Saturday, October 08, 2005
(10:43 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Becoming-Cow
To be sure, one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays--and therefore it will be some time before my writings are "readable"--something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a "modern man": rumination.We have forgotten how to chew our cud--actively forgotten, it would seem, unlearned. Philosophy, writing is something to chew, swallow, regurgitate, chew, and swallow again. Of course, Nietzsche is not the only one to use digestive metaphors for this process. Those hapless undergraduates, who have learned so little even after over 12 years of schooling, are described as "regurgitating" their professor's lectures into their blue books on the day of the exam -- and the professor duly assesses this steaming pile of vomit, according to the standards appropriate to vomit. Some vomit is quite good, for vomit -- A+ vomit, the best vomit I've ever seen. Now chew it again a while, vomit it up a couple more times -- because that's what it's going to be the first few times: vomit, of various colors and consistencies.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface, sec. 8
Show some decorum -- rather than being a binger and purger of ideas, become a cow. No one needs to see your vomit. No one needs a notebookful, or indeed a blogpostful, of your vomit. Keep it to yourself -- chew it, let it move through you until it becomes part of you, until it is incorporated into you. We don't have the enzymes necessary to digest this stuff on the first pass, no one does. But once you have digested, then open your mouth, not to vomit, but to speak -- not to "apply" certain foreign ideas to some outside experience, certainly not to display some trait like "cleverness," but to bring your thoughts to bear. Digest them properly, thoroughly, and they are your thoughts, they are part of who you are, no longer any more (but also not any less) of a foreign body than your native language itself, "your" native language that you got from someone else.
If a good reader, a good student (not merely in the institutional sense of the word) is a cow, then perhaps a good teacher is the mama bird, chewing up the first pass, and perhaps the second pass as well.
