Nietzsche and readers

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All too Human. Volume Two, Part One, Assorted Opinions and Maxims No. 137.

The worst readers. - The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole. 

1)  In the above aphorism, Nietzsche attacks those who read his work as one solid piece, and draw conclusions without placing it within his contexts.

2)  We all have been at the receiving end of being misunderstood, mainly due to the reader's negligence. Or due to the reader being utterly lazy to take the efforts to understand in what context the we used the sentence. A cause of great frustration for the author. 

I experienced one such incident yesterday that filled me with rage and frustration. In fact, that prompted me to produce this write-up. 

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Jespers, Karl. Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity

In praise of Philology, he writes: "It teaches people to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, looking forward and backward, with mental reservations, with doors left ajar, and with tender finger and eyes."

It is not sufficient, however, for the reader to exercise this "goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of words"; rather he must, through word, sentence, and assertion, arrive at the primal source of the thought in order to partake of the real impetus.

I like how Nietzsche believes that Philology helps a reader to read "with mental reservations and "with doors left ajar". We, as readers, are often guilty of not doing both. In the need for a quick bottom line, we usually bypass the intended meaning of the author's words and hastily look for one particular word/sentence that we believe to signal the end of the theme/idea of a para. Yes, there are instances where the author desires for the reader to draw their own conclusions, but we should be able to analyse where the theme ends, and if the author indeed wants us to draw our conclusion, or whether he wants us to find his conclusion in his words. 

The benefits of slow reading is there for all to see. Personally, I try as much as I can to make it a conversation of sorts, with the author, sometimes by re-reading certain lines, or even certain paras. I am not always successful in this because certain styles of writing doesn't allow you to. But when I do succeed, it enables me to grasp each word of a sentence in it's intended context more clearly. This invariably deepens my insight into the author's mind which is paramount when reading a certain work. 

Also, it is interesting to notice how Nietzsche focuses on 'source of the thought'. Again, most of us (when I say us, I speak of the average reader), often focus on the goal of the thought, but Nietzsche's "passionate state" is attained only through the source. Food for thought.