“I am well aware that none of these ideas can have come from me—I know my own ignorance. The only other possibility, I think, is that I was filled, like an empty jar, by the words of other people streaming in through my ears, though I’m so stupid that I’ve even forgotten where and from whom I heard them.” Socrates (235c-d)
I’m no baker or brewer, but fermentation is a good illustration of the value I’ve found in reading. I think it gets at the unpredictability of the kind of inspiration that reading brings about, while also explaining its strange reliability.
Starter cultures are a mixture of microorganisms, usually bacteria and fungi, bottled up with a small amount of nutritious substrate to sustain them. When you introduce a starter to a larger source of fuel, like the sugar in juice, voila, you get your fermented product: the juice is transformed into wine. If you know all the living contents of your starter, you can nicely reproduce the same flavor of bread, cheese, etc. every time you introduce that specific mixture of starter into a fuel source.
But if you want surprises, you can eschew making the starter from scratch. You can take the soft sediment at the bottom of an already prepared brew, which contains the essential ingredients of a starter—the microorganisms and the fuel—and put it in stasis in the fridge until you want to start a new batch. You can reuse the sludge of each subsequent brew for the next fermentation. This can’t be done too many times; your reused starter will end up too contaminated, and the microscopic intruders of each successive brew will add a wonky taste you might find undesirable (although you may even really like it!).
I imagine ideas propagate in a similar way (stick with me here!). One obsessive makes a Weltenshaung from scratch, stores it in a book that a bunch of people read, then they become inspired and make variations until some dissatisfied obsessive creates another fresh intellectual starter that begins a fresh cycle (all of which doesn’t have to happen serially, of course).
New minds are the environments, the jars, so to speak, where older starters develop, where stable concoctions meet wild microbes, the combination resulting in new flavors of ideas. It’s worth noting this novelty is never truly novel; each new brew bears the tangy traces of those which came before. And of course, new flavors could end up really good or really bad.
The benefit of starting from scratch is control—if we form ideas from first principles we’re free from the assumptions that others are “contaminated” by, but we might miss some key assumptions crucial to being comprehensive, that “round out” your system’s flavor profile. We also lose the ability to truly surprise ourselves, our Weltenshaung being only the sum of the ideas we put into it. The classic example of this is someone who refuses to engage with existing ideas, perhaps imagining that they could match the state of the field with their own unique brew.
On the other hand, we could also leave room for surprise, and I take this to mean, still following the analogy, that we should read widely. I don’t mean we should read everything. In the same way that we shouldn’t leave our minds so open that our brain falls out, we shouldn’t leave our figurative jar so open that too many microbes fall in. Eclecticism by itself isn’t a virtue; we should be picky about what we allow into our minds. We still want to minimize the chances of spoiling our brew, and I do in fact think it’s possible to spoil one’s intellectual ecology.
I guess the takeaway is to make a starter from scratch while leaving some of the fermentation process up to chance. In other words, always be reading as you write, since reading is a chance to engage with others who aren’t present—contamination at a distance, so to speak. If you’re a scientist, read poetry and literature; if you’re a humanist, don’t avoid the sciences! Don’t isolate yourself, talk through ideas with others. There are always more opportunities to try something else if a starter doesn’t work.
The benefit of reading widely, if you’re a choosy reader, is being able to channel some pretty good thinkers. As you channel great thinkers, the hope is that something sticks in the channel itself, golden grime in the tubes of thought, starting an inner transformation that is sure to surprise. And who knows? We might just find some perfect mix of mental microbes other people will want to use.