The reason for slow reading and the danger of speed reading

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Nietzsche's philology has a particular claim, known as the art of "slow reading" or "rumination." In Section 17, Nietzsche first raised this point and, in a manner that conforms to the requirements of slow reading, suggested very briefly the reason for slow reading and the danger of speed reading.

One very great value of antiquity consists in the fact that its writings are the only ones which modern men still read carefully.

Overstraining of the memory--very common among philologists, together with a poor development of the judgment.

"We Philologists" 17, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

We have previously mentioned Nietzsche's concept of slow reading or "rumination." This section introduces this idea for the first time and hints at the reasons for slow reading. Readers unfamiliar with this approach might find the pace of this series difficult to endure. There are several sections that are so brief they consist of only one or two sentences, including this one, which seems too short to allow for any deeper interpretation. This is precisely what Nietzsche wants us to pay attention to: to delve into the deeper meanings behind seemingly barren texts.

Why is slow reading so important to Nietzsche? For instance, do we need to read modern texts as slowly as ancient ones? Or conversely, can we read ancient texts quickly? What is Nietzsche asking us to pay attention to during slow reading?

In an era where speed reading has almost become a politically correct norm, what is the significance of slow reading? I read WeChat articles by skimming, directly targeting the keywords in each paragraph, finishing thousands of words in one or two minutes. The highlighting feature on WeChat now further encourages our tendency for speed reading, skipping over unhighlighted parts and focusing on the key points. From the perspective of reading demand, we don't have enough time to process the massive amounts of text we must face every day, so speed reading is a survival skill that modern people must master; from the perspective of reading supply, the era we live in has a whole set of value assumptions that allow us to skip over a large number of "self-evident" logical steps. We also rely on context from specific fields to speed up reading. For example, the word "stress" has completely different meanings in engineering-related texts and psychology-related texts. By pre-mastering the terminology of specific fields, we can enter that context in advance, thus speeding up reading.

But all these no longer apply to ancient texts, as semantics, syntax, and contexts differ greatly from today's. For instance, the original meaning of "忠"[dutifulness] was "doing one’s utmost within a role," while the original meaning of "誠"[sincerity] was to (in verbal expression) present the authentic completed state of things. However, nowadays, the word "忠誠" is almost unrelated to duty and authenticity, instead expressing blind obedience to leaders. Therefore, when we encounter the characters "忠" and "誠" in ancient texts, we often unconsciously interpret them as blind loyalty in modern contexts, leading to many low-level jokes.

Try two examples. "為人謀而不忠乎" is more accurately translated as "did I exhaust my capacity in representing another’s interest?" rather than "Am I being loyal to my lord?" Imagine a finance director of a real estate company taking Zeng Zi's "three reflections" as his life creed: if he understands it as the former, he should immediately issue a warning and limit debt expansion when the company's debt ratio is abnormally high; but if he understands it as the latter, he would only unconditionally be loyal to the leader, and would do whatever the leader orders, such as expanding the debt and cooking the books. The problem of our time is that almost no one would choose the former understanding.

"The Doctrine of the Mean": "誠者，天之道也；誠之者，人之道也。"[Sincerity is the way of heaven; the pursuit of sincerity is the way of man.] If we understand "誠" here as honesty or loyalty, it is difficult to understand why a psychological characteristic of man can be used to describe heaven. However, if we understand it from the perspective of "the true state of things," there is no obstacle: revealing the true state of things is the process of heaven's operation; pursuing the ability to analyze the true state of things is the process of man's operation. The following two sentences are also easily understood: "誠者不勉而中，不思而得"--the existence that reveals the true state of things (heaven) can hit the mark effortlessly and understand problems without thinking; "誠之者，擇善而固執之者也"--The pursuer of the ability to analyze the true state of things (man) always chooses the effective path and maintains on it."

The semantic changes of the characters "忠" (loyalty) and "诚" (sincerity) reveal the transformation of values among the Chinese people from ancient to modern times: no longer trusting some objective and eternal natural standards, but trusting interpersonal relationships that transcend nature; no longer trusting the inherent laws of things, but being subject to various obedience tests within power structures. The ancient Chinese reverence and fear of the natural world (and its personification) have all been leveled by modern technology, with "人定胜天" (man can surpass nature) replacing "思诚事天" (thinking sincerely about serving heaven), and loyalty to human endeavors replacing awe of the natural order.

So, returning to the issue of slow reading, reading ancient texts becomes a laborious and unrewarding task. For those who still hope to legitimize ancient texts, they have to forcibly reshape the inequality of ancient text reading between the supply side and the demand side: either they claim that we need the "influence" of ancient texts in aesthetics or emotions (which is equivalent to admitting that ancient texts have no practical value), thereby increasing our demand for ancient texts; or they artificially eliminate the "disparity" between ancient and modern times, forcibly interpret the experiences of ancient people as similar to modern predicaments, describe the Three Kingdoms as three listed companies, and refer to Liu Bang as the "Chairman of the Board of the Han Group," in order to lower the reading threshold and deceive modern people into reading some ancient text--using the fast reading method of modern times to read ancient texts. The result is that ancient texts also lose their most important value: the art of slow reading is lost.

The weirdness of ancient texts compels modern readers to slow down, allowing them to observe the various cultural "facilities" humans have created for their own lives, and to see how modern people are immersed in these facilities without realizing it. The danger of speed reading lies in unconditionally accepting all the assumptions about current life, manifesting as a superficial scanning of the text. You must first accept a whole set of linguistic game rules and familiarize yourself with the context of the text you are reading (domain, scope, problematique) before you can read ten lines at one glance. However, in doing so, you cannot reflect on the game rules and context themselves, which is precisely the issue that Nietzsche was concerned with - the problem of "judgment". Without the ability to judge values, it is impossible to innovate in values, and life cannot be renewed.

"Overstraining of the memory" and "a poor development of the judgment" of philologists are two sides of the same coin. Remembering too much too widely and lacking the ability to delve deeply into a very short text are both because the premise of remembering a massive amount of text is given as a whole set of value presuppositions, and once the value scale drifts, all memories will drift and become vague. To maintain a keen sense of value judgment, one must give up the ability to remember every detail. Translated into the current reading dilemma, it can be said this way: to maintain a keen sense of value judgment, one must give up the obsession with speed reading, the delusion of knowledge distillation, and the most typical information anxiety of our time. (What a huge industry behind!)