Why Pragmatism Isn’t Everything
We have a glowingly humongous number of reasons not to read. After the Dot Com Boom and the current technological revolution (yes, it is a revolution) of AI that we are witnessing, information not only is at our fingertips but also curated beyond our imagination. If confused regarding a concept or something that might’ve made you open a few encyclopedias a few decades ago, now is just a question away at the prompt box of the most intelligent AI. We’ve all heard the arguments regarding the pointlessness of memorizing since everything is already available to you in the internet, on similar grounds, can be made an argument against reading. Something else can do the reading, summarizing, even complicated tasks like theorizing and analyzing for you, to provide all that you need on a silver platter. If you can get the gist of Dostoevsky, and not only understand the novel, but also use the AI to drill on every aspect of it as you wish/need, then what’s the point of reading those 600+ pages? Certainly the opportunist undergraduate who needs to write an essay on Dostoevsky will choose a way other than reading those hundreds of pages, and having tools like ChatGPT at his/her fingertips only makes reading be the least appealing option. And, pragmatically, the student shouldn’t need to really worry about anything else if something like Dostoevsky can be ignored away. Technical books are the last books people want to read anyways, they’re for reference when in need of finishing something and GPT has mastered the art of pulling up references. Proper textbooks are supposed to be read throughout the semester but…really? They contain information from an author, and GPT treats it basically the same whether Philosophy or History. And then, we are left with something that can be a bit engaging like novels and here we are trying to erase that as an option as well, because apparently AI can now do it all for me. Very pragmatic, no? I can “read” (more like, consume) a lot more than anyone could in the past and absorb the necessary information without actually going through the act of reading. I just need to develop one habit of interacting better with the AI, and be good at extracting what I need from it.
And this is what the “pragmatic” line of thinking leads to, and I believe its a dead-end. It leads to nowhere. And whatever it leads to, which might be important or not in other contexts, is far from why people have been and continue to read since humans have devised language. Why the best minds of all have always read, and why reading (even in loads) for misleading reasons–such as the pragmatic reason–will always miss the point.
For It’s Own Sake
People throughout the years have read for all sorts of reasons, there’s reading done primarily for syllabus, for writing something, for reference, because you were gifted something etc. And amidst all of this, there is the worst of all reasons, reading because you want to “gather information” and “increase your knowledge” so as to cover as many books as you can. This is the kind of mindset that led us see the surge of book groups forming, Meetup being used for book readings, people exclusively using reading as a “premium hobby” that puts a certain light on the other person regarding how you spend your time. All of this is good, and you certainly are surprised when you read that I consider this the worst of all reasons. I do so not out of spite, but only out of concern that this has led to reading being a fad, a commodified trend, a superficial act whose aim lies more in the glorified image it creates than in its native process. This is also fine, and actually pretty good that people care about being glorified through reading but this is exactly what gives way to the pragmatic reasoning I mentioned above. These are the people who would use GPT to not read at all while extracting the same amount of “information” or “knowledge”. One main reason for this is also when we consider reading an act that needs to be done once for a particular need we have, and after we’ve gotten what we need we move on to something else. And exactly opposite to this is what we need to consider, the way against pragmatism.
Books are (usually) a complicated body of information, it really is nothing less of a magic how humans have come to the point of arranging and articulating information in a few pages that can be communicated across the globe. The way a book gets written is a journey through the author’s mind, and so is the process of reading the same. And, because it is the journey down the mind of a complex human being it is heavily unjust to think about a singular reason when reading a book. There cannot be a singular reason, it is us who narrows the domain of the thoughts the author has spread over only to create yet another product of tunnel vision1. Thinkers as broad as Nietzsche or Kant suffer this all the time, their thought gets reduced to labels and treated on that basis.
To read is not to produce any glorified image, or to “gain knowledge” these are extremely good secondary concerns that one can have or maybe not. The real cause behind reading should be to explore the complicated domain of human thought, which resoundingly refuses to be reduced to anything as such.
It is with this abstract reason that we should never give up on reading, and nothing like an AI can take over. It can develop advanced enough to aid us in this process, in the process of exploring terrains of thought but it will be just another tool like many other tools we have to aid us. We do not have to read for commodification purposes, to consider that a book contains something for which it is sold (the commodity), you can always get that elsewhere and in better means. What you won’t get elsewhere is the experience of engagement that the reader gets when he or she goes line by line throughout the text keeping in mind the author’s preface, the life he lead, the myriad of other ways in which his writing and work has been helping others and everything else that those pages can help you imagine. This active process of connecting not just the text, not just the author, but far apart ideas, processes, histories and other books while reading is what makes the engagement preciously unique. Even if GPT can really serve you with all those references, until and unless you actively partake in thinking through it you’re still just circulating through packages of information and nothing else.
Thus, reading is more in the process than the outcome. Reading is another process of thinking that allows you to explore beyond what you could’ve come up with. To explore your thinking along with that of another, and it is that process which reading produces. Out of that whatever products one gets is great and nice for whatever purposes, but because your cause was never the products but the process you can repeat the same text, and have a totally different process. This is why we have people who read books again and again, fiction or non-fiction something that might seem futile when you think of books again as commodities carrying certain ideas.
Thus, read to your heart’s desire far and beyond on all subjects that the human thought could have trespassed about. Reading is the one thing, I believe, one should never rethink and relinquish about. Whatever one wants to know, they should start exploring and reading. Who knows what line of thought might lead to a creative road that no one else thought about?