Codex Edition is a special bi-weekly curation of ideas, interviews, artworks, and our findings for paid subscribers of this newsletter. We’re grateful for your support.
A Note from the Curators
We want to give you something special with Codex Edition. Ideas, interviews, quotes, and pieces of art that will hopefully inspire you and open up your horizons to obscure things and different perspectives in a way that is easy to consume and easy to enjoy. We decided to make this first edition public so everyone can get a glimpse of what to expect in future Editions. Naturally, we thought it would be great to kick this off by focusing on the topic of reading and what the purpose of reading is, as we see it, and as how other notable thinkers see it.
When we came across a chapter called On Thinking For Oneself from Parega and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays (1851) by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, it stood out for the following reason. His directness on reading as it relates to original thought stating the following:
Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.
It reminded us of an algorithmic encouraged social pattern we’ve noticed where people produce threads distilling books and other material for people who don't want to read the whole thing. There is a place for that. But there is a lot of nuance that is lost in that process. And that's something we don't want to happen with Codex Edition.
Instead, we want to find and curate ideas, leaving them intact, only adding our thoughts to introduce them to you. Ultimately, we aim for Edition to be the tarmac for thinking and consequently doing. Schopenhauer’s piece is a great way to start that because we’re not presenting you with a philosophy of go and read all the books in the world! No. We are encouraging reading with the end goal that you can eventually form your thoughts and opinions so that you can go on and contribute, whether through writing or making music or whatever it is that you do.
For ever reading, never to be read.
—The Dunciad, ш. 193-4.
And there are just so many books to consume, right? But if all you do is read, you'll never do anything. And that's the danger that Schopenhauer warns us of. At Codex, we don't want to create a culture of people who just read. We want to create a culture of people who read to broaden their perspectives in order to think for themselves and contribute original thinking to the larger conversation.
Excerpt from On Thinking for Oneself
Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking. When we read, we allow another to guide our thoughts in leading strings. Moreover, many books merely serve to show how many false paths there are and how seriously we could go astray if we allowed ourselves to be guided by them. But whoever is guided by genius, in other words thinks for himself, thinks freely and of his own accord and thinks correctly; he has the compass for finding the right way. We should, therefore, read only when the source of our own ideas dries up, which will be the case often enough even with the best minds. On the other hand, to scare away our own original and powerful ideas in order to take up a book, is a sin against the Holy Ghost. We then resemble the man who runs away from free nature in order to look at a herbarium, or to contemplate a beautiful landscape in a copper engraving.