§ 1:  Introduction to Philosophical Reading

Reading for Understanding   |   Helpful Hints     |    Three Levels of Reading

Reading for Understanding

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty of how to read a philosophical work, a distinction should be made between reading for information and reading for understanding. In reading for information, one reads something that requires very little effort to comprehend—an article in the New York Post, for example—and which therefore increases information about the world, but not understanding about yourself and the world in which you live. Growth in understanding, by comparison, comes when one reads material that is difficult to comprehend, and which forces one to rise to the more elevated level of the written material.  In general, the more effort that you are forced to make in reading, the greater will be your growth in understanding.  To quote the old adage, “No pain, no gain."

Try to keep in mind that the goal of reading in a liberal arts education—and this is particularly true in the discipline of philosophy—is neither pleasure nor information per se; it is rather to help expand your understanding of yourself and your universe.  This is not to say that you shouldn’t derive some pleasure from reading Milton’s Paradise Lost or receive useful information from reading a work like Plato’s Republic.  But these concerns should be secondary to your ultimate aim of reading great works in order to expand your intellectual horizons and to broaden your understanding of the meaning of your existence.  

Helpful Hints on Philosophical Reading 

  1.   Savoring the Delectable

Because philosophical reading is by its very nature deep reading, in your attempt to derive some understanding of a philosophical text, you are probably going to have to put aside some of the lazy reading habits that you’ve developed over the years.   Many students have the tendency to breeze through most of their college readings rather quickly and haphazardly in order to get through reading assignments as “painlessly” as possible.  While this kind of quick-read might work if you are reading the typical college textbook that is written on a 9^th grade reading level, it will not work if you are reading the works of great philosophers.

Almost all philosophers tend to write in a very dense style that demands a slow and careful reading.  You should try to savor their ideas the way you would a delicious meal at a fancy restaurant.  If you were dining at the Russian Tea Room you would dine slowly, attempting to appreciate every mouthful of food.  Try to read philosophy in the same way:  take the time to mull over every sentence that you read, and to reflect carefully upon the author’s meaning.  You may even have to reread a section of text several times before you get what the author is trying to say. 

As an illustration of what I mean, try reading the following selection from the opening paragraphs of Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death in your normal style of reading:

Doesn't make much sense, does it?  If you were asked to read this work in a philosophy class on Existentialism, you might find yourself frustrated by your inability to break through Kierkegaard’s rather difficult style of writing.  You might even be tempted to give up on him as soon as you got to the end of the second paragraph.  So what can you do to prevent yourself from falling into despair when you encounter complicated writing of this sort in your philosophy classes?   Here are just a few general suggestions:

2.   Slow Down Some More…

The first time I read Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death as a college student I was just as confused as you probably were reading the above selection (sometimes I still get confused when I read Kierkegaard).  Confusion is perfectly natural when you are reading any kind of challenging literature.  The trick is not to try to rush through your reading in the misguided hope that the author’s writing will get easier later on.  Instead try slowing your reading down even more, concentrating on the relations between the various terms that the author is using in each sentence and paragraph.  If nothing else you should be able to figure out that that Kierkegaard is defining a human being as a “self.”  You may not fully understand yet what a self is, but you should have a vague idea that it has something to do with being a “relation” and a “synthesis.”  That is more than enough for a start.

3.   Understanding Those Wacky Words

One of the main reasons why many students have difficulty reading great works is because they get stumped by unfamiliar terms and expressions.   Just try picking up Dicken’s Pickwick Papers and you will find a large number of words that are probably completely alien to you.  Sadly, the vocabulary of the average college-educated person today is much more limited than it was even 100 years ago, making it difficult for many students to read great works of literature and philosophy.  One simple solution is to read these works with a dictionary beside you, and to take note of any words that are unfamiliar to you.  Not only will this help you make more sense of the work that you are reading, but it may also improve your vocabulary at the same time!

Unfortunately, this problem is compounded even further in philosophy, where quite often you have a specialized vocabulary being used.  Notice that in the Kierkegaard passage above none of the words that are being used are complicated in themselves.  The difficulty in the passage lies in the way that Kierkegaard takes rather ordinary words and assigns them his own specific meanings (“self” and “relation” for example).   If you are stuck with an author who doesn’t define his terms carefully or an edition that doesn’t have extensive notes on the text or a glossary, then you will just have to try to figure out the specialized meaning of these terms through their contexts or by referring to some outside source for help (see section II.5).  

4.   Text Marking

One way to force yourself to read more deliberately is to do what scholars for centuries have done with great works: use different devices for marking important terms, ideas, and concepts in the work.  Among the most common methods of marking a text are the following:

• Underline crucial words, phrases and sentences.

• Use checks (v) and stars (*) in the margins to emphasize important sections of text.

• Make brief notes in the margins of the text to help sum up the author’s main points.

• Put a question mark (?) next to passages that are problematic, ambiguous or unintelligible to you.

Text marking can help you to concentrate more intensely on a philosopher’s line of argumentation, and will make life much easier when you have to go back to the text later to study for an exam or to write a paper.  Consider the following suggestions for marking a text effectively:

• Use a pencil rather than a pen or highlighter to mark text.

• Mark your text lightly so that it can later be erased/changed if necessary.

• Mark a text sparingly—only in the most crucial sections.

• Never mark a book that doesn’t belong to you—especially a library book.

5.   Just Keep on Trucking

In the event that slowing yourself down and rereading a passage several times does not help you to make sense of a text, don’t despair.  After all, no one profits if you hurl your philosophy text against a wall, screaming obscenities about how stupid Kierkegaard is.  Instead try reading further on in the work. Usually a philosophical text will get clearer as the author elaborates upon his ideas and his arguments begin to unfold.  If you were to continue to read Sickness Unto Death, for example, you would find that many of the terms that so confused you in the opening paragraphs are clarified by Kierkergaard later on in the first few chapters. 

6.   It’s OK To Get Some Help

If you find it simply impossible to make any sense of a philosophical work that you have been assigned to read, then it might behoove you to get some help in understanding it.  Of course, you can always ask your course instructor for assistance, but this is not going to help you to become an autonomous reader of great works.  A more effective option is to find a secondary source that will help you make sense of the author’s ideas.    Some possibilities include:

• Don’t forget to read the introduction to the work that is provided by the editor or translator.  These introductions are put at the beginning of a text in order to give the reader the background information that he will need to read the text profitably. 

• Read the chapter on your author from one of the many histories of philosophy that are available in every college library (Copleston’s History of Philosophy may be a tad dull, but he does treat almost every notable figure in Western Philosophy in a fairly thorough fashion).

• Read a brief intellectual biography of your author that will help to put some of his ideas in context for you.

• Find a respectable on-line commentary on the text that can help guide you through it.  Many philosophy departments around the country are developing such commentaries, and some are extremely well done.

 

    EXERCISE 1:  Practicing Deep Reading

 

Three Levels of Philosophical Reading  

Our aim in the previous exercise was to help you to learn how to make some sense of a few rather basic philosophical passages.  In fact, all you were really doing in this exercise was trying to sum up or get the main point of these passages.  Believe it or not, this kind of “summing up” (what I will call explication) represents the most basic type of reading.  “Summing up” is basically the same skills that you used in the seventh grade, when your teacher asked you to write a book report on Huckleberry Finn.   The texts that we asked you to read may be a bit more difficult than those you read in the seventh grade, but the skills that you employed in summing up the text are essentially the same.

If all we did in reading a work of philosophy was to explain in the most elementary terms what the author’s basic arguments are, we would not be doing anything very profound or interesting.  The real task of the student of philosophy is to further investigate the text in order to discover its deeper meaning (what I refer to as the process of elucidation) and to assess whether the ideas presented in the text are right or wrong  (the act of evaluation).

These three levels of philosophical reading can be broken down in the following way:

Three Levels of Philosophical Reading

Molloy College   |    Department of Philosophy     |    Sophia Project 

   © 2000, Michael S. Russo.       For more information contact:  mrusso@molloy.edu