Charles Darwin: His Reading Habits

[RonPrice]

GETTING KNOWLEDGE

Part 1:

 

Reflecting as I now do on my 65 year reading life from 1949 to 2014, I found Darwin’s way of reading a book of interest. He “often annotated heavily, prepared his own index of interesting passages, broke a book in half at the binding if it was too heavy and stopped to write about it in his notebooks.” He showed, as Howard Gruber puts it: “a man at work using books as tools for getting knowledge, not as exhibitions of knowledge already crystallised”.¹ Gillian Beer characterizes Darwin’s reading style, as “full of questions & exclamations, enthusiastic rebuttals and problem raising queries”.²

 

Howard Ernest Gruber(1922-2005) was an American psychologist, and a pioneer of the psychological study of creativity. He had a distinguished academic career working with Jean Piaget in Geneva and later co-founding the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers. At Columbia University Teachers College, he continued to pursue his interests in the history of science, and particularly the work of Charles Darwin. Gruber's work led to several important discoveries about the creative process and the developmental psychology of creativity.

 

I have taken an interest in Gruber's studies of creativity now in these years of my 70s due to the reinvention of myself in the last two decades as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist, editor and researcher, reader and scholar. I have left my 50 year student-and-paid-employment-life, 1949 to 1999, far behind me now as I head into the evening of my life. After decades, too, of extensive work in Baha'i administration, in teaching and consolidation, service and social activism, I have now assumed a largely literary role.

 

Part 2:

 

Darwin not only continually challenged and examined the views of other authors, but he continuously questioned his own thoughts and definitions as a result. Darwin’s writing reflected his reading style, and it reflected his view that our judgment of the world around us can never be complete. A new fact or contribution is always potentially around the corner ready to disrupt what we think we know and make us think again.

 

The ending of his book—“that from so simple a beginning in the chain of life endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved”³ is a testament to this principle.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Howard E. Gruber and Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, together with Darwin’s Early and Unpublished Notebooks, London: Wildwood House, 1974, p. 62; ² Gillian Beer, “Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development,” The Darwinian Heritage, editor, David Kohn, Princeton: PUP, 1985, p.547, and ³ Charles Darwin, Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character: 1874-76, 1882 cited by Elizabeth Banks in Persuasions On-Line, Vol.30, No.2, spring, 2010.

 

Part 3:

 

Literary works from many fields

which bring writing skill & insight

together in the examination of some

aspect of human culture bring me a

great deal of pleasure in this evening

of my life as I head through my '70s

and into old-age, the years after 80,

if I last that long. Such works bring

my critical faculties into play, and in¹

the process, a penetrating scrutiny is

brought into the literary game with a

keen observer at the centre of things

bringing about this meaningful & this

deserving happiness in these my years

of late adulthood and retirement from

a 50 year student-and-employment life.

 

¹ I thank Elizabeth Bankes for her essay: “Read and reread until they could be read no more: Charles Darwin and the Novels of Jane Austen", Persuasions On-Line, V.30, N.2, spring 2010. This essay contained many comments on the influence of Jane Austen's novels on Charles Darwin among others.

 

Ron Price

23/7/'14.

 

[Ophiolite]

Ron, your observations are interesting, but I find nothing that moves me to discuss - and this is a discussion forum. Your post has more of the texture of a blog. Can you offer a further thought that might promote discussion rather than passive agreement?

[overtone]

Suggestion: Since Darwin's reading habits clearly required an independence of income - those books were expensive, and the time to read and react in that fashion even more so (he was not stopping by a public library for a couple of hours every day);

 

and since they also depended on the physical nature of the books involved;

 

does this example point to any implications of intellectual deficit, of diminished opportunity , in the potential loss of physical books as central means of intellectual communication?

[RonPrice]

Belated apologies for taking six months to respond. Ophiolite raises a good point to which I will respond below. As I point out in my post Darwin “often annotated heavily, prepared his own index of interesting passages, broke a book in half at the binding if it was too heavy and stopped to write about it in his notebooks.” He showed, as Howard Gruber puts it: “a man at work using books as tools for getting knowledge, not as exhibitions of knowledge already crystallised”.¹ Gillian Beer characterizes Darwin’s reading style, as “full of questions & exclamations, enthusiastic rebuttals and problem raising queries”. For me these words have important implications, beside simple agreement.

 

Raising questions is often more important than providing answers. Our society is very big on answers and the questions are often not asked. Darwin really got "into" the books he read and, for me at least, they point to detailed reading and note taking....that's enough for now.-Ron

Edited January 19, 2015 by RonPrice

[MonDie]

Your description of Darwin's style seems to resemble your own style. You're collecting little tidbits about his study habits, tidbits of which the usefulness isn't immediately obvious.

Are you hoping to synthesize a more general conception of creativity?

Then again, the passive absorption of details is prone to certain errors which formal analysis is not prone to.

[MomentTheory]

Ron, your observations are interesting, but I find nothing that moves me to discuss - and this is a discussion forum. Your post has more of the texture of a blog. Can you offer a further thought that might promote discussion rather than passive agreement?

 

By your own logic, what did you offer to the discussion by posting such a retort, except a condescending attitude??

[Strange]

 

By your own logic, what did you offer to the discussion by posting such a retort, except a condescending attitude??

 

What did you offer to the discussion by posting such a retort, except a condescending attitude?

[MomentTheory]

Touche.

[RonPrice]

There was certainly no intention to display a condescending attitude. Of course, the road to hell, it is often said, is paved with good intentions. Why don't we just leave Darwin in his reading style for now and bring this thread to its end.-Ron Price, Australia