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June 26, 2009

My Impactful Five

John Hobbins thinks I should fess up to the books and scholars that have had the most impact on how I read the Bible.

For me this is a lot harder than some might think. One approach would be to list the relevant works of Noth, von Rad, Cassuto, Gottwald, Van Seters and the like and let it go at that. For reasons I will address below, this seems wrong-headed. Another approach, driven by the more narrow philological interests that I often display here on my blog, would be to list two dictionaries, two grammars and one of several influential linguistic works. As they sit on my bookshelf, these works are monuments to human learning, but when I take them down, they generally become monuments to my own ignorance. To be sure, ignorance has influenced my thinking and, therefore, should be given its due. But I'm not all that happy with highlighting the impact of ignorance on my reading. In addition, I often display a narrow philological interest here as a cover for a much broader thought process.

There is a still larger concern. The Bible is just one set of literary works that interests me. Any literature I read impacts my understanding of the other literature I read. In addition, my life's experiences influence how I read and understand literature (and everything else). So to fulfill my social obligation I will list below a snapshot of thinkers whose works have had a disproportional influence on my life and the way I approach all literature including the Bible.

I'll start with the first impactful book I ever read, Plato's Republic. I own several versions of the Republic. I acquired my old Jowett translation in 1953. I was eleven years old when I first tried to read it. I didn't fully understand it then and, even with numerous rereading over the years, I still don't. But I have learned two things that impact how I read all other literature and how I understand life itself. First, I learned that fiction could sometimes communicate extremely complex but imprecise ideas better than non-fiction. Second, I learned that for any well-formed question there is a fact of the matter. In other words, since reading Plato, I have always been a realist, certainly a physical realist but even a moral and aesthetic realist. I also learned that the fact matter that answers many well-formed questions might be extremely illusive. I must add that while I am a realist and have toyed from time to time with Platonism, I now think his metaphysics and epistemology are fatally flawed and even rather silly. I'm not so sure he believed all of it himself but that is another story. These days, I while am far from being a Platonist, neo or otherwise, I still often find myself asking, "What would Plato have thought of this?" You see, for me all thinking is a footnote to Plato.

Second, I would point to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Most of Twain's fiction reinforces the notion that fiction is an important vehicle for communication. But more, in Huckleberry Finn I learned that conventional expectations often mask serious errors in thinking. Personal norms and conventional thinking are not the best standards for judging people or literature.

Third, I continue to reflect on what I learned from Taylor's Calculus with Analytic Geometry. From the mid forties to the early seventies this was the most commonly used calculus textbook. At least it was in United States. Taylor was neither my first exposure to mathematics nor my last; it is just the one I remember most fondly. How does this affect my reading of literature? It is a simple if often ignored fact that a math textbook is a very specific and easily identified literary genre with an unambiguous Sitz im Leben. I wish all literary genres were so easily identifiable. Mathematics demonstrates a pristine beauty that often stands in stark opposition to the equally wonderful messiness of the rest of the world. I gave up any quest for that pristine beauty in literature when I gave up Platonism but much of my thinking is still driven by a quest for informal but fairly rigorous models that may (or may not) inform my reading. Mathematics imposes an extreme standard for critical thinking on its practitioners that practitioners of other disciplines can never match. As an amateur working in the humanities, do I have math envy? I sure do.

Fourth, Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which I read for the first time in high school, lunched my life long interest in natural explanations for just about everything including literature and particularly the Bible. Humanists often forget that we too are products of the natural world and therefore our works are also products of that world. As such, they are deserving of our best efforts at natural explanation.

Finally, Danto's Narration and Knowledge has left its mark. Because of its rigor, his analytical approach to the philosophy of history, has taught me much. I find his emphasis on the ability of historians to make true statements about things in their past and his thoughts on methodological socialism and the social individual particularly stimulating. Do I agree with everything Danto says? No, but he does not let his critics get off all that easily.

Having compiled this list, I must now tell two unvarnished truths. First, this is today's list of the impactful five. Tomorrow's list might be significantly different. Whitehead, Salmon (just now I'm thinking of Merrilee but Wesley could make such a list also), Kuhn, Aristotle, Dawkins, Dennett and Diamond along with many others might be on some other day's list. Second, no writer or scholar has affected my thinking more than have my friend and teacher Loren Fisher and my friend and wife Shirley. I also continue to learn from both my children in the professional capacity as philosophers to be sure and even more in the role as my now adult children. That doesn't mean that I agree with all that these friends and family members have tried to teach me and it certainly doesn't mean that they agree with all my thoughts on my many abnormal interests.

Posted by Duane Smith at June 26, 2009 1:46 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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Comments

Posted by: John Hobbins at June 26, 2009 2:51 PM

Posted by: Ken Brown at June 26, 2009 8:30 PM

Posted by: Duane at June 27, 2009 9:58 AM

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