Wednesday, July 20, 2005
(8:15 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Reading the Whole Thing
Ted Jennings has impressed upon me the value of Reading the Whole Thing. Indeed, not just Ted, but CTS as an institution has done so -- in the first part of the Hebrew Bible survey (taught by Ken Stone), for instance, we were routinely given reading assignments like "1 and 2 Kings" or "Psalms." That's part of the reason that I'm moving at a glacial pace through my patristics directed reading -- the assignment is, say, "Irenaeus," as a whole.Now I wouldn't want to do it any other way. I am, of course, reading these works in a somewhat dated translation, but that is unlikely to have a really major effect on whether I get a good idea of the broad outlines of these people's thought -- and, most importantly, not just the way their thought related to later orthodoxy, which is how doctrinal histories and "sourcebook"-type anthologies tend to be arranged. I think the later orthodoxy is important to understand and grapple with, but there's a lot in Christian thought that doesn't have anything (directly) to do with hypostases, ousia, etc. I'm discovering more and more of that as I make my way through. In fact, there's a lot in there that doesn't have a lot to do with "doctrine" at all, and that's the stuff I'm finding most interesting at the moment -- and as an aside, I'm disappointed that so many secular thinkers who approach religion seem to go straight for the most "doctrinal" part of whatever text is at hand.
This has to stop somewhere, obviously. For instance, reading Clement of Alexandria, I find myself thinking that I have to read Philo, and by "Philo" I mean The Whole of Philo. And then there's Plato. I've read a lot of him in my day (as translated by Jowett, who may well have thrown back some beers with the guy who translated Clement), but Clement likes to cite the dialogues that one tends not to read or that tend not to be anthologized -- Laws, The Statesman, Timaeus... This is getting to be as bad as the time when I tried to read an essay by Lacan, then he said you have to read Critique of Practical Reason, which said you have to be Critique of Pure Reason. At some point, summary and anthology (and translation, which seems to be much less frequently questioned) are necessary. Perhaps part of becoming a scholar, part of what constitutes the turn by which further education reveals ignorance, is familiarity with the impulse not to settle for "good enough" and with the melancholy knowledge that that impulse inevitably leads only to the outer reaches of "good enough," never to the point where knowledge has been definitively attained and consolidated.
UPDATE: Since I mentioned translation here, I will link to this interesting post from No Great Matter, e-mailed to me by Jonathan Dresner. The question: What constitutes plagiarism in translation?
