The Intellectually Honest Read
Dear Reader,
The intellectually honest read is a fairly simple one. Its most common form runs this way: if you really disagree with some writer’s stance, you should read them far enough to fully make that judgment.
Now, of course, there are limits on how far you can take this—no one has time to read every writer who takes up a disagreeable position. And some positions can be navigated without reading too much in the literature—I can be opposed to cannibalism without reading every just-being-the-devil’s-advocate-here take. You can advocate for the devil; I’ll invest my reading time elsewhere.
But most of us, myself included, shortcut how intellectually honest we are in our reads. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of prudence—scarcity of time, other pressing concerns—but at least as often, given how strongly we hold certain ideas, it’s an intellectual cop-out.
The intellectually honest read, then, is about taking up the argument. It’s about looking into the hullabaloo and examining what’s there.
I’m not certain where I first got the idea behind the intellectually honest read. I mean, it’s not mine, obviously enough. I just don’t know how I stumbled upon it. I say this because it was with me long before I hit the intellectual tour known as college, where students are more commonly exposed to the idea of intellectual honesty. (More commonly, not necessarily, I’ll note. It’s not a core lesson learned in college—depends on one’s mentors and all of that.)
I vividly recall one example from high school wherein I undertook the intellectually honest read: I had read a fair bit about educational pedagogy—yeah, I started early on this beat—and from what I’d read, I was pretty sure that John Dewey was the worst. I thought, though, that other people’s summaries of this guy couldn’t be the sum of my critique. I needed to tango with him in his own words.
It’s a good thing that Dewey was the philosopher I decided to take on because, while he’s a capacious and diffuse writer, his prose isn’t highly technical. After exhausting my library’s collection of books by him, as well as a few interlibrary loans, I wrote a pretty terrible paper on him and his ideas. (I don’t actually recall the paper, but I’m sure it was terrible.)
I did read Dewey again after high school, as he’s been a central figure in both the critical thinking movement and our culture’s general technocratic mania. Because I’ve been tracing the term “critical thinking” for more than a decade, Dewey was a necessary return visit for me. I’ll save my evaluation of his writing for my book. I’ll say here that I found him less offensive my second time through his many works, although I wasn’t saddened by my youthful reservations.
John Dewey is one of my earliest examples, but I more recently read Trudy Govier because I had seen her referenced in about every book ever on critical thinking, and I was super annoyed that she kept getting referenced. I didn’t want to read her—my stack of books relevant to the subject is in the hundreds and articles in the thousands—but she is also a huge figure in informal logic and argumentation theory. So I finally read her, most unhappily.
Govier is now one of my favorite philosophers. Like, favorite favorite. I appreciate what she writes on, I appreciate how she writes, I appreciate her thinking. She’s one of the writers who helped me mature in my interaction with Douglas Walton’s scholarship.
I’d never have discovered her had I not been obligated by the necessity of not embarrassing myself with a rudimentary, known-only-by-passing-reference understanding of her arguments. And while some of my research on her work has been as painstaking as my high school adventures with Dewey, that painstaking approach has largely been because I recognize those writings which will demand continued reflection and engagement.
Another form of the intellectually honest read is a willingness to perhaps consider historical figures who espoused some views that we find unpalatable today. Again, there are limits to this, both of time and interest.
An interesting recent one has been Aristotle. I’ve had more than a few people who’ve commented to me that “We don’t need to read Aristotle any more because his best ideas have already been summarized and advanced upon by others.” Aside from the question about whether those advancements are real rather than merely declared as true without evidence, there are some questions about engagement with Aristotle because he’s been so influential historically.
If you want to do history research, Aristotle plays a pretty heavy role in history, including American history. So to do history research well often requires some familiarity with him.
A major reason people don’t want to read Aristotle—there are a few such reasons—is that he does, in fact, argue for slavery. He does not, however, advocate for racism, which is what many people often infer is his argument. It is not better than that argument, though.
It is simply another form of very bad. But interestingly, this form of very bad is as much a contemporary discussion as one of the past.
As many thinkers smarter than I have observed, sometimes examining arguments in history frees us to see some of the poor arguments of our own time, even arguments that are identical but buried beneath other contemporary concerns (or language). As the above essay on Aristotle does a good job of exploring, there’s some relevance in reading Aristotle in the present, as even his bad arguments still carry some weight.
(I think Aristotle has many good arguments and insights, I’ll note. And then there are ones like the central one in the above essay… But those I still learn from, as I try to untangle why I think they are hot garbage.)
I was reminded by a recent discussion—and then reading a parallel piece that same evening—that the intellectually honest read isn’t just about reading those with whom you think you have a genuine intellectual disagreement. It’s also about investigating your own preferred ideas, those claims about reality you really want to be true. (This is, of course, how you find yourself reading The Wealth of Nations as a teen, which I don’t recommend.)
I can’t say that that sort of self-reflection is always fun. It has, however, led me to more confidence in some positions and far less confidence in others. And even more entertainingly to my mind, it’s led me to go hunting for some better ideas on quite a few occasions, as the ones I thought I’d held I found wanting.
To intellectually honest reads,
Kreigh
P.S. None of the above means I’m going to pop open The Great Gatsby. Whether that’s a matter of intellectual inconsistency—and thus hypocrisy—or related to a different set of intellectual principles is another matter.
P.P.S. As this period of openings and closings, stoppings and (re-)startings, continues with no immediate signs of real resolution, I keep reflecting on only the fifth thing I wrote for this newsletter. It’s one of the few pieces that I’ve been mostly satisfied with before sending out. But that’s not why it sticks in my mind (I’ve forgotten half the pieces I’ve written). It sticks because each level of it catches a different aspect of this ongoing experience—not perfectly, not completely, but aspects. And for some reason, it’s a piece that I find encourages endurance. If you’re finding yourself in need of some endurance, maybe the piece will offer you the same sustenance as it does me. (It mostly sticks because of the central story, one which for obvious reasons keeps flickering to mind.)