Wednesday, 10 August 2011

The ideal book

A book on philosophy is a book exploring ideas. Ideas are spiritual artifacts, and as such do not have beginnings or ends. Thus, a book on philosophy should not have a beginning nor an end either. Always when you start to explain a philosophical idea, you suddenly realize that there is some other idea which needs to be explained for the other person to understand what you are trying to explain, so in the end any starting point you choose will be more or less arbitrary, and not the actual beginning of the idea you are trying to explain.
Therefore, books on philosophy should be published as interactive electronic books, with a multitude of smaller articles arguing single points. Each of these articles should be furnished with a link to other articles which explain, supplement or expound upon the ideas presented in it. The book would in the end be more like a web, that the user could move through in any order he wished, its secrets revealed organically as questions arise within the reader, than a novel which starts at one point and ends in another. The book should open on a randomly selected page, or on a randomly selected one of several pages chosen as good starting points.
Such a book could also be infinitely expanded, which is also good because no idea ever actually ends.
As a matter of fact, it might be extremely interesting to read a novel published in this fashion as well, where the reader decides the order of the telling.

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