Reading a major thinker more than 100 years removed from your own time is like trying to run old COBOL code on a phone. Doable in principle perhaps, but best left to intermediary experts willing to devote their lives to rebuilding the environment where it can compile.
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Not even close to true. So many great thinkers >100 years old are directly readable and extremely insightful: Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Thucydides, Montaigne, just to name random people off the top of my head
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A) you’re reading translations by more recent people
B) you don’t know what you’re NOT getting or misunderstanding because you don’t know what you don’t know about the historical context
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a) not the decisive factor. anyhow the same easily holds of English thinkers in the 18th or 19th centuries -- say Carlyle or Gibbon or Ruskin. b) doesn't matter. there is vastly more than enough beauty and wisdom in the texts, even "naively read," to justify the effort
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