7 Ways of Reading Philosophy: #1 Reading Like Napoleon | Philosophy - Medium

This article was first published on LookingforWisdom.com on 19th March 2021.

There’s a lot to be said for reading at a gallop by Will Buckingham, Writes nonfiction & fiction and PhD in philosopy.

Wittgenstein looking Napoleonic.
Anonymous photo dated 1891. Public Domain via Wikimedia commons.

 

 

When reading philosophy, the advice is often to read slowly and carefully, 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...

Philosophy at a gallop

But this article isn’t really about Wittgenstein. Instead, it is about how to read philosophy. And for Rosenzweig, reading philosophy fast, reading it at a gallop, is often the very best way. Rosenzweig writes:

Thus, whoever does not understand something can most assuredly expect enlightenment if they courageously go on reading. The reason why this rule is difficult for the beginner, and […] also for many a non-beginner to accept, lies in the fact that thinking and writing are not the same. In thinking, one stroke really strikes a thousand connections. In writing, these thousand must be artfully and cleanly arranged on the string of thousands of lines.

Remember that for Rosenzweig, the way that philosophical arguments unfold is a kind of “speech thinking.” Philosophy is a kind of storytelling...

But, you might ask, what if you get to the end of the Tractatus — or any other philosophy book — and find you have galloped out the other side without any of the major fortresses falling? What if you get to the end, and are still as baffled as before?

Well, that’s fine too. Because nothing is lost.

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Additional resources 

Immanuel Kant, by H. Pfening, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

7 Ways of Reading Philosophy: An Introduction by Will Buckingham.

Source: Medium