C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books | Hacker News Reader

C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

reasonabletheology.org

109 pointsTomte82 comments

The single greatest benefit of reading old books directly, and not via a modern intermediary, is that you realize the modern era is but one of many. More specifically, that past people had completely different worldviews and weren’t simply modern humans living 2,000 years ago. The past isn’t just a foreign country, it’s another planet.

When you read a summary book or a modern translation, you miss this entirely. Everything is filtered through the worldview complex of 2020 to a much higher degree.

I'm curious which parts of the past strike you as being from "another planet", because I tend to get the opposite impression.

Past people didn't have our tech level, but otherwise strike me as being very obviously fellow humans.

(confer Marcus Aurelius' complaint that even when you're the emperor of Rome, you still have to deal with idiots and jerks all day long)

Both are simultaneously true.

You get such a strong impression of Pliny from his letters: a sensible chap, a bit Pooterish, really a classic organisation man, but good-hearted. And his appreciation of his new wife is so touching! Then you discover he was 39 and his new wife was about 14.

I had more morality-type issues in mind. Something like The Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche, in that what we think of as universal human moral attitudes have actually been very different in the past.

A modern example might be imperialism and expansionism. Pretty much universally condemned in 2020, yet was the SOP of basically every civilization since the beginning of time.

Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present.

As far as imperialism goes, it may be condemned in theory, but in practice it looks to be alive and well, at least as far as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military... indicates (expansionism is a different matter, because how is a global power supposed to expand?)

> Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present.

True, but still much less so than they were before the Modern era.

Regarding imperialism, I don’t think your examples are quite apt. While modern nation states have power bases around the world, this is nothing like most historical empires. The American economic “empire” is nothing compared to the Romans, Mongols, etc.

The difference I see is that the Romans, Mongols, etc. were geographically limited and bordered by geostrategic peer powers, with the occasional client states buffering in between. Presumably you see different differences?

(I've read a fair amount of Kissinger, and his main contribution to US political thought had been anticipated by the Melian Dialogue, set about 2'400 years ago)

Sure, from a moral standpoint the Romans or Mongols would probably have zero qualms with using biological weapons, nukes, enslaving the conquered populace, etc. These are obviously all totally taboo today.

If you read about the Mongol siege of Kyiv, or the Romans destroying and salting Carthage, they are way beyond anything considered acceptable today.

I think of the Assyrians who carved into the stones of their public buildings scenes of them killing and torturing their enemies. I don't think that would go over so well today.

Life was cheap, especially to the rulers, and their existence was a zero-sum game (the success of other rulers always compromised their own power to a degree or in totality).

What does "acceptable" mean? What we condemn in public or what we tolerate? It seems that civilians were killed using gas in Syria. Other atrocities are happening in several places around the world and they're dispatched with some stern declarations. When oil supply has been endangered, wars were fought.

Fortunately the US is now a net oil producer and looks to be one for the indefinite future. Hopefully this will help reduce need for the US to militarily maintain access to that resource by force.

I agree. I think one thing I’ve realized is that a few thousand years isn’t really that long of a timespan. And people writing around the time of Rome and even earlier weren’t stupid like I’ve tended to think of them. I think that’s why things like philosophy have persisted through time. It’s not like humans were unable to reason about their existence in the time of Rome. If I read and think about those folks and their experience of the human condition, I am able to relate to someone who lived many generations before me, which I think is pretty incredible to be honest.

One example that comes to mind is maps. I tend to think of North as being up, so North should be at the top of a map. I never realized that that is cultural until I learned that many ancient societies considered East (the direction of the rising sun) to be up, so you find ancient maps with East as the top.

Another example is their view of history. We tend to see history as needing to describe what is "true", that is what actually happened if we had been there with multiple cameras recording the events as they happened. Many ancient peoples would have thought that is a bizarre and alien view of history. For them history was more about the stories that they could tell and if the stories differed significantly from what actually happened, well, so what? Why would anyone possibly want history to describe what actually happened? Who cares? The story is what is true.

> so you find ancient maps with East as the top.

I have seen that before with the T and O maps [1], where Asia is presented as North. They are nice, simple maps for their age

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map

To be “oriented”.

Some old Greek texts have the Past being what’s ahead of you - you can see it all in front of you. The Future being behind you - it can sneak up on you and you can’t see it.

Not just Greek. Many ancient societies viewed time in this way. It makes sense. You can see the past, so it must be in front of you. You can’t see the future, so it must be behind you.

How about in 1600s when people in Massachusetts (and in Europe also) were being burned because they were witches ?

Maybe they got all of them, so we don’t know how we would do today.

That is actually one of C.S. Lewis' examples of how humans have not evolved morally. He claims that the difference is people not believing their child was sick and might die because the weird old lady at the end of the street is a witch. If they were convinced of that then many would almost certainly support burning people.

He was sadly proved right in 2014 when someone posted on social media that a 33 year old women was kidnapping babies to use in satanic rituals. Her neighbors beat her to death (news in Portuguese):

http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2014/05/mulher-...

He talks about this in “Mere Christianity” and it strikes me as correct:

“But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

We could speculate on how modern society would react if it was established that some people really could harm telekinetically, were doing so, and incarceration couldn't stop them.

Not to downplay the atrocity of the whole thing, but -- no one in Massachusetts was burned for being a witch.

> The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

thanks - not sure where i got the burning from

> ...I tend to get the opposite impression.

I think it can go either way, depending on who you read, because contemporary variation has always been greater than difference over time. Much of what I read in Galen or Aristotle sounds like it could have come from a colleague, while a lot of posts on HN strike me as coming from an alternate reality.

I have the opposite take when reading history, especially very old history. The more I read the more I realize that people haven’t changed in thousands of years. The only real difference is speed of travel and communication.

This is a real point.

When you read something with a modern perspective, you might get a vague or simple sense of what the author was intending, but a deeper and richer understanding can be misunderstood, or completely missed. Many simple assumptions in the minds the readers of the time, would be totally lost to us today, unless we reached out and studied.

For instance, (to steal from an author I can't remember) - try to imagine a culture in 2000+ years coming across an ancient fragment which reads: "The Dolphins went to the air and pummeled the Lions."

>The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.

>The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

It is often amazing actually how approachable some of the classic books are.

It's an interesting argument. Without having read e.g. Plato's Republic myself, is the novice likely to learn as much or more from reading a direct translation as they are from its Wikipedia page and some commentaries?

I read Plato's Republic a long time ago now and, both from my memory and looking at translations online just now, it's approachable and comprehensible.

Project Gutenberg has the Jowett translation:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55201/55201-h/55201-h.htm

... and what little I could see of the C.D.C. Reeve translation at Amazon looked very approachable:

https://www.amazon.com/Republic-Hackett-Classics-Plato/dp/08...

I would argue yes, at least for Plato in particular, the commentaries take their time to discuss the topics in the so-called "Socratic" style, and its easy to engage with the arguments and counter-arguments directly. I think with a commentary you risk reading someone else's opinion, without challenging yourself to form your own. It's more-or-less equivalent to doing the exercises in a math text rather than just reading the chapters and letting the author convince you that you understand.

Obviously the ideal is the read the source material and then read commentaries after once you've had a chance to reflect on it for yourself.

Of course for me, I have only ever managed to read Plato and Karl Popper. Other "Classics" like Hume or Kant I can't make heads of tails of the source material without some guidance. I haven't even tried the most notoriously dense authors like Nietsche or Hegel.

The novice is less likely to learn from a direct reading of Plato's Republic than to absorb Socrates's arguments and ingest enormous amounts of food for thought.

The novice will then have the capacity to think more seriously about current or historical political questions and devise better responses or approaches to them (better for the novice and better for our societies).

Always go to the masters first - the Platos, the Keynes, the Freuds... They're by far the best exponents of their own thinking.

For most of human history a single book took months or years of work by a skilled worker to make a single copy. It follows that our predecessors copied those books believed to be of value. This filtering process continued for many dozens of generations. Due to this selection mechanism it’s unsurprising that the quality of the surviving works is so high.

No, this isn’t true. It was only for a period of a thousand years (500-1500) in Europe between the loss of the papyrus paper making industry, and the advent of the pulp-linen paper making industry. This latter period happened to coincide with movable type.

For instance, reading, writing and access to scrolls was fairly widespread in the Roman Empire — it was one of the well-known ways for a slave to self-emancipate. (They could earn pay as a scribe.)

I was referring to the time labor cost. The actual copying was done by hand and doing so without error is harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to have your forum shopping list written down and quite another entirely to copy out the Aeneid, regardless of whether you’re writing on papyrus, paper, or parchment.

Great PBS doc on this recently, describing paper as info tech. The manufacturing process was so cheap in China they literally had blank notebooks for sale to the general public. The Persians or Arabs (don’t remember which) coaxed the manufacturing process out of some captured folks, which eventually made its way to Europe as well. Movable type was the next huge advancement.

Nova on PBS; I think the second episode of the series? It led me down quite the rabbit hole about literacy during the Roman era; very surprising!

Because ancient authors were often aiming more at an oral, less of a literary, tradition, their arguments tend to be more clearly structured and signposted than modern commentary. A listener can't go back and reread, which forces the speaker to be more lucid.

(for a modern example, some of JFK's speeches could even be sampled into song: https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/10/sing_along_with.html without losing their main points, eg http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0510/jfk/05_-_Sing_Along_With_J... )

Anyone know of a list of books that constitute the classics?

Here's a list of the Great Books of the Western World, which is a pretty good place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

Definitely a good selection of books, just a note that the actual books in the series sometimes have quite small print and aren't the most comfortable way to read. I'd recommend using the list and then checking for recent translations/editions of the books.

I’m of the opposite opinion. I like the two-column structure and there’s just enough space to sketch in the margins.

Also, if you can get a whole set I highly recommend it. It’s pretty convenient having so many great works in one place and when coupled with the syntopicon it really is a treasure.

You might check out the list of books in Harvard Classics library, which were intended to be "enough books to give a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

All books in Harvard Classics are available for free on Project Gutenberg.

I recently read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which was I think was from this collection. Particularly as a non American (so lacking his featuring highly in my primary education), I found this really intriguing insight into a brilliant entrapreneurial operator and public figure.

Thank you, will check those out. Will probably rip them from libgen so font shouldn't be a problem

It's taken me a long time to figure out that classics are actually fun; they're the good stuff that persisted beyond the faddish pretensions of their times, and helps me to see put some of the nonsense of my own time in perspective. Plus they cost almost nothing!

I've found most of them to have absurd black and white plots that lack any intrigue.

In particular, Charles and Elbegast stood out for me how none of it made any sense and how the final conflict of deciding whether Elbegast or Eggeric was truthful was decided by having them fight to the death, with the winner declared veracious, not to mention being gifted the loser's spouse, of course.

I was told it was one of the apices of Middle Dutch literature but found it rather wanting, and so asked my teacher if he knew of any Middle Dutch literature that was not considered an “apex” — he could not provide me with such and I still can't find much myself so I'm left to conclude that anything that survived the ages is automatically called an “apex”.

I wasn't impressed and suspect that it is not valued despite being old, but singularly due to that it's old. Had it been written yesterday, it would certainly not be so well received.

Would you say that of Count of Monte Cristo?

You don't live in a world where a god would ensure that a trial by combat would go to the righteous, and there's the difference. If you can't find the mindspace, you rather miss everything else.

And how inconsistent God was in the story in helping is what I would consider a plot hole and one of the reasons I found it a poor story.

It's called a “deus ex machinā” for a good reason — it makes for rather poor storytelling if some higher power, with all the might to ensure a happy end at any point, only elect to do so at specific points.

Again, you don't live in that world. The writer and his audience did. If you can't meet it halfway, or at least allow for it, you're going to miss everything... and that's your fault, not the author's. It doesn't matter at all how it reads with a thoroughly modern mind.

I’ve been enjoying non-fiction accounts from ~150-250 years ago. Fascinating experiences, like Sufferings in Africa, and to your point these are often like $1 for the kindle edition. Memoirs from fur traders/trappers and indigenous warriors in the Western US before the railroad are also fascinating.

Just finished Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Iliad. What an absolute work of art. To think how long ago it was written and how amazing the imagery is is mind bending. I can’t even fathom how good it would be if you could read the original greek. According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great kept a copy annotated by Aristotle himself under his pillow.

Are you aware of any good audiobook versions of the Iliad? I imagine listening to the oral version could be interesting considering that's how most people historically would have consumed it.

https://librivox.org/search?q=Homer&search_form=advanced

The University of Oklahoma Press keeps Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek in print (https://www.oupress.com/books/10672205/homeric-greek). Now, in tackling it by oneself, it certain helps to have learned some Greek already, or at least to be comfortable with grammatical notions such as case, tense, voice, and mood, whether through Latin or perhaps German.

>>Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Iliad. What an absolute work of art.

I read that by accident (reading the kids' summer reading list) and I must totally agree.

Hah! Within the last couple of weeks I read Berdyaev's The Fate of Man in the Modern World, less for any special insight into theology than because the book was lying around, I had heard his name, and thought I might as well read it. On the other hand, I did read a fair bit of Plato and some Aristotle in 2020.

The one thing the modern synopsists will give you, though, is context. Jaroslav Pelikan quotes an American theologian to the effect that the Reformation was the reaction of Augustine's theology of grace on Augustine's theology of the church. I moderately well understand this, not through reading Augustine; I have read The Confessions and a smidgen each of On the Trinity and The City of God. But it was Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo and the first volume of Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine that told me.

Context is always an essential hermeneutic tool. Historic context in particular is nigh invaluable for many works. (This would seem obvious, but one of the consequences of 'death of the author' lines of thought is that a work becomes entirely stripped from all context, and much damage is thereby done to reason.)

Philosophers and theologians tend to be questioning answers that their predecessors or contemporaries have raised. This goes way back: Plato's dialogues have a lot of references to Heraclitus, Parmenides--well, the pre-Socratics--and Aristotle argues with Plato. To read the the successor without knowing at least something of the predecessor is like listening to somebody on the phone: you might be able to follow the conversation from just the one side, or you might not.

I've found something similar with old films: there have been countless movies made, and the better ones have been preserved and left for us today. However, they are often less accessible and need commentaries to clue us in to their world.

In particular, Benedict's Rule is available online, and seems to me to clearly contradict a recent author who had the chutzpah to drag the saint's name into the title of his own work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588118

It is always worth attempting to engage with primary sources, if for no other reason than to be able to avoid wasting time with less than reliable secondary sources.

Sounds a bit like the Lindy Effect. The idea that the future life expectancy of an idea is directly proportional to its current age.

In this case, old books that have lasted till the present day have a lot higher likelihood of having staying power in the future.

Recently I gave up on my latest attempt to read Augustine's Confession. The recommended translation that I have is still so otherworldly wordy that I feel I need something else to help me understand what he is getting at.

I thought that Garry Wills's translation was pretty good. I hear very good things about Frank Sheed's translation, but haven't bothered to get it.

A huge exception is Nietzsche. That guy is just unreadable, I wonder if he was schizophrenic.

I was a bit surprised too, some of the incomprehensible parts or things that look like a split personality could relate to his sister's tampering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_F%C3%B6rster-Nietzsc...

I've never really investigated how his popular works relate to time of initial publishing.

I submitted the reference from that article separately since it is very interesting.

To summarize, it doesn't support editing by his sister explaining his strange style. I would be more inclined to think his strange style stems from his health problems and reclusiveness and made it easy for his sister to edit "A will to Power" into nationalist propoganda which got a lot of people reading things into confusing passages in his earlier works. (Particularly as propoganda may have integrated his choice of terms with his sister's meanings into later nationalist works.)

> That guy is just unreadable, I wonder if he was schizophrenic.

I find him among the most readable of philosophers, maybe the most readable. I can't think of any philosopher who is as readable. I don't care for Zarathustra or his poetry, but everything else he wrote I've read numerous times, with a lot of pleasure. Often he's very funny.

Only his last book Ecce Homo seems really nuts, and even that has a lot of good stuff in it besides the grandiose claims.

It depends where you start with Nietzsche. If your first encounter with his work is Thus Spake Zarathustra or perhaps Ecce Homo, you're going to be confused. In contrast, On the Genealogy of Morality, The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil are clear, lucid, and beautifully written (whether you agree with them is another matter).

(He probably wasn't schizophrenic, but he did suffer from terrible migraines and mental illness. Traditionally his mental health problems were attributed to tertiary syphillis, but that has beeen challenged in recent years with speculative diagnoses ranging from bipolar disorder to brain tumours to early-onset dementia).

If I were to nominate a philosopher for the title of most unreadable, it would probably be Hegel.

Oh, come now. Worse than Fichte and Schelling? Hegel is pretty tough going, but I found The Science of Knowledge to be something like trying to shovel packed snow with a spork.

He perfected the art of postmodern jargon before it was cool.

Make no claim at all, but be sure to include all the buzzwords that signal to the audience that whatever vague theme one is describing probably sits well with it's politics, and instant success is achieved.

I suggest you have no idea what you are talking about.

Nietzsche never used a word of jargon. He made a large number of extremely direct claims. "God is dead" is hardly content-free, is it? As for pandering to his audience for instant success, he mocked every piety that existed in Wilhelmine Germany, alienated most of his friends, and went mad.

> Nietzsche never used a word of jargon. He made a large number of extremely direct claims. "God is dead" is hardly content-free, is it?

“God is dead.” is a claim whose exact meaning, like so many things said or written by Nietzsche, has been debated for centuries now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead#Discussion_by_Hege...

As you can clearly see there are quite a few different interpretations as to the meaning thereof.

> As for pandering to his audience for instant success, he mocked every piety that existed in Wilhelmine Germany, alienated most of his friends, and went mad.

Then those were simply not his audience.

OK, dude. Talking of content-free claims, how exactly would we test your hypothesis that Nietzsche pandered to this mysterious audience which didn't include any contemporary Germans?

I never spoke of whether Nietzsche's claims were true or false.

I merely said they were so vague that it is debated what exactly their meaning was, which is entirely different from them being false.

I'm convinced that Nietzsche is only taken seriously today because of his mustache. Just look at a picture of him without it:

https://i.redd.it/kyww0yu24vnz.jpg

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713855.

lot's of people say they read Karl Marx, but in reality they read Lenin, Stálin, Trotsky or Gramsci. and the original is so superior most of the times!

I know some folks who used to have a Marxist reading group. My recollection is that they bogged down on the 3rd volume of Capital. One of them had a doctorate in economics, and all were well educated.

that's another problem, where people don't understand the entirety of a writers work

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