Reading without comprehending

I’ve been reading Scott Soames’ The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age. As I near the end of chapter 6, I can say that it’s a great book so far and I imagine it will be through to the end. Its main thesis is that in spite of comments to the contrary (e.g. Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and parents of most philosophy majors), philosophy can be credited with shaping the world we have for the better and with continuing to do so. Soames shows his readers how philosophers have helped birth many other disciplines, including the sciences as we know them, but how it also continues to speak to our politics, our concepts of language, rational choice, mind-body relations, and much more.

There are two chapters that I’m confident are good ones but also that I found humbling: Chapter 5, “Modern Logic and Foundations of Mathematics” and Chapter 6, “Logic, Computation, and the Birth of the Digital Age”. Admittedly, much of chapter 6 left me lost, not because of anything Soames did wrong in writing it, but because I struggle with these concepts. I’ve struggled with mathematics since high school. As soon as they introduced “x” and “y” in the equations, my brain became allergic. There’s a reason why my primary philosophy/theological/historical interests have to do with things more social-science-y!

Gottlob Frege receives a lot of attention in both chapters; Kurt Gödel receives a lot of attention in chapter 6. These men seem brilliant. I understand the gist: their work in logic, and the logic of mathematics, laid the foundations for computability. The modern digital world owes them a ton. But the details escape me as Soames mentions this formula and that formula. My poor “it took me two attempts to pass Algebra I” brain tries to comprehend what I’m reading but I must admit, I’m lost most of the time.

This humbling experience has a dual silver lining though: (1) it reminds me to be patient with my students who try and fail to understand the material in which I have expertise; (2) it functions sort of like Umberto Eco’s “Antilibrary” reminding me that there’s still so much about our world that I have to discover and better understand. Let me say a little about each point.

Regarding (1), I’ve been reading the Bible since I was young. I’ve been around religion for the same amount of time. My undergraduate, two graduate, and doctoral degrees all focused on religion and theology. I’ve been teaching on these subjects for over a decade, including eight full years in a high school setting. (I began my ninth year this week). It’s the water I swim in daily. And it’s easy to see a student flailing and think, “Why is this concept so hard to understand? It’s simple, really!” But is it simple, really, or is it really simple for me? I have students in my class who can go to another classroom and take a physics or calculus exam who would do way better than me if I were put in the same situation. It’s not that they’re not smart enough; it’s that they lack familiarity. I need to be patient and provide them with the tools to make my discipline more familiar to them.

Regarding (2), I won’t say much because Maria Popova at The Marginalia has an excellent post on this topic that’s worth your time: “Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones”. But in short, the intellectual Umberto Eco argues that it’s actually good to have a library with books you haven’t read/won’t read. Those books sit there reminding you, “you don’t know everything; you have so much—so much!— to learn”. The aforementioned chapters are having a similar effect on me.

As I flip ahead to Chapter 7, “The Science of Language,” in Soames book, I feel like I’m on more secure ground already. I’ve thought about some of this. I can follow the argument. There are less formulae! But I’m glad I struggled through chapter 6 and that I’m doing my best to walk in complete darkness through the end of chapter 7. Maybe someday I’ll be able to understand this stuff but it’s the discipline of trying to learn, reading even when I need help comprehending, that eventually strengthens the mind to understand. But not to understand everything, and that’s ok.