Beware: it’s too easy to let others’ schema and ideas dominate your own.
When reading, the default is to let the author do your thinking for you. Per Schopenhauer:
When we read someone else thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. … Accordingly in reading we are for the most part absolved of the work of thinking. … It stems from this that whoever reads very much and almost the whole day, but in between recovers by thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think on his own – as someone who always rides forgets in the end how to walk. But such is the case of many scholars: they have read themselves stupid. For constant reading immediately taken up again in every free moment is even more mentally paralysing than constant manual labour, since in the latter we can still muse about our own thoughts. But just as a coiled spring finally loses its elasticity through the sustained pressure of a foreign body, so too the mind through the constant force of other people’s thoughts.
That’s bad from an epistemological perspective, but it’s particularly bad for achieving novel insight. How can you think thoughts which have never been thought before if you’re reliant on others’ thinking?
Per Kant:
Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Dare to be wise!
One key antidote: Write about what you read
References
Kant, I. (1996). An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? In A. Wood (Ed.), & M. J. Gregor (Trans.), Practical philosophy (pp. 11–22). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813306.005 (Original work published 1784)
Schopenhauer, A. (2015). On reading and books. In C. Janaway (Ed.), & A. Del Caro (Trans.), Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays (Vol. 2). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139016889 (Original work published 1851)
Stop Relying on a Source and Have Faith in Your own Thoughts • Zettelkasten Method
- I had believed that texts contain information, and that it was my job to make the information accessible.