everyone wants to make him a systematic thinker and in some respects he clearly is, but it’s a lot more open-ended and exploratory

stultified, unimaginative, dogmatic interpretations abound and steal all the air

there are naive laudatory ways to engage with Great Men, and naive rejections are just as disastrous. even the framing of “what holes can you poke in his arguments” or “what did he get right” rather than “what use can you make of his discussion”.

rushing into correct and incorrect is just entirely premature

idk i think there’s something rotten about the undergrad essay to demonstrate understanding and mastery, as it treats the text as far too dead and doesn’t allow for appropriation as one’s own. which honestly makes everything a lot more difficult to understand !!!

also like ! it doesn’t teach you how to direct your attention, everything is flat and sedimentary. part of what it means to engage with a text is to ignore certain parts and focus your attention in an uneven fashion.