Kanon Filsafat 17
This is the beginning of the second subcanon in English. The subcanons are like periods of writing within a single massive canon of my writings. This first text will be a critique or perhaps rant against the philosophical mainstream of "reading before writing." It is true that you consume before you produce. You must receive before you can give. However, in this beginning of consumption, you are essentially formed without consent. Your self is made and designed without your will or permission. You must accept this fact and live with it.
However, when you are to distinguish truth from falsehood, you must have seen the Truth and have your own capacities to distinguish it from falsehood. To read a philosophical material and accept it as truth, or as having wisdom, then you must already have a standard which you judge to be true. In other words, you must know the Truth of the Truth and you must know how is it true yourself. If you claim something is true simply because someone else said it, then it is a fallacy of testimony.
Therefore, it is important to have some preexistent knowledge on what is true first before you read any philosophical material. This requires some writing to organize and manifest our thoughts. Only after we have our own understanding of the truth that we can evaluate other philosophical material. Of course it is possible that we read first, and accept whatever is written as the truth. However, such methods will not lead us to any certainty of the truth.
It is not to say that we should never open up to other people's writings. It is to say that our thoughts come first before the thoughts of others. This is not about egoism or egocentrism, it is about the fundamental ordering of things given the way things are in this world. We can and indeed should read others' writings, but we must be able to evaluate them and that comes from our own standard of evaluation. That standard must of course be a universal standard, so it can and will come from reading or consumption. However, when we read or consume that standard, we will see by ourselves that such standard is indeed true, and only then we can integrate that standard into our own systems.
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