Participants, not Prosecutors

Christopher Celenza argues that modern reading habits have shifted toward a tendency to unmask, expose, and diagnose rather than engage in conversation with historical thinkers. Writing for Commonweal, Celenza notes that this approach, which philosopher Paul Ricœur called the hermeneutics of suspicion, treats consciousness primarily as false consciousness.

Celenza contrasts this instinct with the perspectives of Niccolò Machiavelli and W.E.B. Du Bois. Machiavelli viewed the literature and history of antiquity as a way to enter a living exchange with the thinkers of the past. Du Bois described reading as a way to sit with figures like Shakespeare and Aristotle as partners in conversation.