The quiet of a good public library on a weekday morning has a certain quality: the low hum of the ventilation system, the occasional soft thud of a returned book, and people hunched over pages with an expression that is neither quite peace nor quite concentration. It appears to be rest. It appears easy. Neither of those is the case.
When you look closely, reading is one of the most bizarre things a person can do. You remain motionless. Your eyes are the only thing that moves. However, if the right book is chosen at the right time, something within changes. Beliefs become softer. Assumptions fall apart. You are measurably different from the person who picked up the book when you put it down. It doesn’t feel like a dramatic change. It’s hardly noticeable most of the time. However, it exists, and for decades, reading philosophers have been attempting to define, classify, and debate it.
Considering reading as a dialogue is the most straightforward way to comprehend what it truly is, as opposed to how it feels. It’s not a metaphor. A genuine, if biased, exchange between a reader and a writer who might have passed away centuries ago. In a way, Marcus Aurelius was waiting when he composed his Meditations by himself in a military tent near the Danube. waiting for him to be read. That waiting is triggered by reading. You become the other half of an idea that was never completed on its own. In a 2022 article in Frontiers, philosopher Daniel Whistler succinctly stated that reading philosophy is an integral part of practicing philosophy.
Though that phrase tends to make it sound more exciting than it actually is, there is also something to the concept of time travel. When you open a book written in a different century, you’re stepping into a world with different certainties, fears, and atmospheres. There is no other way to access the world that gave rise to Mary Wollstonecraft’s arguments or Montaigne’s essays. However, literacy maintains a certain level of access as a technology. In a tiny but real way, you are standing on the shoulders of everyone who came before you; you are continuing where they left off rather than rediscovering what they already figured out. Perhaps no human invention accomplishes this as effectively.
Readers’ intuitive suspicions have been confirmed by cognitive science. The slow, focused, rereading type of deep reading stimulates the brain’s ability to mimic other people’s thoughts. Your brain architecture is doing something that is very similar to actually going through that grief or joy when you follow a character through it. For this reason, reading and empathy have always seemed to be connected. Yes, they are. Imagination and perception are not clearly distinguished by the brain. Because it employs the same tools for both, a particularly vivid scene in a book may later seem like something that actually happened to you.
However, the majority of us read quickly most of the time. Scanning and skimming. In the same way that you listen to a podcast while driving, you absorb information by being both present enough to follow and distracted enough to miss the texture. Reading philosophers are often critical of this, and it seems that they have good reason to be. The distinction between skimming and what Alasdair MacIntyre referred to as authentic “practice”—a type of intense, demanding, and fulfilling engagement—is analogous to the difference between visiting and residing in a city. You can move through while still having a general idea of where things are. However, you fail to see what makes it a place.
When you observe someone reading intently, taking notes, going back to passages, and silently debating the margins, you start to realize that what they are doing is a kind of self-construction. In this sense, reading is not what you do when you’re bored. It is one of the ways that a person develops their identity. The books you’ve read again, the ones you disagreed with, the ones that made you feel uneasy for reasons you couldn’t immediately identify—those books didn’t simply flow through you. Something was left by them. At its most basic, the philosophy of reading is just an effort to explain what that something is. Sitting quietly in a library on a Wednesday morning and watching people do it is more difficult to put into words than it seems.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.