Opher Kutner writes:
> ... I wish to investigate with you ...
> the reason people read.

Kierkegaard, if I understand him correctly, might have
said that reading is an expressions of ones "infinite
concern" for ones "eternal blessedness". 

I observe remarkable differences, even among family members,
of sensitivity to ideas. Some of us experience them much more
poignantly than others; but in some measure, ideas are important, -
promising, threatening, consoling, to all of us. 
Just as we build mansions (or rent apartments) to 
house our bodies, so we design edifices of theory
(Wolkenkuckucksheime) for our spirits by writing our own books
or by appropriating for ourselves books written by others,
such as Kierkegaard. "Oikeiosis," a term popularized, if I
remember correctly, by Zeno, the Stoic philosopher, is the
technical term that describes the process by which humans
appropriate facets of alien culture and make it their own.

In the Jewish-Christian tradition, Scripture, that which is
written, is the word of God; and we teach our children to read
in order to naturalize them, spiritually, into our families;
and the books that we teach them to read are the biblia bibliorum.
The written word in itself is but a cipher that derives
significance from the reality (Wirklichkeit) to which it points.
The requisite for understanding is faith, faith that there is
reality beyond the written word, a reality the search for which
then consumes ones life.

(Those proficient in German who are interested in this topic
may wish to look at a more detailed exposition at
http://www.thenerve2.com/lit/andere/andere01.html
and subsequent chapters in
http://www.thenerve2.com/lit/andere/
To anyone who does not have access to a world wide web
browser, I can supply the text by e-mail.}

Thus, in my experience, the Bible is the prototypical book
not only in a theological but also in an hermeneutical 
dimension. Having been brought up in the Lutheran doctrine
that the reading of the Bible is the key to salvation, 
(and, thank you all the same, I should rather read it myself
than listen to the sermon), it seems to me now, rightly or
wrongly, that the intellectual and emotional processes of
reading are the same for *all* literature, sacred or secular,
and that the task of literary interpretation that makes meaningful
the Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead is the
same task, and is similarly accomplished, as that which makes
meaningful the prophesies of Isaiah or the Revelation of St. John;
and that, by the same token, there is a reflection of the divine
(or the demonic) on everything that is written, sacred or secular,
or, more accurately, on everything that is read in the faith that
it has meaning.

These consideration lead directly to yet a third issue raised by
Opher, namely whether Kierkegaard's texts should be read as
philosophy, theology, or poetry. Theodor Adorno begins his
book on Kierkegaard with the sentence: "Wann immer man die 
Schriften von Philosophen als Dichtungen zu begreifen trachtete,
hat man ihren Wahrheitsgehalt verfelhlt." (Whenever one has
undertaken to comprehend the writings of philosophers as poetry,
one has missed their truth content.) That sentiment, obviously,
puts all of Plato out of bounds. Adorno was 26 years old
when he wrote that sentence, and I guess when I was twenty-six
years old, I might have written the same, because I also didn't
learn how to read until I was much older.

I learned to read when I was in medical school. Those were
the days at Harvard when the philosophy department, chaired
by W.V. Quine, refused to give academic credit for courses
in philosophy given by Paul Tillich. But that is another story.
When I realized that my physician teachers didn't really know what
they were talking about, and that their unending discussions served
only to bolster their self-confidence, I started to skip the afternoon
"clinics" to attend instead the seminars in classical philology
of a scholar, much honored in his day, named Werner Jaeger.
Jaeger had spent much of his life reading Aristotle, in particular
editing the Metaphysics. And as we sat around the seminar table
on the seventh floor of Widener Library, he smiled enigmatically
as he said: "And now I am going to teach you how to read." And he
did. He took every sentence and every phrase of the text, and,
as it were, held it up to the light of his intellect, and told us
what other authors had used these words and in what context
and with what meaning, and how Aristotle had used them, and what
these words might mean and what they probably meant. And in so
doing, he demonstrated that this apparently most prosaic of texts
had all the characteristics of poetry; and that to interpret it
required the same reflection and imagination as interpreting
a play of Aeschylus or Sophocles. (By the end of the semerster,
we had covered four or five pages of the voluminous text.)

Although he himself would surely have distanced himself from
their doctrines, Adorno's rejection of Kierkegaard as poetry
(Dichtung - the German word includes both prose fiction and verse)
reflects the notion that philosophy is science, and that the truths 
of science and the truths of poetry such as they may be,
are qualitatively irreconcilable. This is the doctrine of
logical positivism.

Obviously, there is a contest between the hermeneutics of which
I have tried to give some slight indication, and those espoused
by the "logical positivists" so called, which have had so corrosive
an effect on contemporary philosophy.  But I think the contest is
very unequal and the balance is rather obvious, for they, by their
own assertion cannot understand us, but we understand them only
too well.

They deal with Kierkegaard in the following manner:

"When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles,
what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand and volume;
of divinity school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, 
Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity 
or number? No, Does it contain any experimental reasoning
concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit the then
to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and
illusion." - David Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding,
quoted approvingly by A.J. Ayer in his anthology "Logical
Positivism."

So they know nothing better to do with the books that constitute
my world than to burn them; but I rather enjoy reading, interpreting
and understanding theirs, just as I enjoy looking at the other
books for juveniles in the Children's Room at the Belmont Public
Library.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com