My favorite books are nearly impossible to read, because they cause me to have so many of my own thoughts.
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An insight is a generative thought: an idea that produces ideas.
An insight is impossible to speak about directly. It can only be observed, but not empirically in the usual sense. What is observed is intellectual behavior. This kind of observation takes the form of following a thought. It is an intellectual participatory observation.
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A very strange reading experience:
- At the beginning of the book the author sets a painful and apparently irresolvable problem.
- Then the author shifts his attention to a second, different problem. He approaches it from several angles, and resolves it several ways. Each angle sets off an explosion of original thoughts. It is hard for the reader to get through the book. (And some of the explosions reverberate into the reader’s own past and future, and change the meanings of things in unexpectable ways.)
- Then toward the end of the book the author shifts back to the original problem. The reader is shocked to find himself reading the very thoughts he’d conceived earlier, sometimes worded almost identically. It is as if the author made the reader think his thoughts (and in profound cases, even feel his feelings).
What is going on here? My explanation:
The author has presented a problem the reader does not know how to think out. His mind lacks the movements necessary to resolve it, and it leaves him with a sort of knot in the mind.
Through the explorations of the second problem, his mind learns to produce the necessary movements. (“The dance.”) Once the reader has acquired the means to resolve the first problem himself, the resolvability somehow causes the mind to recall and solve the problems almost effortlessly. This causes the eruption of thoughts.
Then the author “winks” and indicates what has happened by showing his own resolutions by the same method. This phenomenon is itself theoretically, practically and ethically problematic, and it has been the obsession of many fine minds.