Failure in Polymathy indeed. In Sam Delany’s “Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders” the main character reads and rereads Spinoza’s Ethics over and over again over the course of a lifetime. With every reread, the character comes to understand the work a little bit more. I liked the bit in the book quiet a lot, because it really represents how leaning, real learning, actually happens. One of the reasons I was such a shitty student when I was younger is because I was given the expectation to encounter something precisely once and be able to understand that subject and its implication fully. That’s not how anything works.
I like philosophy, and I like philosophy of language. It is something I am somewhat good at (considering my background). But when it comes to philosophy., progress is always very difficult. There is so much you have to read just as background to what you are currently working at. The joke is true to some extent – it really is all footnotes to Plato. At some point if you want to make any progress at all, you have to jump in somewhere in the middle. A decade ago I did this with Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus, and I really came away from that book with a lot. This was despite never having read Heidegger’s Being and Time. Once you get past a massive and pretty incomprehensible first chapter all about Being and Time, Eco’s work is actually pretty comprehensible, and a damn good avenue into the other works of Eco.
That’s what I was hoping to encounter with Quine’s Word and Object. I knew it was going to be a challenge, but I wasn’t sure how much of a challenge it would be, and I was hoping that slogging through it would get me enough to go back and read something else. But I have to admit defeat this time, just like I did the first time I read this, about a decade ago.
Did I get more out of this on my second time around? Of course. But I still didn’t get enough to really call my reading of this book intelligible. Parts of it were, but I don’t think I came away with a really good idea of of what Quine’s overall arguments actually were (that is to say, I didn’t come away with an organic notion of the work’s ideas. I had ideas already from reading texts about this text.)
I will keep at it. Part of it is a point of pride. This is kind of my field, or it is supposed to be. I also don’t want to be one of those people who get a few years away from their education and have forgotten more about it than they learned in the first place. If I am going to have a meaningless degree, I am at the very least going to exercise the muscle that comes with it.
Failures in Polymathy 