellectual giants like George Elliot and Albert Einstein were too, as were and are many other people. In July this year, I was at a workshop in Chile that aimed to build bridges between American and early-career Latin American philosophers. It was a two-week workshop with plenty of downtime and socializing, and I got to talk to one of the more senior Latin American participants, a philosopher who lived and worked in Colombia.
When the topic of the Ethics came up during dinner he told me that as a teenager he read it and became so gripped by the work, that he went to live as a hermit in a cabin near the Amazon forest, to the immense displeasure of his parents who did continue to support him in his subsistence. After two years of deep meditation, reflection, and utter solitude, he slowly came back to society thanks to Native people he would sometimes go to, to consume ayahuasca. They gently coaxed him back into society, and he went to study philosophy at university, and later became a professor.
I was intrigued by this story because there is clearly something that we both respond to that is inherent to the Ethics—something we intuitively grasp that sits within the text and that seems to transcend the barriers of language, culture, race, gender, etc. What are we responding to?
Xu Ai really gets Wang Yangming
Xu Ai, Wang Yangming's (1472-1529) brother in law and beloved student (who to Wang's intense regret died very young), wrote a postscript to Wang's Record for Practice, which provides range of philosophical insights written down by his students. These include difficult and obscure concepts such as the unity of acting and knowing, the idea that akrasia is only apparent and that someone who truly knows filial piety will take care of her parents, spontaneously, and without any motivational or doxastic conflict.
As Xu Ai mentions in the postscript, he found some of Wang Yangming's ideas very difficult and perplexing, but
[A]ll these teachings were at first difficult to reconcile with one another. However, after contemplating them for a long time, [I discovered that] unconsciously my feet began to step in time to them, and my hands began to dance [according to their rhythms]—Record for Practice, Xu Ai's postscript, PJ Ivanhoe 2009 translation
The Postscript refers to a similar passage in the Mengzi, a book from the Warring States that was written centuries before Wang, and so directly illustrates what it means to vibe with the ancients. After thinking, contemplating, digesting, the reading, it becomes a part of you and you internalize it like music. This internalization and the intuitive feel we get for a classic text makes it part of the shared, communal experience.
What is happening, at a cognitive level? Is there something essential to the text that makes Wang Yangming both alluring to his students, 16th-century Chinese lesser nobles who were studying for the Imperial Exam, and my students, 21st century mostly Midwestern Americans studying for a Bachelor's? I don't think we need an essentialist reading like this. However, I do think that texts such as Record for Practice and the Ethics are not infinitely flexible in their interpretation. There are some features that remain relatively invariant.
Note for instance that as Xu Ai observes that you have the immediate reaction to the work (the firstness, as I called it above) but then slowly, as you contemplate, you begin to get that mature, intuitive grasp Carlisle talks about, a more profound yet intuitive sense of understanding. This understanding can be radically different for each reader! Think of how Gilles Deleuze reads Spinoza's Ethics, and compare this to say, Michael Della Rocca, or compare Della Rocca to Nadler and it seems like three radically different Spinozas emerge: a Nietzschean advocate for joy and freedom (Deleuze), an austere metaphysician (Della Rocca), an atheist iconoclast (Nadler). And you can add to this your own reading.
When you, as an academic, want to make the case for your reading and help add more layers and depth to the shared conversation, you have to put in the work. Unexpectedly, I have found this also to be great joy and privilege of academic writing.
Friends with the ancients
I'm a lot more open to the idea of a canon, a corpus of shared works that due to their salience become easily available to us, than many other academics I know. Many academics want to do away with the canon altogether. They cite racial, gender, and other biases and they call it elitist to select few works in such a vast range of ptions. I think canons need to be carefully thought about, can and should be altered over time. There can be multiple canons too. But there are advantages to have a corpus of classic works: it's not huge. It's very difficult for a beginner to consider the rich tapestry of all those past works and to wonder what to read. I certainly experienced this, growing up working class and curious, without guidance from my parents or teachers. Starting with canonical works gave me at least an entry point, and these were also readily available for free in the library.
When we have works that we can respond to together as an extended community, we not only have the joy of shared experience in a community of scholars now. We even have the joy of communing, in some sense, with people who preceded us and who are now dead. Mengzi raises the intriguing possibility of friendship with the ancients.
Mengzi said to his disciple Wan Zhang, “If you are one of the finest nobles in a village, then befriend the other fine nobles of that village. If you are one of the finest nobles in a state, then befriend the other fine nobles of that state. If you are one of the finest nobles in the world, then befriend the other fine nobles of the world. If befriending the other fine nobles of the world is still not enough, then ascend to examine the ancients. Recite their Odes and read their Documents. But can you do this without understanding what sort of people they were. Because of this, you must examine their era. This is how friendship ascends.—Mengzi, Bryan Van Norden translation, Book 59B (p. 141)
This passage by Mengzi has always struck me because of the possibility it offers: friendship that transcends time and space, even the brief spans of our biological lives. It's frustrating we live so briefly, and that a lot of direct friendship and scholarly interaction is precluded. But if Mengzi is right, friendship in some sense is possible through reading. As Bryan Van Norden observes in his commentaries to this text†, Mengzi sees an intimate relationship between virtue, friendship and textual understanding. Since in his view genuine friendship is based on shared virtue, communing with the ancients allows for some form of friendship too.
Phenomenologically, this seems to be the case not only because you feel sympathy for a writer or think they must've been an amazing person. Who knows how they were in real life? Kant scholars can admire and love Kant yet know he held racist views, so it's complicated. Also, as
(Eric Schliesser) once told me, never meet your heroes.No, I think that this sense of friendship arises purely textually, from what you can glean from the works in that mature spontaneous intuitive sense you get after contemplating them, and rereading them. You feel that the author has your back as a reader, is in a sense rooting for you to grasp their insights.
It certainly feels like this to me for the Mengzi, a work I deeply adore and keep on coming back to. My copy is filled with pencil scribbling, dog ears, and sticky notes. I get a strong phenomenological sense of Mengzi's belief in the inherent goodness of humanity, and that belief, combined with Mengzi's astute philosophical insights, is one I keep on turning back to when things are difficult. I feel the intense regret when I read the parable of Ox Mountain, which compares a bad human person to someone, who like that mountain was beset by axes and overgrazing and whose virtues yet still tried to sprout, but then, unfortunately were eradicated. When I feel anger at people who are destroying our society, I think sometimes back of Ox Mountain (at least in my less petty moments) and it gives me a better understanding of what must've gone wrong.
To conclude, we can all vibe and commune with the ancients. Our intuitive grasp of their work, after mature contemplation and making the texts our own are valuable and add to the total collective knowledge of the work. Thus knowledge is shared and built upon, and friendship ascends.