What Is Reading, Anyway?

I deleted Zotero recently.

It was something I used to record and organize the books I'd read, and I deleted it precisely because it worked too well.

I had been using Zotero to log each book I read, but at some point it started to feel less like I was reading books and more like I was reading books just to add them to Zotero. It felt closer to intellectual vanity, so I went ahead and deleted the database entirely.

It's a relief.

I thought about why I read books.

In Plato's Phaedrus, there is a story in which Socrates criticizes the invention of writing.

When the Egyptian god Theuth invents writing and claims it will enhance human memory and wisdom, King Thamus pushes back, arguing that writing will actually cause people to forget.

People, he says, will stop using their own memories and instead depend on externally recorded text, and having read a great deal, they will mistake that for genuine knowledge.

The critique is that writing is not a remedy for memory but merely a tool for reminder, capable of producing the appearance of wisdom rather than true wisdom itself.

Human memory has its limits.

Without writing, vast amounts of knowledge could never have accumulated. Ironically, the very fact that we can read Socrates' critique of writing is possible only because Plato committed it to writing.

And yet, as you read more, a tendency emerges to treat the act of reading itself as something sacred.

In truth, a book is fundamentally ancient information frozen at the moment it was written, not something to be venerated in itself. What matters is the information it contains, and that information remains rooted in the era the book came from.

Reading can cultivate the ability to trace a book's logical flow, but some books make their arguments so forcefully that, without critical reading, you can be powerfully swept along by them.

Ultimately, being uncritically captivated by an author's logic and finding satisfaction in neatly stacking up a reading list in Zotero share the same root. If you finish a book, let it fade from memory, and keep only the sense of satisfaction, was that really a worthwhile act?

Schopenhauer went so far as to disparage reading as "delegating thought to others instead of thinking with one's own head." You take the finished, pre-assembled thoughts that someone constructed within the limits of their era, install them in your mind as-is, or file them neatly in your computer's database, and feel reassured as though you have acquired that much wisdom. The "appearance of wisdom" that King Thamus warned against was probably exactly what I had been doing.

A book is simply an old tool carrying the concerns of the era its author lived in. The real product left over from reading should be the gradual revision of your own system of thought that happens while you read. It must not become merely the satisfaction of having read.

But thinking about it, even this line of reasoning could itself be mistaken. Is reading that doesn't change your thinking meaningless? Then again, meaning itself may be nothing more than something humans assign. And so the thought loops endlessly in my head.

For today, I decided to stop here. There's no right answer to this question anyway. As time passes, I'll arrive at a different conclusion. I always do. I am fickle, and I am always changing.

Later, I might not be able to recall a passage from a book I erased and end up regretting it.

Specific sentences can always be looked up again. The internet is readily available these days. And in the process, I might stumble upon something new.

What matters is the fact itself that my system of thought changes.

What I deleted was nothing more than a certificate proving I had read certain books.

And so I write. Even this act of writing may not be so different, in the end, from the Zotero I just deleted.

Accumulating posts on a blog is its own form of collection, and the hope that someone will read them is just another face of intellectual vanity.

The "appearance of wisdom" that King Thamus criticized will not disappear simply because I deleted Zotero. If there is one difference, it is this: Zotero was a warehouse for storing other people's thoughts, while this writing is the work of pulling out my own thoughts and assembling them.

Arranging results that are both mine and not quite mine, I keep fighting with myself. That is why I write. I wonder how my thinking will have changed by tomorrow.