Reading and Ethics

I enjoyed this week’s exploratory (at least the research aspect; figuring out how to synthesize and present the information was not so great). For the exploratory, I predominantly used the Internet Archive, although I tinkered with Alex and Google nGram. The Internet Archive felt familiar to me, since I have used indexes and concordances to search texts before. Looking back now, I think that some of my approach was also derived from previous experiences with Systematic Theology. First I went through and compiled all of the quotes into a Word document, and then I read all of them, to see if I could trace a theme, and see how Vico was defining the terms “science, reason, and passions,” and how he was using them. I then synthesized what I saw, but I still tried to maintain any tensions or ambiguities that existed. What is ironic about this kind of reading is that it is simultaneously distant and close. It is distant because I’m not reading the text immersed from one page to the next – I am looking at overarching themes. However, in order to see those themes, I have to closely read the passages that might be pertinent, snippets plucked from the whole.

What made me uncomfortable about reading Vico’s The New Science in this manner is that I did not first read the text in its entirety. Although I recognize that my interpretation of the text is not necessarily what Vico intended his readers to see (and can we ever know what he intended?), I feel like I might have done Vico (or his ideas) an injustice by not placing the sections that I was drawing out within the larger context of his work as a whole. This feeling made me think about the ethics of reading in general. In a sense, when we read we are taking someone else’s words and making them our own. But, it could be argued, every element of our sense experiences are simultaneously external to ourselves (and perhaps belong to others), and they are also internal, because once they are perceived they are interpreted and become part of our thoughts and memories – they in fact become part of who we are.


So on the one hand, it seems that I shouldn’t be concerned about how fairly I read someone else’s text, because my reading belongs to me, not to the author or to anyone else. On the other hand, I don’t live in a perfect capsule of isolation. I live in community with other people, and how I read does matter to others, especially because it might affect them and how they read. Because of this, I do feel a compulsion to read every word in every text that I read, just so I can be sure that I’m not missing the part where the author addresses the aspects of his/her text that I am critical of. I want to read other people’s writing how I want my writing to be read – in its fullness, not dissected and twisted acontextually to fit into the reader’s pre-determined schema.

Because of these thoughts, I am uneasy about using these tools. While they certainly enable a valid, interesting perspective on texts by tracing major themes and trends, they also enable a facile, context-less reading that makes claims unsupported by the rest of the text (or other texts, in the case of Google nGram). I suppose these musings have just served to remind me that there aren’t any “pure” tools – they are all value-laden, both in their initial conception and creation, and in the subsequent uses to which they are put.