Yesterday, I ran a conversation with MA students on how to read. I found it rather exciting and learned many new things about reading habits as well as worries. One question from a student was particularly striking as it concerned the difference between reading novels as opposed to reading philosophy. She prefaced her question by saying she had grown up to commonly read novels with a sense of identification (for instance, with the protagonist) and missed that attitude of reading in philosophy. It seems true, I replied, that we might often appropriate the beliefs of, say, a first-person narrator in a novel, while we are mostly trained to look for points of disagreement with authors in philosophy. Witnessing any philosophy talk or reading most philosophy papers will teach you that disagreement, rejection, criticism is the hallmark of philosophical reading. So we agreed that reading literature might often be identificational (to a point), while reading philosophy is often adversarial. Now, this question started haunting me. Is it true? Well, as a child or adolescent, I certainly didn’t start reading adversarially. But is reading philosophy just different? Or is there a mode of identificational reading in philosophy? And if yes, why is it so rarely practised?
Aspiration and belonging. – Starting from my own experience, it’s striking that it took me a while to make sense of what identificational reading of philosophy could even mean. One of my earliest encounters with a decidedly philosophical book is Nietzsche’s Antichrist. It starts thus: “This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive.” I faintly rember wondering whether I might be part of the target audience. I guess I would have liked to. But reading on, I thought I didn’t, because I was neither indifferent nor did I live on mountain tops … If we want to classify this first beginning, my reading was aspirational. I wanted to belong to the chosen audience. Perhaps not primarily in understanding what was written there (that felt hopeless) but rather in strengthening, amongst other things, the bond with the friend who had given the book to me. So while I was trying to immerse myself in that book which I didn’t understand, I aspired to belong to a community of readers. It seems, then, that I experienced the duplicity of being alone with a difficult book and entering an unknown but certainly special community.
Identification as agreement and projection. – The aspiration of belonging to the community of readers, not yet necessarily readers of philosophy, grew into a set of identificational reading experiences. When I read an aphorism, I might agree (or disagree) or aspire to understand and think “that’s right” or “oh, I see” or “I want to think like that”. Especially shorter pieces of philosophy or aphorisms can work like bits out of novels. (My German teacher and philosophy teacher was the same person, so I had an easy transition from literature to philosophy) So reading them can feel like identifying or agreeing with a person. I guess that once we begin to exchange experiences of reading with others, we – as adolescents or later in life – begin projecting a persona, that is projecting ourselves as (becoming) a stable part of a community of readers. The persona we project might come with a certain set of qualities. Such projection will be aided by conventions of readership, be they explicit in the books themselves (as hinted at in Nietzsche) or as they figure in other readers we converse with. I was born 1970. When I grew up, there was a rich environment, not in my immediate family but in the neighbourhood and the bookshops in town that fostered the idea of a community of readers that I could belong to. So reading was identificational not just in the sense that one could be immersed in a world or identify with (the beliefs of) a narrator or author. Rather, there is a whole environment of smells and colours and sounds that come with bookshops, public readings, people conversing about books on the radio or television. – When we decry that today’s teenagers don’t read, do we really place enough effort on making the pertinent environment desirable?
Adversarial reading in philosophy. – Now it would be a mistake to think that this immersion in agreement with, say, a given author is devoid of adversarial moves. Determinatio est negatio. Agreement with a certain position entails the rejection of opposing positions. Preferring or being immersed in one (state of the) world excludes others. Realising this, playing with oppositions and alternatives, quickly becomes part of reading philosophy. Just as the authors you read refute others, the community of readers you are part of by now might not be as homogenous as you thought. However, what tends to be overlooked or obscured (at least for the onlookers) in academic settings is that adversarial reading rests on and thus rides piggy-back on the identificational and aspirational forms of reading that ground the community in the first place. Much of the work in philosophy requires diligent exploration, immersion in ideas, trusting and going along with thoughts. Criticism can only come after that. But in the way we structure our discussions, we all too often focus on these second steps. This is why reading often reduces to critical reading and why the first suggestions by students for essays often take the form of a refutation. As a community of philosophers we owe it to those aspiring to join that we lead by more thorough examples that also bear testimony to the joy of exploration, playfulness and aspirations of our beginnings. Not least because learning is mostly learning through imitation.
Handling Ideas 
I wonder if generosity is a better way of looking at this apparent difference than identification. It seems to me to be the case that much of the best literature presents us with characters or situations that are *not* exactly easy to identify with. The trick with a novel is that in narrative fiction we are often inclined from the get-go to be generous–we go along until we find, at least sometimes, that we can’t go along anymore. The “unreliable narrator” demonstrates this for narrative unreliability wouldn’t be remarkable unless we tend to assume reliability as the base state.
Perhaps no novel plays with reader generosity more than Nabokov’s “Lolita.” We don’t identify with Humbert Humbert (I hope!) but through his eyes we, for a while, are willing to downplay moral monstrosity. This wouldn’t be possible, and the novel would lose much its power, if we began from a stance of disagreement or moral condemnation.
I’d argue that it’s simply an empirical fact that novel readers begin a novel in a state of generosity, all things being equal. In philosophy, this may or may not be the case although I’d imagine that the non-academically trained reader of philosophy does not read it in order to disagree, but to learn from it ways in which to better understand. That doesn’t preclude disagreement, of course, but the attitude of being ungenerous to a philosophical thinker seems to me to be more a product of graduate school training than of philosophy as a humanistic enterprise.
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This blog is such a glorious find!! I can’t wait to read all your past posts.
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