Reading Challenges
Reading Challenges Overview
Not Modern Nonfiction
Not
a Modern Textbook
The Specific Meanings
The Multiple Meanings
The Rigorous Meanings
The
Secrets of Sun Tzu
Not Modern Nonfiction
When reading modern nonfiction, you can read the lead sentences and skim the rest of most paragraphs and understand exactly what
is being said. When reading science—modern or ancient—you have to read every
word and every sentence carefully to learn the terminology. You can open a
nonfiction book to any chapter and understand most of it without studying the
preceding chapters carefully. But science and math start with developing precise
language. If you skip even a few paragraphs defining their concepts, you get
completely lost. With ancient science, you have the additional barrier of having
to understand the underlying scientific methods and models
of the period.
Because we translate Sun Tzu into normal
English, readers think they understand what is being said even when they don't.
For example, in Sun Tzu's writing, the differences between "fight,"
"conflict," "battle," and "attack" are as great as the differences between
"rational numbers," "irrational numbers," "real numbers," and
"imaginary numbers" in mathematics. We can understand what the words
"rational" "irrational," "real," and "imaginary"
mean but have no idea about how those terms define
different types of numbers. The same is true in Sun Tzu's work. You may know
what "fight," "conflict," "battle," and "attack" mean normally, but unless you
understand the very specific ways these terms and a hundred others are used in
The Art of War, you cannot appreciate what he is saying in any specific section.
Sun Tzu carefully defines his terms from the
very first page, but when translated into normal English, the result appears to
be normal nonfiction. When we read "fight," "conflict,"
"battle," and "attack"
we assume we know what is being said. We quickly forget (and often do not even
notice) Sun Tzu's very specific definitions. Since "fight," "conflict,"
"attack," and "battle" mean very similar things in English, we miss most of the
specific points that Sun Tzu is making.
An Example for Discussion
At the beginning of our workshops,
we use several stanzas from The Art of War to demonstrate how much of Sun
Tzu sounds like vague aphorisms. For example, the first two lines of one of
those stanzas reads:
Know the enemy and know yourself.
Your victory will be painless.
Sun Tzu's The Art of War 10:5.15-16
On the surface, this seems like a simple statement about the somewhat obvious
idea that we should know ourselves and our opponents. However, when we come back
to to these lines at the end of our
workshop after only a day's study, attendees can see how easy it is to miss the true
meaning hidden in these lines.
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