Do you ever feel overwhelmed by number of philosophers and thier many texts? I’ve come to the point where I realize that I’m going to have time to get to many of those philosophers one finds on a list. I have this idea that I don’t want to miss out on some insights, and so I must read at least some bit from each philosopher. This is not going to happen. My plan is to come up with a chosen list and just focus on those. Maybe I’ll read some histories of philosophies and a few summary articles on others.
My Amazon wish list is 12 pages long, and my bookshelf easily holds another…100 books or so. Everytime I go into the library at my university, I’m taken by the number of books they have in there…how many opinions there are, how so many people write so much about essentially the same thing, and how tedious scholarship has become. There are more than enough specialized branches of study, each requiring its own specialization to completely understand, each becoming more distant from the other branches…hardly ever integrated.
I’ve noticed how rushed and sloppy college is getting too. My guess is that as more and more information becomes available and we get further from the foundation, you need more education and more information to read in the same amount of time. You have to cover centuries of material in a few weeks…work that took entire lifetimes and dedications to create demolished in a few slipshod weeks and careless college students who don’t want to learn, nor do we know if they even deserve that privilege.
Yes, I think it’s a problem that everyone has their own opinion…and that it’s hard to even find someone who is not trying to write their own novel. It’s hard to read everything, even harder to read them well and understand them or integrate them. Emerson once said that we should not just read, but LIVE what we read…when we read history, we LIVE the era and shine of the diversified experience. It’s more than just recognizing it; I think understanding it is to know it like the back of your hand, to be able to explain it and apply it everywhere.
And YouTube and Google Video and such make it only worse. Have you seen the number of documentaries, and videos worth watching on there?
And it’s not as if I just have one desire at the same time either. I’m reading 5 different books right now, in addition to the 4 classes that I’m taking in college. I finish about a book per week on my own, and about a book per week for school.
I try to sift between the opinions of the people who read them all, then focus on the ones who get the most attention and look into whoever sounds interesting. Right now, the list is at Emerson/Thoreau, Nietzsche, Rorty, Walter Kaufmann, Taoism, Schopenhauer, Hume, Spinoza, Proust, Weber, Quantum physics (in general), Vedantas/Upanishads, Sartre, Baudrillard, Campbell, and a few more.
But I do think that too many opinions are detrimental.
Yeah, I’m similar October. I also have a lot of books on my Amazon lists. I have them grouped into subjects like Philosophy, Classical Civ, History, Economics, Math and Science, and random. I usually try to read about 10 books from the college library per semester. I only consider myself as getting some kind of overview on what is out there in philosophy, hoping to pick up some ideas as I go along and eventually return for a deeper study of a selection. Thanks goodness I should be done my surveying of philosophy this semester.
I’ve stared at the books thinking about how so many of them are not going to be picked up and read. I wonder what is out there and know I will not beable to take down one shelf among the many. Then again, some books are nearly repetitions of others. I looked at all the Calc books wondering if they’re ever going to get rid of some of them. Anyway, the library is the best area of the college…
LoL.