Why Read "Primary Texts"?
On George Steiner, Daniel Bessner, Theology, and the Culture Wars
George Steiner says that in his utopia, he would ban all reviews, all secondary literature. The newspapers would tell us where to go to find works of art and thought, but would suspend their evaluations (and paraphrases) so as to empower us to have our own, unmediated encounter with them.
Meanwhile, Daniel Bessner tweets:
Now, we can reconcile the two opinions in myriad ways.
One is to say that Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault aren’t “great,” and therefore don’t qualify as primary texts in the way that Steiner intends. Another is to say that Bessner is restricting his argument to these three thinkers specifically and that the reason to rely on secondary texts is that their “use value” is reducible to some paraphrasable content. To a hammer-holder everything is a nail, and to an ideologue every text is either a friend or an enemy of what one already knows to be true.
Unanswered by Bessner is what the value of scholars and scholarship is once it is reduced to a form of specialization cut-off from everyone else.
Steiner’s call for an unmediated encounter with primary sources and Bessner’s call for a mediated one recalls the debate between Catholics, for whom the Church is necessary, and Protestants, for whom the personal relationship with God is core.
Steiner, as it were, pushes the Lutheran ideal of sola sciptura, but broadens it to the entire canon.
Bessner effectively says that Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault are mere crackers until the Marxist priest-interpreter comes along and facilitates their transmutation into the “body” of usable content (the secular version of the Eucharist).
In Jewish tradition, a parallel idea to Bessner’s can be found in the notion of oral Torah, the idea that the rabbinic commentary matters as much if not more than the Tanakh or written Torah.
In my view, Bessner’s claim says more about the specific thinkers he cites than it does about primary texts, generally. Broadly speaking, I favor Steiner’s end of the spectrum.
But not all texts are created equally. If you must read secondary sources in lieu of primary ones, better to do it with regards to Gramsci and Foucault than Plato, Aristotle and Heidegger. Bessner’s tweet is more of a reductio against Marxist intellectuals than an argument against reading difficult texts.
There is no one reason that can justify reading great books. We should be pluralistic about both the aims and goals of reading. But Bessner’s argument—to me—is deeply sad, as it reduces the goal of philosophical reading to downloading a “bottom line.”
If reading is a way of cultivating a rich inner life and a more sensitive way of thinking about the world, it is misguided to outsource it to “experts.” A world in which people mainly read “X for Dummies” will likely be for the worse.
How do you think about your own balance of primary and secondary sources? When is the summary more desirable than the thing summarized?
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