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7 Ways of Reading Philosophy: #1 Reading Like Napoleon
There’s a lot to be said for reading at a gallop.
When reading philosophy, the advice is often to read slowly and carefully, tortoise-style, making sure you understand every point before going on to the next. But in this article — the second in my ongoing series on how to read philosophy — I want to persuade you that this can sometimes be the very worst approach. And to do so, I’m going to take my lead from the German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929).
How to read better
Rosenzweig is a fascinating thinker. His most famous book is The Star of Redemption, which he started writing while he was serving in the German army on the Balkan front. He sent the text back home scribbled on army postcards and completed the book after the war ended. The book was published in 1921. Rosenzweig intended it to be a new way of doing philosophy, based in what he called Sprachdenken, or “speech-thinking,” a kind of thinking that is closely related to storytelling. But after it was published, Rosenzweig’s book was met with general incomprehension. So in 1925, Rosenzweig wrote an essay called The New Thinking, where he tried to explain what he was up to. And along the way, he made a fascinating argument about how we read philosophy (including his own book) all wrong.
In his essay, Rosenzweig argues that when we read philosophy, we make the mistake of imagining that what we are reading is “especially logical.” We imagine that the ideas in the text will follow each other in neat chains of reasoning, with each sentence leading on to the next. We think that if we start at the beginning and work through systematically, making sure we understand every sentence before moving on to the next, we’ll get the hang of what is going on. But the reality is, “Nowhere is this less the case than in philosophical books.”[1] For Rosenzweig, there is something story-like about how we come to understand philosophy. We start at the beginning, sunk in confusion and mystery. And clarity only emerges as the story unfolds. This is how Rosenzweig puts it:
Here [i.e. in philosophy books] a sentence does not follow from the preceding one, but more likely from the one following. Whoever has not understood a sentence or a paragraph…
