Being on top
Some dude on the TeX for Mac OS X mailing list uses as his sign-off a quote by Donald Knuth that got me thinking, even though it’s Sunday:
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Hmmmmm. I do remember doing that — like, fifteen years ago, when I was doing grad work in philosophy. I’d read books for their own sake, for their “intrinsic value” (whatever that is) rather than for their “engagement” in some “arguments.” A while later I switched to political science (and from a Germanic style of teaching, research, and reading to an American one, or as our friends in France would euphemistically call it, an Anglo-Saxon one) and learned how to read books primarily for how they advanced our knowledge through their engagement in some argument.
One effect was that books were no longer taken as coherent units but as a compilation of often rather isolated “arguments” that were often bound up in a variety of incompatible conversations. Books became these multifaceted artifacts that were simultaneously partaking in debates with very different concerns. (Note that this has nothing to do with postmodernism and stuff — quite the opposite: I was doing some of that in my philosophy days since my minor was in comparative literature, in a very small department that was heavily influenced by people like de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman.) We were making the books less coherent in our quest for more coherent strands of thoughts that advanced the discipline.
I think Knuth might be talking about a similar dichotomy, two types of thinking and working, and I suspect that they fractalize even within individual fields.
