Finally, yesterday, I finished activating another book, my fifth, one I was rather nervous about dealing with. In three passes of about an hour each, I now have a fairly decent map. It's a philosophy text dealing with an issue I know little about: the problem of evil in modern thought. A range of philosophers from the centuries are named, which is material I never studied. It attempts to survey how evil has been perceived since the "Enlightenment". The author is witty in an erudite way, so the switchpoints in the argument are not entirely clear. She says the book was a long time in the making, and it reflects a wide range of knowledge. There's a lot I'd like to learn from the book, so I had to admit to my limitations and not let myself get overwhelmed.
Basically the operating question I came up with was, What prompts people outside of Christianity to consider 'the problem of evil'. (Christians tend to think of it in a certain way, while philosophy has had to invent a series of other ways, believing Christianity unsatisfying). So, I have a map showing the points of divergence going from initial tepid 'Well, the world could, after all, be better', to more coherent critiques of theology, to overt attempts to establish ways of reasoning that eliminate God from the picture entirely, e.g. defining evil in novel ways ('put it into history!'-Hegel) ('we invent it through our resentments!' -Nietzsche) ('Deism and republicanism triumphant!' -author assertion) ('sin and suffering are naturalistically linked--forget God try sex!' -Rousseau) etc.; to closing thoughts like Auschwitz presenting a problem so large (evil not requiring intent and therefore perhaps having an essence and being describable only in traditional abandoned terms) that the transcendent may revive.
The author makes some arguments that don't fully gel, and my temptation is to keep bashing against the book to sort out those points (for example she also seems to argue that evil might be conceived as not having an essence--so which is it?) but by simply accepting that the book may have its limitations, and that I have derived from it something of value to myself, I can now return it to the library without remorse. I know a lot that I didn't know previously, and I can't duplicate in my head the author's own knowledge, partly because there isn't enough information in the book, and partly because there are flaws in the book. By accepting my relationship to the book more fully, I can dispatch it more readily. And so I'm just sharing my difficult trial with a complex book. I'm sure I learned more from this book in this reading process than I would have otherwise. This method gave me a real basis for 'digging in' to this hard material. It's not even an academic book, but an academically chatty book. Academic books are extremely well organized. An academic who is being witty while dropping names and concepts all over the place is another matter. And once again, having PhotoRead the book, I found that the sections to which I was less drawn during super-read did in fact shed less light, upon my operating question, when I made myself look at them.
