Many of history’s most celebrated thinkers—Heidegger, Nietzsche, Girard, Augustine—were, by modern scholarly standards, bad scholars: they misread, distorted, or ignored the thinkers they engaged with, and this was not incidental but essential to their philosophical projects.
The pattern of great thinkers being poor scholars
Heidegger misinterpreted Nietzsche and the entire Western philosophical tradition, but this misreading was demanded by his own philosophy—he needed to portray the tradition as culminating in his own work.
Nietzsche was famously uncharitable toward the thinkers he attacked; Girard, in Battling to the End, gave a deliberately uncharitable reading of Hegel to serve his own argument.
Augustine is perhaps the most striking case: the thinker credited with fusing Platonic philosophy with Christianity may have read only one dialogue of Plato in the original Greek (the Timaeus), relying heavily on secondary sources like Plotinus and the Neoplatonists—an oddity comparable to someone today synthesizing Hegel with Chinese philosophy having read only the preface to the Philosophy of Right and commentaries by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth.
Why thinkers and scholars are fundamentally different activities
The thinker’s task is to produce paradigm shifts—to create fundamentally new modes of thought that break from the prior tradition.
To engender such shifts, it is often necessary to distort, forget, or ignore what came before; the thinker must misread the tradition in order to position their own work as its culmination.
Nietzsche’s essay On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life argues that forgetting is a prerequisite for action: just as an aspiring Alexander must ignore the suffering and ignoble deaths of past conquerors to act decisively, the thinker must be willing to be “uncareful” with the truth to produce world-historic ideas.
The teacher Mark Lilla observed that careful scholars who offer multicausal explanations are easily forgotten, while great thinkers who locate a single hidden wellspring to explain everything—like Girard with mimetic desire—are ridiculed but never ignored.
The conqueror and the gardener
A useful analogy: the thinker is to the scholar what the conqueror is to the gardener.
The conqueror (thinker) seizes vast territory, much of it left in shambles or rebellion, but the scale is world-historic.
The gardener (scholar) tends a small domain with meticulous care, arranging everything properly but without transformative ambition.
The thinker’s willingness to commit violence on the texts of others—to misread, flatten, and distort—is what makes them a thinker, just as the conqueror’s willingness to use violence is what makes them a conqueror.
No literature professor confuses themselves with Shakespeare, yet many philosophy scholars believe they are doing the same kind of work as Plato—when in fact the activities are as different as literary criticism is to poetic creation.
Which path to follow?
The speaker feels the pull of both: the glory of the world-historic thinker (evoked by Ovid’s boast that his name will never leave men’s lips, or Dante’s vision of being invited to join the ranks of Homer and Virgil in Limbo) and the meticulous scholar’s impulse to faithfully interpret the great books.
But both paths, taken as ends in themselves, are perverted: the proper end of philosophy is not great thinking or great scholarship but a great life.
The models worth following are those who never intended to be great thinkers or to write books at all—Epictetus, Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha—people focused on living well and helping their communities live well, who happened to become great thinkers as a byproduct.
The goal should be to be a great liver, not a great thinker or scholar; if one’s life demands producing important books or scholarship, so be it, but making either an end goal betrays what philosophy is truly about.
