Overthink
The best of all possible podcasts, Leibniz would say. Putting big ideas in dialogue with the everyday, Overthink offers accessible and fresh takes on philosophy from enthusiastic experts. Hosted by professors Ellie Anderson (Pomona College) and David M. Peña-Guzmán (San Francisco State University).
Overthink
Reading
This is one for the books. In episode 104 of Overthink, Ellie and David consider what makes reading so rewarding, and, for many people today, so challenging! How did society shift toward inward silent reading and away from reading aloud in the Middle Ages? How have changes in teaching phonics and factors of classism, accessibility, and educational justice made it harder for the young to read? Why is reading philosophy so hard, and how can we increase our reading stamina?
Check out the episode's extended cut here!
Works Discussed
Marcel Proust, Journée des Lecteurs
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Julie Andrews, Mandy
Adam Kotsko, “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted,” Slate
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid
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Welcome to Overthink,
Ellie:The podcast where two philosophers talk about things we've enjoyed reading.
David:and occasionally stuff that we didn't enjoy so much.
Ellie:I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
David:And I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.
Ellie:David, today we are talking about one of our favorite activities. reading.
David:Yeah, something that every academic is deeply passionate about, each of us in our own way. And I recently read Proust's Journée des Lecteurs, which translates into Days of Reading. And I have to say, it was a beautiful book about Proust's childhood, where he describes the joy, the intense joy that he got from reading as a kid. And he talks about it in such a, in a way that I really related to, because I was a nerd, you know, as a child, and I really enjoyed reading. I used to go to the park with my books and be a nerd. And Proust talks about reading as something that awakens the imagination of children, and as something that begins to develop a child's consciousness and their sense of time and space, and gives them a sense of belonging in the world. And I think that's definitely how I think of reading as a world building, nest creating activity.
Ellie:Yes. I love that. Simone de Beauvoir has these beautiful passages in her memoirs about being a young girl going to Marignac, which was a beautiful town in the French countryside where her grandparents lived. And just like going out into the fields and into the little forests and reading. And I've just always loved those images of her having those childhood formative experiences of reading in nature. I love to read outside myself. And David, I'm thinking already about a book that had, the first time that I can really remember being so both obsessed and proud of a book that I've read. There's a book called Mandy, which was written by Julie Andrews, the actor, Julie Andrews. She wrote this children's book called Mandy that's about this little girl who discovers, I think it's like an abandoned house or something, and just makes it her own special space. And I am probably getting the number wrong, but I remember thinking this book was so interminably long at the time. It was 175 pages. And that felt like such an accomplishment when I finally finished the book. I was like, Oh my God, I can't believe I read that much. And it was such an enjoyable, delightful experience the whole time. So that's just like an iconic moment for me of childhood when I was both like obsessed with the actual story, but then that carried me to this moment of pride of feeling like I achieved reading this entire book.
David:oh my God, Ellie, that is really sweet. And for me, my childhood experience of reading was largely associated, I've talked about this on Overthink before, I believe, they're associated with these poetry recital competitions that I used to do as a young child. I did my first one when I was four years old. And I would read these very long poems over and over again in Spanish, of course, because this happened in Mexico. I would memorize them and then I would perform them in front of a live audience at public events, on holidays, at schools, so on and so forth, and- Ellie: Okay, proto podcaster. Oh my God. Yeah. The seeds were already planted. No, but for me, from a very young age, reading was associated with memorization and with oral performance. And so I read things not to dwell in the stories or in the worlds that they created, but specifically to be able to then perform them before a live audience. And I think that's a very different kind of reading that favors orality.
Ellie:But it also favors competition, so I'm curious what you think about that, because it seems like the Proust, the Beauvoir, and my reading of Mandy are classically solitude oriented, kind of in nature, maybe like a little bit bourgeois, just like times of enjoying the leisure. Maybe we can, let's remove the bourgeois out of it. They are bourgeois stories, but I don't think they necessarily need to be. But I think there's just this sense of being alone with one's books. And so it sounds like what you're talking about, the orality component is super interesting and we'll return to that later in the episode. The difference between silent reading and reading aloud, but I don't know, I'm just wondering David, because it seems like if you're a four year old who's having to compete against other people, like, isn't there something, it's giving like child reality star or something, but you would say that was where your passion for reading developed? I think in my case, I probably would have ended up hating reading if I'd been competing in poetry competitions as a young child.
David:Well, when I was four, I was not competing. I was just a performer. I'm a kind of like a troubadour without the music going from stage to stage in the town at local events. But then when I was in elementary school and middle school, it definitely took on a competitive form, with me having coaches specifically devoted to me traveling all around in Mexico to go to these regional and state competitions. And I do think that the competitive element introduced a certain kind of anxiety and a certain kind of pressure that took out maybe some of that Proustian pleasure of giving yourself over and surrendering to the text for the sake of joy, because I began relating to the act of reading as something that I do with a specific purpose. It was a means to an end. And although I think the oral component certainly gave me, especially because we're talking about poetry, some of these were very long poems that I had to memorize as like a 9, 10 year old, the longest one I ever performed was 45 minutes.
Ellie:Oh my God.
David:It was like pages and pages and pages long. And I think it gave me a good sense of the rhythmicity of language, which I do think is connected to the oral dimension, but it also gave me a bad relationship to reading where often I would select things only because I thought they would perform well on the competitive circuit. And that's a little bit of a yikes moment.
Ellie:Okay, I thought this was going to be some cute, like, I loved reading when I was little because of XYZ, but it turns out actually what you're talking about, David, I think will relate to some of what we're going to talk about later in the episode too, which is how teaching to the test or teaching reading with some expected outcome in mind can inhibit the enjoyment of it. And so perhaps your story not only raises really interesting points about the difference between reading aloud for an audience and reading silently for oneself, but also I think about some of the downsides of an approach to reading whatever context that emerges in that emphasizes output rather than intrinsic value.
David:No, that's definitely true because in the Journée des Lectures, Proust talks about how when you give yourself over to reading in the way in which he's talking about and you're talking about, Ellie, reading has the power, as he says, to turn any space. And he's also talking about reading in like under the tree at the park, you know, in these natural scenes, it turns any space into a church, he says, where the act of reading injects a sense of awe and respect into the space that enables the act. And I think in my case, because of that competitive dimension, it actually turned every space into a classroom where the things that were foremost
in my mind were:How am I going to be evaluated for my performance of this text? How successful am I at memorizing it quickly? And how effective will I be down the road at evoking the right kinds of emotions like a rhetorician? And so the function was to evoke a certain kind of reaction from an audience. And so all those considerations were already there priming the experience. And I do think that probably created some habits that I've subsequently had to unlearn, in fact. Today, we are talking about reading.
Ellie:do humans build entire worlds in our heads out of little lines on pages?
David:Why should we care about reading in an increasingly digital age?
Ellie:why is reading philosophy so hard? There was an article published by Slate earlier this year by Adam Kotsko that has an ominous subtitle. The subtitle is "Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively." And Kotsko talks about how he's been teaching in a small liberal arts college setting for over 15 years, but in the past five years has had this complete switch in his experience. where he's noticed the students are no longer able to do the reading. For instance, he used to assign 30 pages of reading. Now it seems like anything over 10 pages is completely daunting, if not impossible, for them. And they're really not able to understand the material as much as they were before he says, suddenly, a lot of his time spent teaching in the college classroom is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument. These are things he used to be able to take for granted.
David:Yeah, and I think that this is a very common complaint in academia among educators, that students are not only not doing the reading as a matter of fact, but rather that they are having real difficulties. doing the reading even when they try. There is a problem not just of there not being enough time that is being invested in the reading, but that the comprehension level is suffering. And I sometimes worry when we talk in this way that we are falling victim to the golden age prejudice as we age, Oh, back in my day, kids used to be a lot smarter and much more committed to their own educational trajectories. But nowadays, kids are not doing that. And so I want us to avoid that kind of rhetoric, but I have to admit that this does track my own experience of teaching in the last also 10 to 15 years that I've seen a switch, or at least that I myself have also experienced it in myself. And in fact, as you know, I was thinking about doing a project on reading and that project, which I've since abandoned, actually grew out of a concern that I had that as a professor, I was facing the same challenge as many of my students suddenly having a much shorter attention span, being distracted, feeling frustrated with the text, and I wanted to reflect on why that was happening.
Ellie:David, you taught that class a few years ago that was all about deep reading, and you got some national news coverage for this, that you were focusing on a flipped classroom style in which students would come and you would all silently read together. For what it was multiple hours, right?
David:it was almost six hours.
Ellie:Oh my gosh, that's, okay, that's so intense.
David:it was a very intense class. And I have to say, I didn't come up with the idea. I read about another professor who taught a version of this class where they called it the monk class, where the idea was to replicate a kind of monastic setting where you focus on intentional slow reading and confrontation with the text for a protracted period of time, while at the same time, closing off distractions that might come from your environment. And so I spoke to my chair and I said, Hey, I want to replicate this class for our students. And I have to say it was one of the most fulfilling educational experiments that I've done. And I want to do it again, but it really sought to cultivate and rediscover the joy of not just for me, but also for my students.
Ellie:So it was truly six hours of silence? Were there breaks where you guys would talk at all, or?
David:So we experimented with the format quite a bit because initially it was just a long period of four hours of silent reading, a little break, then followed by a one hour and a half discussion of the reading. So it was not six hours of silence, but it was mostly silence and then some group discussion. Then we experimented with time blocks, read for an hour, 5 to 10 minute break where we chat, go back to reading for an hour, 5 to 10 minute break over and over again, four or five times. And then at some other times we just did long silent sessions without discussion, sometimes more discussion, so on and so forth. But the essence really was that there would be hours of reading where the students were asked to put their computers to the side, put even their notebooks to the side and their iPhones to the side so that they could just look at the page and immerse themselves in the kind of attentive reading that I think we should be trying to teach students, especially at the collegiate level.
Ellie:Yeah, and I think for me, there's big differences between different kinds of books, such that in some cases, like the hour of reading and then a quick break would work for me. And with others, it really wouldn't work. And we'll talk more about reading philosophy specifically later in the episode. But I think especially with certain philosophical works, I would need longer uninterrupted periods. But then for others, I would really need shorter periods. And so I don't know, there are very different rhythms depending on the kinds of texts you're reading. And that means for me, I'm always reading a lot of books at once, because there are certain books that are for different times of day or for different moods. Or, you know, even if I'm just talking about books that I read for leisure, I think sometimes with us, the line between reading for pleasure and reading for work is blurred, if not non existent. But there are a lot of books that I just read for pleasure. One of my favorite books I read in the past few years was an anthropological account of the history of Hawaii. And that was so fun to me, even though it's still kind of academic. But then other times I'm reading, fun novels that are contemporary and whatnot. And I feel like there are just different things that I'm going to find. fine from different texts, right? And that means that there are going to be different ways of relating to that material. But there is certainly a joy that I take in reading, whether it's coming from how a plot is hooking me, or whether it's coming from the ideas that reading is catalyzing, or whether it's coming from just the simple fact that it's such a pleasure to be able to take this quiet time to read. And unfortunately, it seems like that's really going away for a lot of people, especially students. Kotsko identifies in this article and slate a few different reasons why his students relationships to reading have changed so much. And like you pointed out and made really explicit, this isn't necessarily just about the enjoyment of reading. It's actually about the ability to comprehend too. Of course a big one is the rise of the smartphone and digital media. Our attention spans have become drastically shorter as a result of social media, which is constantly competing for our focus. I usually try and put my phone in a completely different room if I'm trying to apply myself to a text to reading a text. The second he identifies is the disruption of schools during COVID which has had a huge impact, right? Students not having that classroom setting through remote schooling and such really got behind in their reading. There's lots of documentation that's showing this. But a third that he thinks is really important, and I've also seen this echoed in some other publications on the topic, is recent changes in education. There have been some changes in teaching phonics and in teaching reading in the past few decades that I don't fully understand, but that apparently have had really big effects. And one of them is teaching to the test. Students are taught more and more to teach to national and or local tests, and that means that they're not really learning about reading as something that's fun, exciting, intrinsically valuable, but they're rather reading things to get the maximum amount of information out of it. Reading is not about just receiving information. It's about so much more than that.
David:About winning state and regionals in your poetry competition. Come on.
Ellie:Right? But David, even you as a kid reading those poems aloud, even though there's like something about that competitive scene that we need to take seriously, it wasn't about you distilling information from that poem, right? The performance aspect, I think, is something that's really beautiful and something that gets lost nowadays, right? Like I hate it when Overthink's material is taught as a TLDR of Hegel or Nietzsche or whatever, right? It's so much more than that. You can't get a TLDR of so many texts.
David:Yeah, I mean of any text that has aesthetic or philosophical or cultural value. And there are a lot of explanations that come up in this article from Slate about the causes of this shift in the student experience of reading. And you mentioned the phonics one. And I want to say something very briefly about that, because this is something that came up in my research a few months ago. About the way in which we teach education, especially at the elementary school level. Because in the 1980s, there was a movement to shift away from phonics education in elementary school and then middle school towards what is called the balanced literacy approach. And this is associated with a woman named Lucy Calkins, who spearheaded this effort in the early 1980s. And basically, there was a huge debate in the 19th century about how to teach kids reading. Do you teach them the letters and then how the letters are pronounced and then how phonemes make up words? Almost like a bottom up analytic approach. And then there was a camp that said, no, this is too formalistic. Kids don't care about the alphabet and the phonemes. They just care about meaning. And so, kids should be taught with books that have a visual component like pictures. And they should judge the meaning of the text by looking at the pictures, and over time they'll come to associate words with images. And this balanced was a return to this power of the picture mentality. And it was implemented in a lot of places, including in the U. S., in the 80s and 90s. So, for example, this became the dominant way of teaching reading to kids in New York City,
Ellie:I get it. I got the old, I got the hooked on phonics approach. That's what, hooked on phonics was our curriculum.
David:Yeah, no, and so what we are now realizing is that this shift toward pictorial contextual reading was actually a huge disaster because it encouraged kids to look literally away from the words and to come to expect to essentially predict what text means independently of the letters,
Ellie:Oh my gosh!
David:Kids were, were not learning how to read. They were just guessing or making up a story as they went around. And once you removed the visual component, then they didn't know what to do. And so there is a whole generation of kids who grew up in the 1980s and 90s. So this is partly our generation who really struggle with literal word recognition, because they didn't build the basis of letter recognition and phoneme to letter association when they were kids. And that's something that just requires rote memorization in order to create the right neural circuits. And so that's a huge factor also in the contemporary critique of the state of reading.
Ellie:Yeah, and how an intervention that's meant to promote engagement, to promote literacy, and probably, especially if it's being pioneered in urban environments originally, to promote educational justice, ends up having really negative consequences. It ends up having In many cases, the opposite of facts. And I was really struck by the way that Kotsko ended this Slate article where he says, "this is a matter not of snobbery, but of basic justice. I recognize that not everyone centers their lives on books as much as humanities, as much as a humanities professor does." Sorry, I was having trouble reading that line. He says like, look, if you're not reading a lot for pleasure, I think you're missing out, but you can do what you want with your time. But what's happening with the current generation isn't that they're just like choosing TikTok over Jane Austen, but they're being deprived of the ability to choose. I thought that was a really interesting ending because he's defending against this possible charge of just conservative good old days we used to be able to read and now we just watch TikTok and saying no, students nowadays actually aren't even really given that choice because they're not given the tools for understanding written material. And not written material that's in a TLDR on SparkNotes, but actual written material that takes the time that it needs to take, right? A Jane Austen novel takes the time that it needs to take.
David:Well, in order for you to do that kind of reading, you need to have the basics in place. And I think this is very much a case of the road to hell is paved with good intentions because this was spearheaded. By educators who were trying to reform the education system to help kids learn faster and without putting undue stress on them in their earlier stages in the education system. And here we're talking about costs associated with the education system. But I think we also have to go back to the case of the smartphone, because changes in technology also contribute to this crisis of reading. And one particular change that I definitely want to talk about for a hot second is the rise of digital spaces as the go to space for encountering text. So the fact that we read on digital platforms has deformed, I would say, our relationship to text to such a degree that once we start reading in non digital spaces, i. e. like physical books, we have difficulty dealing with them.
Ellie:And I'm curious to think more with you about how the rise of digital modalities have transformed the act of reading, and I don't want to be curmudgeonly like, oh, it's all bad, of course. But I think you, you mentioned earlier not wanting to have some sort of golden age nostalgia, but I do just want to note that some of the changes we're describing, namely the literacy approach and also the rise of digital technology, are very new, and have had some pretty detrimental effects. And also I read an article about how college students in the 1960s did about an average of 25 hours a week of studying, but now they only do about an average of 15 hours. And what's happened is that students aren't less busy than ever. In fact, they're actually unbelievably busy, but they've started doing all these extracurriculars. And especially their involvement of clubs has risen dramatically in terms of their weekly time allotment. And so they've started devaluing their actual class material in favor of stuff that they can put on resumes in part because they think they can get away with doing less work for classes due to grade inflation and things like that. And so there's this move away from the original role that homework had in college, even as we've seen a dramatic rise in homework over recent decades for people who are younger than college age.
David:Yeah. And, you know, the scary thing is that all these changes are happening simultaneously. So it's not as if we have on the one hand, the reform of the education system, the movement away from phonics, the rise of teaching to the test, the explosion of the common core, the legacy of the No Child Left Behind Act, so on and so forth. And then at some other time, you also have changes in technology that deform our attention and that affect how we are able to or unable to co produce meaning with a work, it's that they're actually happening simultaneously and they are mutually reinforcing one another in their effects on the reader. And I'm here thinking about a book by the reading expert Maryanne Wolf, who is a psychologist from Harvard. And she wrote this book called Proust and the Squid. And just the title, I think is wonderful because it makes a reference to Proust's Journée de lecture, the joy of reading, and then the reference to the squid is about neurons. So it's about the neuroscience of reading.
Ellie:About how Squids love to read Proust, he's their favorite author.
David:No, it's about the fact that we came to make some important discoveries about the neuron in the early 20th century by looking at squid neurons.
Ellie:Thanks squids!
David:So squid here is a proxy for neuroscience. And Maryanne Wolf draws a distinction in this book between two styles of reading. There is slow reading for comprehension, and then there is fast reading for information processing and multitasking. And the problem is that many young people have been raised on digital platforms that cultivate only the skills needed for fast reading habits, which,
Ellie:Okay, yeah,
David:they're very useful, but they are not very good when it comes to understanding concepts, noticing contradictions, appreciating subtlety in the position of an author, so on and so forth. And according to Wolf, this really has to do just with the literal format and the structure of digital spaces and digital platforms. So think about when you read online on a digital surface. You have on Safari, for instance, like the back button, you can always go back and forth in time instantaneously. You have cookies, you have many tabs, sometimes like hundreds of tabs where
Ellie:Oh David. Don't get me started on the tabs!
David:You are bad at that, Ellie.
Ellie:I open so many tabs of things I want to read and then I don't end up reading
David:Yes, it's a horror movie embodied on a screen.
Ellie:Yeah. I'm always riding, the iPhone lets you have up to 500 tabs on Safari and I'm always riding that 500 number. Yeah. I'm like having to delete a new, an old tab to open a new one.
David:I have three on my current Safari
Ellie:I have 467, which is actually pretty good for me.
David:And you also have other things like hyperlinks, pedagogical bubbles, like with definitions where you just put the mouse over something and a definition comes up. And Maryanne Wolf's point. is that on digital spaces, there is so much comfort, there is so much availability of information, there is so much unnecessary details that our brains don't actually have the focus and the distance and the silence to tap into the kind of slow reading that we need for literature, that we need for philosophy, so on and so forth. And it means that as readers who have been reared in these digital spaces, we come to have these expectations that cannot be met on a physical book. And so we then experience reading a book that is more demanding, that requires time and effort as too frustrating and too unreasonable. And so we have this discomfort with the kind of reading that we should be doing, especially when we are students.
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David:My favorite book about reading is Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. And Manguel was a cultural theorist and also the director of the National Library in Argentina. And he had a really interesting life. When he was a teenager he was working at this bookstore and he randomly befriended the poet and author, Jorge Luis Borges, who came in. Yeah, he just came in to check out some books, befriended the like 16 year old kid who was working there. And at the time, Borges was quite old and losing his vision. And young little Alberto became Borges's eyes. So they became friends and he would go to his house and read out loud to Borges. Then he went on to become an author in his own right, with an interest in the history of reading. And he then wrote this book, A History of Reading, in which he traces the history of the art of reading from antiquity all the way to the present. And he notes that What reading is now, which is the act of a mind silently confronting a written text, is not really what reading has been for most of human history. If anything, for most of recorded history, reading has been an oral practice that has been shared and collective. With silent reading, Only emerging roughly, Manguel says, in the 9th century. And in fact, it didn't even become very popular until 4 or 5 centuries after that, in the 14th or 15th centuries.
Ellie:And this is so interesting. I love this image of Borges, this famous thinker, famous writer, just like befriending the teenager who works at the bookstore. That seems very on brand for what I understand about Borges. And then kind of enabling this young, budding thinker to flourish in his own right. I feel like there's an interesting story of education and mentorship to be had there. But I think that in terms of this actual history of silent reading, this is also echoed in one of the books that you and I have talked about before, David, at least in our synesthesia episode, and a book that we've both really enjoyed reading. I had a quasi mystical experience reading that book, which is the David Abram book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram is a philosopher trained in phenomenology and the book isn't entirely about reading, but reading is a big part of it, and he talks about how basically our world has gradually changed. become more and more disenchanted. And part of the story is the rise of silent reading. He says that the rise of silent reading is a late development in the history of the alphabet and that it emerges in the Middle Ages which is also in line with this story that Manguel gives. But during this time, Spaces and forms of punctuation were for the first time inserted between the words in a written manuscript. So it's only in the Middle Ages that we get spaces and forms of punctuation. Before this, you had to read aloud or at least mumble quietly. And Abram is focused on tradition of reading that emerges out of ancient Judaism and ancient Greece. And so I'm not sure whether this is universally applicable. But once you get to the Christian Middle Ages in Europe, you have this rise of punctuation. And he says that after the 12th century, it became increasingly possible to internalize the sounds, to listen inwardly to phantom words. Because before punctuation, the only way that you could read was to sound out the words, right? You had to figure out where one word started and the other stopped. But once we have punctuation, you can physically see that, so you no longer have to mumble to yourself, right? You can have this sort of inward echo of the words.
David:Yeah, and in Abraham's account of the history of reading, The spacing and then the punctuation are the two central themes that come up because before that literally the text was just a string, a continuous line of characters and you cannot really tell where one word ends and the other one begins. And in fact, there have been some debates about the interpretation of ancient texts precisely over where you cut words. the words, because sometimes you could cut it in different words and it would create a different sentence. But as you point out, Ellie, you could figure it out on the spot by sounding out the phonemes. But those two things, spacing and punctuation, are not the only ones that made possible the shift from oral to phonemes. to silent reading. There were other factors that also contributed to that transition that Manguel talks about. For example, the rise of fixed word order in many languages. So the fact that suddenly you had to put the subject in a particular place, the verb in another place, and they had to obey certain rules and conventions, because If you don't have that order, then it's very difficult to have stable meaning. Manguel also talks about the simplification of script, like the letters just being simplified and easier to look at. He talks about the emergence of writing cases, like upper and lowercase, because once you have the majuscula, the uppercase, You could very easily visually spot where a new sentence begins. And so it orders the text big picture. And then the last one that he talks about that stood out to me because, yeah, I guess there was a time when this didn't exist. is the advent of chapters and chapter titles, like cutting up the text into chapters, rather than just one flow of textuality. And then the injection of titles that tell you roughly what the next section will be about.
Ellie:Well, Maurice Merleau Ponty had no excuse because he was writing well after the advent of chapters, but dude did not have a lot of section breaks. The Merleau Ponty translation of the Phenomenology of Perception inserts those. Just a insidery phenomenology joke for you.
David:so alongside with punctuation and with spacing, all of these things lead to the silencing of the text. Where silencing here means. How we coproduce meaning with the work.
Ellie:Yeah. And. That, I think, is part of what Proust and Beauvoir are describing in talking about their joys of reading as young people, this idea that it's a silent relationship from self to self that's only made possible through silence. But one of the knock-on effects of this increasing internalization and silencing of reading that Abram addresses is the way that there's been a kind of absence of breath or life force brought into text. We used to have a more inspired way of relating to text and now we no longer do. He talks about how the structure of the ancient Hebrew writing system had no letters for what we call vowels. There were 22 letters in this alphabet and they were all consonants. This is different, of course, with its European derivatives. So in this ancient Hebrew writing system, you have to infer the appropriate vowel sounds from the context of the consonants. And this is a more mystical approach to language. He says specifically, the vowels are nothing other than sounded breath. So when you have to come up with the vowels, when you're reading something, you are bringing something of yourself into it. And you're bringing specifically because vowels are sound and breath, you're bringing your own breath or your own life force.
David:Yeah, and because the term for soul in a lot of languages including Hebrew was associated with air and breathing and so the idea was that once you breathe you're not just throwing air out of the body, you're somehow putting part of your essence into the act of speech. But be that as it may, what ends up happening is that all these changes in writing make silent reading possible by the 9th century. But again, it's not as if silent reading immediately spreads and displaces oral traditions. In fact, for most of the 10th, the 11th, the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, reading continues to be a primarily oral habit. In part because in Europe at this time, literacy was not yet widespread, so not a lot of people knew how to read in the first place, but also because books were extremely, extremely expensive, so it was not within the purview of an average person to own a book and to have the time to read it. And what really changes this is the rise of the printing press, which led to an explosion in affordable books that then led to a change in social attitudes about reading, because suddenly private reading can start to take over as the default mode of encountering a text, and once silent reading finally does take over, people's very experience of themselves was utterly transformed because some people trace the emergence of modern subjectivity, the sense of interiority of a, let's say, a space that belongs to me and only to me and that I access through introspection, that is made possible by the act of silent reading, because it's through reading that we work on that inner space and we build up a private reservoir of knowledge and feeling that is not open to other people.
Ellie:It definitely is a fascinating idea that the rise of silent reading has transformed and in some ways established our experience of subjectivity. I will say as somebody who works on subjectivity, I feel like people love to say, this new technology created subjectivity. We never had subjectivity before the modern period. And I usually find that to be a big overstatement. And I think subjectivity is a feature of what it means to be human. So I don't think we suddenly got interiority once we got the printing press. But it stands to reason that there would be big changes that would happen, especially in your relationship to yourself, once you're spending long hours looking at, you a text. And also coming up with an idea in your head about what that text is like, especially when we're talking about fiction, there are images that that text is creating. My image of the little house that the child Mandy discovered in the Julie Andrews novel is going to be different from every other child who read that same book's image of the little house that Mandy discovered.
David:Yeah, so we definitely put our own spin on the text we encounter through imagination, right? We all imagine the worlds that text make available to us in our own way. But I think that's also something that can happen in an oral exercise. Because if I listen to a bard telling me a tale of a hero, I might Imagine that hero and the places that they visit differently than another person listening to them.
Ellie:Yes, yes, such a good point. Okay, so even that transformation isn't new with silent reading. We all still had our own different imaginations before the advent of silent reading.
David:Yeah, I think that's fair, although maybe now I want to say that there is something unique to silent reading, which is not so much that we put our own spin on the text, but rather that the text puts its own spin on us in a new way, because one of the social consequences of the spread of the printing press and the availability of cheap books was that suddenly people could consume texts in private and they could be exposed to heretical ideas because it was easier to hide the text that they were letting into their private world. So it's not only that the emergence of subjectivity is at stake here, but also maybe we could say the multiplication of subjectivity because you could be, let's say, a garden variety law abiding citizen externally by day, but then you could be a sexual deviant or a political radical, you know, like reading anarchic texts or anti monarchic literature at night and nobody would actually know.
Ellie:All right, David, it's time to talk about reading philosophy. Philosophy has a reputation for being particularly challenging to read. And, we saw how widespread this view is, I think, in addition to our many years of teaching, but in our first viral moment. Because Overthink's first viral moment was in summer 2022, when my YouTube video, Tips on Reading Philosophy, racked up hundreds of thousands of views within just a couple of weeks. This was based on a handout that I give to my students. I crafted this handout, you know, years ago now, and I would give it to students in my philosophy classes. Then I was just like, oh, you know what? I'll make a video version of this. Had no idea that it would hit the way that it did, but I think it's success suggests that people really need tips for reading philosophy.
David:And I think this leads to a question that I want us to think about together, which is why is philosophy so hard to read?
Ellie:There are many, many different types of philosophy, so there will be different answers to this depending on the text, and maybe we can talk a little bit about which kinds of philosophy we find harder than others a little bit later. But I think most philosophy tends to be quite abstract, and it's really hard to feel the momentum of a text when it's so abstract. When I think about reading, I think about sometimes being carried along by a text. Think about reading Harry Potter for the first time. You just can't put it down. It's a page turner. That's a time when you're being carried by the text. Then there are times when you really have to carry your experience of the text. You're continually applying yourself to the text. You're trying to check in on whether you're understanding it. You're trying to keep your stamina up. You're kind of self-soothing to enable yourself to continue. And I think philosophical texts tend to be more the latter than the former. There are very few philosophical texts, especially for novices, that do that work of carrying you along. That can change over time. The first time I read a text by Plato, I was like, what is going on here? And it was so boring to me. Now a text by Plato really will carry me along.
David:By Plato?
Ellie:Yeah, I had a really hard time with the Socratic dialogues when I first started reading them when I was 17, 18 years old.
David:That is somewhat surprising to me because when I think about the philosophical masterpieces that are closer to maybe like the Harry Potter style books in that they create a world, I think of the dialogues because there is a setting. There's a description of space and time and of company. And so the fact that they are written as dialogues with a particular location, I think taps into that pictorial and imagistic type of reading that you do not get, for example, when you read Heidegger, there are no characters, there is no landscape. And so I'm curious about why Plato was so hard for you.
Ellie:I think this speaks to a second reason that reading philosophy is really hard, which is that philosophy is the oldest academic discipline, and we value reading texts from throughout the history of that academic discipline. Science students are not, for instance, reading Galen or Galileo when they're undertaking their studies. Philosophy students are reading very ancient texts and texts that were written in really different time periods and different languages with different contexts. So I think that's often a big challenge when people are first starting to read philosophy. So I think when I was first starting to read the Platonic dialogues, sure. You know, they take place in like an agora or at a dinner party, and there are characters, but there's not really rich and vivid descriptions for a modern reader of what these characters are like. And a lot of the questions are very abstract. A lot of the discussions are hard to wrap your head around if you're not already motivated. And so I think that would be why I had a hard time with Plato at the beginning, and also another reason that philosophy is hard. It just takes getting used to, and then you can be like, oh my god, this platonic dialogue is so juicy, but it wasn't juicy to me when I was used to reading Harry Potter.
David:I know it was not until we did that episode on, what was it sport? What did we call it?
Ellie:It was our exercise episode.
David:Exercise. Thank you. That I really understood what the gymnasium actually was, even though it's mentioned and I had read secondary material about it, but you know, these things will be mentioned and as an amateur, let's say, innocent reader, you're like, well, what in the world is a gymnasium? What is an agora? And what does it mean in the context of this text? Now, in connection to this question of why philosophy is so hard, or maybe uniquely hard among the academic disciplines, I also want to add two other variables. One of them is the hyper citationality that is standard in philosophical writing. So, philosophers often write about other philosophers under the assumption that their reader is already familiar with them. And this is something that we have gotten a lot of emails about from our listeners and our fans, which is how do I break into that circle? You know, if I want to read Heidegger, does that mean that I have to read Hegel before? Does that mean that I have to read Aquinas before? Does that mean that I have to read Augustine before? And in some way, the answer is yes. In another way, the answer is no, because even though that can be overwhelming, at some point you just have to leap into the circle and over time build the skill and the expertise to manage that excess of citationality. and the second variable that I want to add here, which I really struggled with as an undergrad, and it, it honestly really pissed me off. is the principle of systematicity. A lot of philosophers are systematic thinkers because they want to make a name for themselves. And the best way to make a name for yourself as a philosopher is by developing an -ism associated with your name, you know, develop a system where all the pieces hang together by a common thread. And that means that sometimes. A philosophical text by a well known author may be doing something in relation to the system of thought that it belongs to, more so than in relation to the object that it's talking about, if that makes sense. I remember reading in my first philosophy class ever, work by Spinoza and Leibniz, both are systematic thinkers. And I thought that was a terrible entry point for a philosophy student, because I couldn't contextualize the readings, not relative to their historical context, but relative to their theoretical, systemic context.
Ellie:I think that's right. And this goes back to the education point for me, because one of the reasons that philosophy is so hard for people, at least in American context, is that we don't usually get philosophy in high school. And so college is the first time that people are encountering these texts, which are I think some of the most fascinating texts ever, of course, but can be really dry for people and really inaccessible. I think it's amazing that there's been this rise of material that's easily accessible to people online for helping them to understand philosophy, and we have been definitely a part of that in our own way. But I also really think that the best way to learn philosophy ultimately is in collaboration with others, especially with a teacher. And so, to pull an Adam Kotsko here, I don't think this is a point about snobbery. I actually think it's a point about educational justice and the idea that philosophy should be accessible to everybody, not only in a 10 minute lecture that I'm doing on Beauvoir online, but actually, in conversation with people under the guidance of a teacher, and that has to do, I think, more with the devaluing of the humanities in our society than with anything else, and with the inaccessibility of college tuitions for people, and so on, because even though philosophy is hard to read, it's definitely not impossible to read, and I really want to encourage folks, if you are enjoying listening to Overthink. I know we probably have a ton of listeners already who do read philosophy, whether it's for work, for school, for pleasure. But if you want to break in, I also want to encourage you to do that because even though I think it's best done under the guidance of a teacher and in collaboration with peers, it doesn't mean that it's impossible to do on your own either. I think really, to go back to some of what we've been talking about, developing the intention span is paramount. And I do think, maybe this can lead into a discussion about different philosophers, that some philosophers, even for those of us who are accustomed to reading philosophy, take a while to get used to. I notice this when I go away from a philosopher for a time and come back to them. I scared the living daylights out of my students a couple of years ago when I was teaching Hegel by telling them that I had recently restarted the Phenomenology of Spirit and spent eight hours reading five pages.
David:Yeah.
Ellie:And they were like, how are we gonna read the 15 pages you assigned if you took eight hours to read five pages? But I was reading it. I was returning to Hegel after a long hiatus. I was reading the Phenomenology of Spirit. spirit, which is a very difficult text, much more difficult than the text that I had assigned my students. And there's just a different rhythm. And then once you get into that rhythm, it becomes a little bit quicker. I think the same is true of Kant. I think the same is true of Heidegger. I think the same is true of Deleuze. And these are some of the philosophers that have a reputation for being among the toughest. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't also have aids, like written aids, secondary literature, etc. That can be really helpful too. But there is a sense of developing attention and a rhythm to reading text that I think is important too.
David:Well, and that it can be also extremely pleasurable because I think one of the greatest pleasures of advanced reading is sustaining those moments of tension that ultimately lead to a moment of mental clarity in relation to a text that is particularly hard that just gives you a sense of accomplishment as a cognitive agent. And this is largely my way of thinking about the canon wars that have been raging on in higher education for some time now. Where I do approach it through what you mentioned is a question of justice, because it has often been said, and keep in mind that I work at a state university. You know, we have limited budgets. Our students are working class. It has often been said that if you teach at a state university, you should not subject your students to primary texts, and you should not have them read canonical texts because they don't speak to their lived experience. And although I agree with critiques of the canon, there is nothing transcendental that justifies why some people make it onto the canon and many others do not. It's highly contingent, it's highly political, and in many ways problematic. I do think that many canonical works are highly valuable and to say that working class students can't be expected to rise to the challenge of reading, Shakespeare or to reading Freud or to reading, insert any other canonical thinker strikes me as a form of classism that is deeply troubling. And in fact, this was the motivation behind that reading experiment class that we talked about a little while ago, that I recognize that many of my students are working class and they don't have an easy time carving out long periods of time to just devote to uninterrupted reading, especially reading of philosophical texts. And that's why I decided, well, what if I carve that space out for them in the very structure of my class, where that's what we do. And my students impressed me in their ability to battle with really difficult material and to process it and talk about it on the spot.
Ellie:I think that's a really beautiful response to this structural issue, David, and I really commend you for it. I want to just end by offering a couple of ideas about how to increase your stamina for reading philosophy. One is really getting a sense of the different philosophers that speak to you and that you feel you want to develop your stamina with, right? If you're not going to be all excited to read about monads, like, don't read Leibniz, read Nietzsche, and use those secondary resources if that's going to be helpful for you. But I think having a sense of which philosophers are going to speak to you, just based on a topic and or writing style is helpful. Go into a bookstore, see what speaks to you, what jumps off the page, and then really try and give yourself a sustained and uninterrupted period of reading, and then see what happens from there. There's also increasingly a lot of exciting works of public facing philosophy being written. Lots of books nowadays by contemporary philosophers, many of whom we've interviewed on Overthink, that are geared towards a more public audience. And so, you don't have to beat your head against Plotinus to be enjoying philosophy. You can really be going to some more accessible contemporary works or accessible earlier works, right? Like Aurelius is not so hard to read. St. Augustine. Now I'm just, okay, I'm gonna stop rattling off people. David, close this out.
David:I would add to this that we could also reclaim times and places for reading, because most of us develop a certain routine around when we read and where we read, but what if we began experimenting with reading at novel times and in novel places. And I think that can be a very powerful way of forming new memories of the things that we read because then the things that we read become associated with those places and with those times. I also would say not just going to a bookstore, but surrounding yourself with books at home. There is a sense in which just having books visually accessible to you makes you think of them and makes you incorporate them into your own self image and your self identity so that you think of yourself not just as the person that has books, but as a person who might just pick up a book when you don't really know what else to do when you have a little break in your schedule. And finally, in terms of reading, I would say, not just read the philosophers that you like, but also read about them. And that means not just reading philosophical material, but reading non philosophical material about the philosophers and the philosophies that you like. Read history books about the history of existentialism or sociology books about what was happening in Europe at the time that romanticism came on the scene.
Ellie:Or biographies.
David:Biographies, read the correspondences that authors left behind because that also can start giving you a sense of the person and the historical epoch in which they lived that can deepen your appreciation and your love for a particular thinker.
Ellie:Go forth. Happy reading folks. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live q and as and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast. com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.
