Intellectual Maps

Abstract

SECTION 1: INTELLECTUAL MAPSProofs and Refutations is already a classic, a model of clarity and succinctness, as well as of excellence. Yet, as Mark Twain noticed, everybody praises a classic but nobody reads it. And it is a fact, regrettable, but true nonetheless, that almost nobody reads Proofs and Refutations. Mark Twain thought classics were praised but not read because people were hypocrites and classics were bunk with a high reputation. In this essay I propose a different explanation of why classics in general may be hard to read and why Proofs and Refutations in particular has had few readers. Paradoxically, Proofs and Refutations is both easy reading and incomprehensible to many readers, indeed both highly readable, crisp, and amusing, as well as not even readable beyond the first two or three pages, infuriatingly frustrating, and so on. Yet many people praise it as a classic. If it is a classic, how is it that almost nobody can read it? And if almost nobody can read it, why is it a classic? Was Twain right? I believe I can explain the paradox of the simultaneous clarity and unread ability of Proofs and Refutations and make it easily accessible to those who complain that it is not readable.My thesis (and it applies to other such paradoxical classics as well) is that Proofs and Refutations is locally very readable to almost all readers, but globally readable only to a few readers. Only a reader who can provide for Proofs and Refutations an appropriate intellectual map can read it with ease globally; once that map is provided, the reader who might otherwise struggle with the text unsuccessfully will find all of a sudden that it is highly readable, enjoyable, stimulating, and in sum, very clear. There are readers for whom Proofs and Refutations has become clear in this way. In this essay I shall discuss three possible intellectual maps for Proofs and Refutations-maps which can be used separately but which I think are best used together. I will also show how the book becomes clear once these maps are provided. To explain how I propose to render Proofs and Refutations readable by offering three appropriate maps, I must first present a brief excursion into intellectual backgrounds, intellectual maps, and classics. I shall discuss Proofs and Refutations itself in later sections.There are two types of classics (both intellectual and artistic)-those which call for new intellectual maps to provide a new order for the intellectual background, and those which do not. Let me fix my terminology: intellectual backgrounds constitute those works which we regularly see around us. Intellectual maps are the specific ways of picking out of the background what is deemed significant, both for a given definite purpose, as well as for putting the various significant things in some order or other. The appearance of any new work changes the intellectual background-although at times ever so slightly-and the appearance of even a classic work need not call for a radical change. A radical change, finally, is not so much an addition of ...