A telling fact about human intelligence is that we can hold a lot of false beliefs and still survive or even live a jolly good life. For all I know, there are flat-earthers around whose beliefs don’t seem to interfere much with other beliefs. It’s telling because it raises the question of how much really depends on our knowing the truth (imagine the word capitalised). Much less spectacular but vital for philosophers and historians of philosophy, the same might be true for our understanding of texts.* Many of us might live with grand misinterpretations without ever noticing. (I, for one, lived with a mistaken understanding of what the term “proposition” means roughly until I wrote a paper about it. ) This fact triggers at least two responses: (1) A fair amount of people think that this sad state of affairs can be amended by proper reading which will eventually lead to a proper understanding. “I just read carefully and see what it says”, or something like that. (2) To this a more sceptically inclined colleague might respond: “Well yeah, but it’s all down to your interpretation.” These fairly common yet opposed responses give rise to two opposed myths about reading: The first is that the text simply contains what we can say about it. This kind of hermeneutical givenism is often met with what one might call interpretationism, that is, the idea that there is no text an sich but only interpretations. This opposition is frustrating because it polarises approaches that actually depend on one another. As I see it, the relation between them is not one of contrariety but of a dialectical swinging back and forth. Even if there is not one single correct understanding of a text, there are many false ones. If this is correct, we should exploit this fact for (becoming aware of) our practice of reading by looking for frictions between what we think we know and what the text presents us with. In what follows, I would like to share some ideas how to exploit such frictions. The crucial point is that a claim on what a given text is about should be refined in the course of confronting the actual text. You may start with the assumption that a text is about X. If you’ve done some proper work, you should find that the text is about Y. Here is how:

What are philosophical texts about? – Contrary to a widespread assumption, the answer to that question is normally not given in the text itself. Philosophical texts typically consist of arguments for a certain claim. That’s at least what should be true of our currently most common genre, the philosophical paper or essay. Thus, a good way to read those is to begin by identifying the conclusion that is argued for and then to look for the premisses supporting to the conclusion. How do you find the conclusion, though? What’s often overlooked is that this question is twofold. It has a textual or grammatical sense and a topical or disciplinary sense. In the textual sense, papers or passages often contain a line saying “the aim is to show”, an explicit statement with the defended view or a “therefore” (or “thus” or a similar word or phrase) introducing a conclusion. You should by all means look for such items when reading, but I suppose that the assumption of what a given text or passage is about is settled well in advance by what I call topical sense. Usually, you don’t just bump into a text wondering what it’s about. That question is normally settled by a a course instructor, secondary literature or a bibliography listing this text under a course title or keyword. In this sense, the conclusion is generally embedded in a topical network of a topic (the nature of the mind) as related to a discipline (like philosophy of mind), a common problem (how do mind and body interact), and a set of positions (say, dualism vs monism) on that problem. So even if you look for the conclusion in the text, it will be the topic suggested by the instructor or some other context that guides your search for the conclusion. I bet that if you were to list Cinderella in a syllabus for a consciousness course, people would start looking for the pertinent points in the text. What this comes down to is, again, twofold: On the one hand, a philosophical text is about (arguing for) a conclusion; and identifying the conclusion settles what you take the premisses to be. However, on the other hand, the conclusion is commonly assumed in advance, since the text is given to you in a topical context that suggests and constrains potential conclusions. If this is correct, it seems that prior interpretations (taken on authority) often settle what a text is about. Try reading Descartes’ Meditations as a text that is not in some sense about dualism and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not impossible, but many people will think you’re avoiding the elephant in the room.

Points of contact. – Guiding topical assumptions might seem problematic, but they are not. They belong to the way we receive the text. Rival interpretations often argue about the right topical context. They can be quite controversial and seem mutually exclusive. Just think of the Bible as a religious text as opposed to a historical document. Sometimes they seem more complementary. You can see the Bible as both a historical document and a religious foundation. The point is, then, not to avoid such contexts (and go for givenism), but to see what actually connects text and interpretations. In other words, you should look for points of contact. What are the interpretations arguing about and how do they relate to the text. Interpretations worth your time do not only argue about the proper topical context but do so by also pointing out a concrete term or passage in the text. This is the proper point of contact. Interpretations and related disagreement must have a clear textual basis.

Where are you now and what is next? – If you have found one or several points of contact, you can begin to see what the text is about – in keeping with various interpretations. Don’t downplay this! Figuring out a point of contact is an achievement going well beyond engaging with doxography or an individual interpretation. You could now write something about the state of the art. But note that, so far, you have not begun to work with the text as such. But how do you begin that and why should you bother? Many people won’t even delve into different interpretations but stick to a doxography telling them authoritatively what certain texts are about. Although doxographies initially derive from engagements with the text, they don’t make these engagments explicit. No one today will actually argue that Locke was an empiricist. Such interpretations are taken for granted, not in the sense that they are taken to be true, but in that they are taken to belong to an interpretive tradition. (In the same way, we wouldn’t call a map of Paris from 1250 or from 1950 false; although it still tells us something, we know that it’s outdated.) If you want to move on, you should know what you want. Do you actually want to read the text or do you want to pass an exam? Are you interested in a certain kind of philosophy or do you want to see how it was or is done, that is, written? As I like to put it, if you’re merely doing philosophy, it’s enough to get the hang of some interpretations. If you want to do history of philosophy, you have to engage with the text. But how?

Build up friction between the text and the interpretations. – Topical contextualisations or doxographies are often taken as a starting point, but they do obscure (earlier) failures of understanding. Students often don’t notice that they have mainly learned to project an interpretation into a text, rather than reading a text. So how do you move ahead? Start from your point of contact, but rather than taking an interpretation for granted, ask yourself what the term or passage in question is about. Begin by trying to explain the passage in virtue of the other parts of the same text. How? Explanations like “Locke is an empiricist” or “This passage contains Locke’s account of linguistic meaning”, for example, will commonly block actual reading. You’ll notice this when you ask for details in the text. Once people parse Locke’s famous claim that “Words in their primary and immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them …” with the assumption that Locke discusses meaning, they are likely to think that “signification” means “meaning”. Arguably, Locke’s text doesn’t offer any such account. So what do you do instead?

• Provide an analysis of the content and style of the passage as such: explain (technical) terms, see how they hang together and get taken up. Look at logical operators and connections between sentences. See whether it contains arguments or explications of terms. See whether it contains examples. References to other authors or texts. See whether it contains metaphorical expressions. Ask yourself what work the metaphors do.
• Make a strict distinction between the content and the function of a passage in the overall text. Does it function as an introduction or is it a refinement of something earlier? Is it a key passage in the text itself or part of a larger argument?
• See whether the technical terms used are part of a common terminology. Study the terminology through dictionaries, handbooks or related texts.
• Check the translation (if it is one) for consistency with regard to technical terms. Is it a use of terms that’s still common or now part of a different discipline?

Going through some of these considerations will quickly challenge the interpretive ideas. You will likely notice that a text, once you look at the whole, can be part of quite different topics or disciplines and also that the priorities provided in the text rarely match what is deemed relevant in current interpretations. As Jenny Ahworth has shown with regard to Locke’s notion of signification, sometimes a different understanding of one technical term can turn over whole traditions of reading a text. But even if you don’t intend to contribute original research, you’ll have made a first step to developing a solid and independent understanding.

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* Here is part one of my series on how to read.

When I was in my final school years and reading lots of Goethe, my German teacher recommended I read some commentaries by Erich Trunz. This was an amazing discovery: Trunz explained the texts on various levels and, above all, he left out none of the difficult passages that seemed impossible to grasp. When I began reading philosophy at Bochum university I found like-mined approaches, especially in medieval studies. But especially the so-called secondary literature on modern philosophy was often disappointing: True, the interpretations were often quite elegant, but they mostly bypassed the dark passages that clearly required a professional interpretation to make any sense whatsoever. The often fleeting remarks on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its numbering system, for instance, left me in despair. Was I not seeing the obvious or were the interpretations I consulted just not geared towards explaining the text? Only much later it dawned on me that the commentary was a philosophical genre in its own right and, outside more philologically inclined circles, a rather rare treat. These days, this is especially perplexing, given that the “diversification of the canon” requires reading unfamiliar material and thus a lot of detailed commentary. But apart from a couple of good examples (especially in classics and medieval studies), one can’t say that the commentary is exactly fashionable again. (See Barry Smith on the neglect of this genre.) Students are often entirely unfamiliar with the genre and sometimes seem to conflate it with what is known as an “opinion piece” in newspapers. After some sketchy remarks here and there, it is high time, then, to say more clearly why a revival of this genre is overdue.

So what is a commentary? – My rule of thump is that commentaries focus on explaining given texts, the linguistic forms of utterances themselves, rather than merely on ideas and arguments. Commentators do not solely attempt to say what a text is saying and what it means or has meant, but also why it is expressed in the way it is expessed. This means that the structure of the commentary follows the text and not the interpretive ideas or goals of the commentator. The beginning of a commentary is thus marked by a quotation of a word or passage from the text itself. Commentaries are often provided along with critical editions or translations of primary texts. They range from occasional annotations to “dark” passages or unfamiliar terminology to full-blown interpretations, giving background information on related texts or tracing unacknowledged sources. That said, a commentary can of course also be a part of a larger interpretation and typically occurs when a specific text passage or term forms the point of contact between different interpretations of a text. In fact, many introductions or guidebooks are commentaries in disguise. But besides critical editions of ancient and medieval texts, it’s mainly Wittgenstein’s work that seems to have invited the genre of commentary.

Why bother? – Do you know Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony? Of course you do! Most people only know the opening theme, though. Secondary literature focussing on “central themes” is a bit like that. Arguably, you need a line-by-line commentary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to get beyond the famous Proposition 7 (see e.g. Duncan Richter’s commentary). The point is, then, that understanding a thought, argument or concept is different from understanding a text. But if philosophers care mainly about the former, why bother with the latter? Aren’t the essential ideas enough? Getting the “essentials” of the Tractatus, for instance, is like getting a Readers Digest or worse perhaps a cartoon version of it. Nothing wong with cartoons, you say. Of course not, but why bother with philosophical texts in the first place? But here is a more important point: It is often said that the text as such only really matters, if we consider it or the author an authority we want to defer to. Arguably, then, if we value independent thinking we can bypass the textual details. However, this gets things the wrong way round. For who tells you what “the main point” of a text is, if not an authority that you implicitly defer to? As I see it, then, the supposed “main points” are taken on mere authority and are in fact the outcome of earlier textual work of past generations. It is the detailed commentary that equips you with the material necessary for independent study and thought.

How to write a commentary? – Getting a glimpse of the scholarly work going into a commentary often makes the idea of writing such a thing overwhelming. But fear not, it’s doable. Especially these days with so many searchable resources at hand, you often don’t even need to travel. Here are a couple of preparatory moves, though, that might help you getting into the right frame of mind for beginning to write a commentary:

• Pick and prepare a bit of text: Pick a text you like and find a bit tricky. Not too much: just a couple of lines. The text is your guide. So actually write it down. No, don’t copy it. Only if you actually write it, you will begin to see tricky bits. Write it down, number the sentences, underline words that you want to focus on, and highlight sections that you find tricky.
• Think about the origin of the text: Make clear to yourself how the text made it onto your screen: Is it from an early print, a student or critical edition, a translation? Who edited it and when and why? Is the spelling in keeping with the original, is there something standardized? All these things tell you something about the material basis and politics involved in the text and might matter to what you actually find on the page.
• Translation: If the text is in a foreign language, then try to translate it or write out a given translation beneath or beside it. If you don’t know the language, try to get at least keyterms. Check every keyterm and ask yourself whether you can think of a better alternative. Making a translation is the best way to see what you really don’t get. In my experience, many sentences begin to become unclear if you try translating or paraphrasing them.
• Paraphrase: If the text is in your native or working language, try to make a paraphrase or transfer bits into formal language.
• Variants: If you waver between different paraphrases, write down both or more. These are possible interpretations. If applicable: Have someone else make a paraphrase, too.

Now that you have a version of the text, you can begin with the actual commentary:

• Start with a term you find central: Explain briefly why the term is central. Try saying how its centrality affects the rest of the passage you’ve picked. Say how the term relates to (modern or contemporary) cognates (similarities, differences). Say in what sense the term is part of a terminology.
• Move on to a phrase you find difficult: Say what makes the phrase difficult for an imagined reader (even if it’s no longer dark for you): a certain grammatical feature, an unknown lexical meaning, unfamiliar terminology, strange wording etc. Now spell out some resources that help(ed you) figuring out what the phrase means: a grammar, dictionary, related texts that come with similar phrases.
• Where does the idea expressed by the phrase come from? Hardly anything you find in a text is (entirely) original. This means that there is often something to be gained from asking genealogical questions: Where does this idea come from? Is it almost a quotation? Does the terminology perhaps just signal a slight shift of interest?

When writing your commentary, there are some obvious techniques to be used:

• What if you can’t figure something out? Take the phrase and google it! Likely someone else has commented on it. Or something similar is in a different text that helps you figure it out.
• Make connections within the text: Try to see whether the terms you commented on shed light on the dark phrases. Check logical connectives and see whether they are well used. Check for omissions, enthymemes, implicit assumptions etc. and write them down. Relate these notes to other parts of the same or a different text.
• Think of audiences: Who will understand thee text better with your comments. Will it help students, people new to the material or fellow specialists? Try too gear your comments to one of those audiences. Ideally begin with students who had no exposure to the material.
• Contextualise your priorities: Even if you try focussing on “the text as such”, your interests and what you find worth commenting on will be in keeping with certain interpretive traditions. Make them clear to yourself and use them for deciding how to move forward.

It goes without saying that there are many other factors that you could take into account, but if you follow at least some of these stepts, you’ll end up with a bit of commentary on a bit of text that might present you with a way forward or a spark for doing something else with it. Perhaps you’ll extend it, move on to another text or integrate it in an interpretation. I for one will begin to make the commentary a decisive part of writing exercises for students. My hope is that we might write more commentaries in the future. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions or about your favourite commentaries.*

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* Thanks to Susanne Bobzien, Nicholas Denyer, Michael Kremer, and Michael Walschots for some first suggestions.