On Wednesday, May 10, 2023 at 11:14:36 AM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-death-of-the-reader-and-of-democracy/
"For most of history, Truth with a capital “T” was an incursion from without that men and women were variously compelled to accept and profess. It was only after the printing press made texts more widely available and Martin Luther told us that we
had a positive duty to read and understand such texts—or, rather, one text in particular, through which we honed the art of interpretation—that a revolution began to take hold.
Arriving at one’s own personal grasp of the truth became a spiritual obligation. The common solitary reader was born and, with time, authors multiplied to meet such readers’ demands and to create new ones. Truths proliferated as texts, authors, and
readers proliferated, and a multiplicity of religious, scientific, historical, and aesthetic truths did as well.
This textual revolution birthed, in turn, a political revolution. When the single Truth acknowledged by all was the order of the day, absolute monarchies and theocracies embodying and enforcing it were tolerable or even natural, but when religious
dissenters grew sufficiently substantial in number and influence, the separation of Church and state and, later, the broader separation of Truth and state became a necessity.
...
That people do not read much anymore is, at this point, news to no one.
... Nor is the largely audio-visual culture we now have a substitute for what has been lost.
...
One of the most important consequences of this monumental phase transition from literary to audiovisual cultural is the loss of the kind of deep immersion and critical reflection required to build up a personal vantage point, an individual perspective.
If, enabled by Johannes Gutenberg’s technological breakthrough, Martin Luther’s ideological innovation brought the self-possessed, truth-professing individual to the world’s stage, then the confluence of ideologies, such as Marxism and
postmodernism, that deny the individual’s agency and those, such as postmodernism and deconstruction, that cast doubt on the very possibility of truth, have—compounded by the technologies of the mass-market Culture Industry—unceremoniously ushered
the individual back behind the curtain.
In the individual’s place, we have what Max Weber called “status groups,” often taking the form, today, of political parties and other similar political interest groups (e.g., pro-choice or pro-life associations) or tribal identity groups usually
broken out along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. What we also have are careening herds and pile-on mobs assembled on and mediated by social networks, flashing personal and political views with all the care and refinement of
logos, banners, and slogans brandished by inebriated soccer hooligans.
An essential part of how solitary reading forges our individuality is by teaching us the critical discipline of holding ourselves open to the individuality of others. Reading requires that discipline. “What most threatens reading,” the post-
structuralist thinker Maurice Blanchot contended, is the reader’s “stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads.” The hermeneuticist Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that we inevitably come to texts armed with our own
preconceptions and prejudices, and it is never possible to let those go wholly and completely, to experience the text as a kind of noumenal Ding an sich offering us a transparent window onto the “true” design of its creator. What we do when we are
reading well, however, Gadamer explained, is replacing, bit by bit as we go along, our bad preconceptions and prejudices with better ones. There may never be a transcendent meeting of the minds between us and the work’s creator, but we may still attain
eye-opening glimpses into that alien subjectivity.
Such encounters transform us and mold us, over time, into individuals, taking a tabula rasa stained in the primary colors imparted with our mother’s milk and refining it into an intricate mosaic. Today, because we are reading far less than in years
past, that refinement of our primary colors is simply not happening. But it is also not happening because we are forgetting how to read. Instead of letting the book serve as Kafka’s “ice axe for the frozen sea inside us,” we are expecting authors
to affirm our identities and confirm the prejudices we already harbor. We are, thus, no longer open to the influx of other subjectivities."
The famous Confucianist saying is "古之学者为己，今之学者为人。"
AFAIK, Alexander Zubatov has the best exposition on 学者为己, why one must read/learn/write for oneself first.
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