Write in Your Books!
(or: How to Read a Philosophical Text)
Joshua P. Hochschild
A Problem: The Frustration of Reading
Your primary and regular task as a student in most introductory philosophy classes — and many other classes too — is to read. Over the course of the semester you will do a lot of reading. This poses two problems.
First, you may be daunted by the amount of reading. You simply have to trust that the professor has assigned an amount of reading that is challenging but manageable. If you make the effort and plan ahead, you should be able to handle the amount of reading.
The second problem derives from the fact that not only the amount of reading is challenging, but the subject and style of reading is challenging. At first, you may find that you don’t seem to “get” much out of an assigned text; as a result, even when you do the reading you might be frustrated with the results. You may spend a long time and read pages and pages, but by the end feel like you don’t have much to show for it. You may come to class and feel like you don’t have much to say about what you read. When your professor asks questions about the text — and a good teacher will ask questions — you may feel like you don’t have any answers. Your professor’s questions may seem mysterious, as if you couldn’t have anticipated them, and can’t see where they came from, or why they are being asked.
At worst, you may even begin to feel like it is a waste of time for you to do the reading. Since you can’t seem to get anything out of it on your own, you may give up, and just wait until you come to class to hear your teacher tell you what you should have gotten from the text. Now, that is one way to be a student — to wait for the teacher to tell you exactly what he wants you to learn. But most teachers don’t want to be that kind of teacher — and you shouldn’t want them to be. We choose some great and profound works for our classes, believing that you will profit far more by trying to learn from the minds that conceived these works than from a teacher who can at best only summarize them. You should want, and your teachers expect you, to read these works. That reading should be fruitful, an integral part of your learning. Here is how you should tackle your reading assignments so that they are fruitful and not frustrating.
The Solution: Active Reading
The philosopher Mortimer Adler called the kind of reading I have in mind “active reading.” The name implies that as a reader, you must be active. This is contrasted with “passive reading,” which is the kind of reading in which you simply receive whatever the text has to offer. Most reading for “information” and entertainment is passive: you simply sit back and let whatever is communicated pass into you (although it doesn’t have to be this way). It requires not much more effort than watching a movie or scrolling through social media.
Active reading, by contrast, requires distinct effort on your part. You may have heard teachers talk about “engaging” a text. The metaphor of “engagement” is meant to suggest that you have to do something to get yourself bound up with the text, to get into it and involve yourself with it.
The metaphor of being “engaged” is suggestive, but it is more helpful if you know exactly what it is a metaphor for. Put simply, active reading, or “engaging” a text, consists in asking questions. Active reading is reading with certain questions in mind, and seeking to find answers to those questions in the text. It requires you to be active, because asking questions and finding answers is an activity. Unless you prompt the text with your questions, the text itself remains passive — unlike a conversation partner, it cannot answer the questions you ask on its own. It just sits there, its words inert on the page. You have to be active to ask the questions, and you have to be active to get any answers to those questions.
The Questions
What kinds of questions should you ask of a philosophy text? (That is a question you should be asking yourself right now, if you have been actively reading this little essay.) To get you started, here is a list of some of the most important questions:
The List
With what problem or problems is the author concerned?
What subject is he considering, and what does he want to say about that subject?
What are the most important terms that he is using to express his ideas, and what precisely does he mean by those terms?
What are the most important assertions that the author is making?
What reasons or evidence does the author give in support of those assertions?
Is it possible to construct an argument for those assertions?
Does the author himself construct those arguments, or does he leave some or all of the argument unsaid?
Are the arguments any good? (Does the conclusion follow from the premises? Are the premises true? Does the author anticipate objections? Does the author make a mistake in logical inference, or rely on a false assumption?)
Now notice a few things about this list. First, most of these questions don’t seem to be “philosophical” questions in any special sense, but rather questions about interpretation. In fact, it isn’t until the last question on the list — “Are the arguments any good?” (along with all the subsidiary questions listed in parentheses) — that they have anything to do with philosophical analysis, the evaluation of arguments, and “critical thinking” in the sense often stressed by philosophy professors. This is not because the questions of philosophical analysis are unimportant — they are very important, and not only to philosophy professors and their students. But a lot of work needs to be done before we get to those questions. Before we evaluate whether the arguments are any good, we have to know what they are, and in order to discern what the arguments are, we need to recognize what the author is trying to say (his most important assertions), how he is trying to say it (the reasons he has for saying it), and why he is trying to say it (the problems the author is concerned with).
I emphasize this because, in my experience, when students get frustrated reading philosophical texts, it is not because they dislike, or aren’t good at, reasoning. In fact, fundamental logical connections tend to be fairly intuitive, and most people can tell bad and good arguments fairly easily. Frustration seems to result instead from a failure to attend to the task of interpreting. Even in well-written philosophical texts (perhaps especially in well-written philosophical texts), it takes interpretive skill to recognize what the arguments are so that we can then evaluate them. Most often, when students find philosophical texts difficult, it is not because the philosophical reasoning is difficult, but because the interpretive reading takes unexpected, and unpracticed, effort.
Thus, the second thing to notice about this list is its order. The questions, as organized here, build on each other. As I’ve just explained, it would be hard to address the question of whether the author’s arguments are any good, without first figuring out what he is talking about. Likewise, since an author’s most important assertions are usually about whatever it is that is signified by his most important terms, we cannot be sure we understand what the most important assertions are, until we are clear about what the most important terms mean. In general, the earlier a question comes in the list, the more preliminary the question.
This does not mean that earlier questions must always be answered before later ones. Sometimes an author will assert his intended thesis right at the beginning, or will summarize his argument for you in a neat paragraph. Do not think that this means you can ignore such questions as what the subject matter is, or what the key terms are. To the contrary, use answers to the later questions, when you find them, to help you find answers to the earlier questions, and then use the answers to the earlier questions to help make sense of the answers to the later questions. You might be able to repeat someone’s thesis statement, but you don’t really know what it means if you don’t know what subject it is concerned with or what problem the thesis is trying to address; and you don’t understand someone’s argument if you don’t know the meaning of his key terms.
The third thing to point out about this list is that it could be much longer. I certainly don’t mean it to be complete. This is just to get you started. (It is also possible to shorten the list, if we make the questions more general. For instance, Adler summarizes what you need to ask in four big questions: What is the book as a whole about? What in detail is being said, and how? Is it true, in whole or part? What of it? It is helpful to keep these in mind, but they are very general, and the longer list of more specific questions will better help you to interpret a text carefully.)
When you ask these questions of a text, the answers you find may often lead to more questions. Why is the author concerned with this subject? What reasons does he have for relying on this meaning of a term instead of another meaning? What other possible approaches to this problem is the author ignoring, or assuming we know about? The questions can keep coming, but the list given above summarizes the fundamental questions to have in mind when you start reading a philosophical text.
Conclusion: The Profitable Habit of the Art of Reading
If you ask these kinds of questions of the philosophical works you read — if you sit down to do any assigned academic reading with these questions in mind — you will find that you get much more out of the reading. You will learn more from the professor, but much more importantly you will learn more from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and whoever else you might read in philosophy and other courses. Moreover, you will actually find your time reading these thinkers more enjoyable, and you will find the time spent discussing them more enjoyable — because you will have something to say, and you will have opinions about what other people say. Start with these questions, and try to answer them — in a notebook, or even in the margins of your books — and see how much more you get out of the reading.
If you want an even more detailed description of active reading and the kinds of questions you can ask of a text, I recommend the book which has informed much of what I say in this essay, Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. In it you will find, among other things, even more examples of the kinds of questions to ask when reading an important text. Pursuing answers to these questions are ways of obeying what Adler calls “the rules” of the art of reading. The “rules” are intended to be guidelines, and they are extremely helpful.
But don’t be mislead by terminology: although Adler gives “rules,” he does not think that reading is a matter of following a simple step-by-step procedure. The “rules” summarize all the kinds of things that an expert reader can tell someone who wants advice about how to read more effectively. We can try to follow the rules, but if they really work they will not turn us into simple reading mechanisms, but rather form in us a complex habit of reading. Once formed, we can draw on that complex habit, like we draw on any other of our virtues, for our profit. But first we have to work to form that habit, with the guidance of those who have some idea about how it works — which is why Adler has written a whole book about “how to read a book,” and why I have written this short little introduction about “how to read a philosophical text.”
Epilogue: Some Parting Practical Advice
Because this is not offered as an abstract theoretical account of reading, but as a practical guide intended to be useful to your own reading, I close with two more specific bits of practical advice. If you want to start practicing active reading, there is no better way than to be genuinely, physically active. One way to do this is to write in your book.
One of the advantages of a college class where you are expected to buy the books is that you own them and are free to mark them up. I recommend doing so. Underline sentences, circle words, write notes to yourself in the margin. Nothing contributes to comprehension and memory like writing in a book. Writing in your book is the easiest way to begin literally active reading. (For this reason, students should always have physical copies of any book worth reading. No exceptions.)
My second recommendation is to write outlines of what you read. This will force you to think of a text as a whole and its parts in relation to each other. Rather than just reading one word after another, you will find yourself going back and forth in the text, looking for clues about how it is organized, how the different parts build on each other to form a coherent whole. If you try to write an outline — in the margins of your book, or on a separate piece of paper — you will read more actively, and you will read more profitably.
Previously posted on Medium, now requiring account login. https://medium.com/@jhochsch/write-in-your-books-424877a77b5e