The Worst Reading Mistakes (and how to avoid them)

Summary

The speaker presents an “anti-guide” to reading: eight common mistakes he has made, and ways to avoid them. His central point is that good reading depends on balancing complementary habits rather than following a single rigid rule. Readers should remain open to correction, willing to make provisional interpretations, and prepared to revisit difficult works.

Eight reading mistakes and how to avoid them

1. Being critical without being charitable

   • Reading a thinker in the least defensible way can turn their argument into an easy target and obscure what they were actually trying to say.
   • The speaker recalls misreading Plato’s story of the Ring of Gyges as though Plato were claiming it literally happened, missing that the story raises a question about why people should act justly when wrongdoing would benefit them.
   • Literature can also be judged unfairly when it is assessed by criteria foreign to its aims—for example, criticizing The Brothers Karamazov only for the slow pace of its physical plot.
   • How to avoid it: First look for a strong, context-sensitive interpretation, then evaluate it critically. Charity should not mean treating a philosopher as infallible or forcing their words to support beliefs they may not have held.

2. Relying entirely on primary sources

   • Original works can be difficult to interpret without historical, biographical, or intellectual context. Readers may miss references, assumptions, or debates that were familiar to the author’s first audience.
   • Context can change how a work appears: Machiavelli’s political career, for instance, complicates the idea that The Prince represents his entire political outlook.
   • How to avoid it: Read primary texts, but use reliable scholarship and relevant historical context to clarify what is at stake.

3. Relying entirely on secondary sources

   • Scholarship can offer sound interpretations, but it cannot replace the reader’s own encounter with the text.
   • Reading the original work allows personal observations to emerge—details or connections that may not be central to existing scholarship but can still reshape one’s understanding.
   • How to avoid it: Pair secondary reading with direct engagement with the primary work. The effort of puzzling through a difficult text is itself valuable.

4. Dismissing thinkers before reading them—or treating favored thinkers as flawless

   • Broad stereotypes about philosophical or literary traditions can be based on a few decontextualized passages and may lead readers to reject worthwhile work without understanding it.
   • The reverse error is excessive devotion: treating a philosopher as a guru, or assuming one thinker’s approach is the only legitimate way to investigate questions.
   • How to avoid it: Read enough to assess a thinker in context, and stay open to why thoughtful readers find value in work you initially find obscure or unhelpful. At the same time, keep questioning thinkers you admire.

5. Reading too closely or too broadly

   • Close reading attends to details such as word choice and sentence structure; broad reading considers the shape and purpose of a whole work or a thinker’s wider project.
   • Too little attention to detail can flatten a complex argument into a simplistic summary. But focusing on one sentence can also obscure the larger structure—or lead to labor over a point clarified on the next page.
   • How to avoid it: Move between the two scales. Examine important details closely, then step back to ask how they fit into the whole. The speaker treats the two approaches as complementary, not competing.

6. Overestimating what you know—or believing you must know everything

   • Overconfidence can cause readers to stop investigating and retain mistaken or incomplete views. But the opposite extreme—believing one must master an entire field before forming any judgment—can make learning feel pointless.
   • How to avoid it: Acknowledge the limits of your knowledge while still making your own interpretations. Hold those judgments provisionally and be willing to revise them when you learn more.

7. Never rereading

   • Treating a book as finished after one reading can prevent deeper understanding. The speaker says that rereading familiar works has often taught him more than encountering new material.
   • How to avoid it: Return to important or especially rich works. A later reading can reveal new layers as your questions and knowledge change.

8. Losing the drive to work through puzzlement

   • The speaker uses aporia for the experience of being puzzled and thauma for the impulse to pursue an answer. He notes that his use of thauma is personal rather than a claim about its strict scholarly meaning.
   • Difficult reading can be frustrating; curiosity alone may not sustain it. The productive combination is recognizing that something is not yet understood and feeling motivated to investigate it.
   • How to avoid it: Let unresolved questions prompt further reading and reflection. The speaker’s rereading of a section of The Brothers Karamazov eventually helped him see how a seemingly separate subplot contributes to the novel’s themes.

Overall lesson

Becoming a better reader is gradual. It involves balancing charity with criticism, detail with context, confidence with humility, and curiosity with a willingness to struggle. No single reading method works for every text, and readers should expect their interpretations to develop over time.

Speakers and sources featured

Speaker: Joe Folley (identified in the video as Joe Folly), host of Unsolicited Advice. Walter Veit is mentioned as someone previously interviewed by the channel, but does not speak in these subtitles.

Thinkers, writers, works, and examples discussed: Plato (Republic, including the Ring of Gyges, and Timaeus); David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature); Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and the subject of Jacques Catteau’s Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation); Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers); Arthur Schopenhauer; John Stuart Mill; Jeremy Bentham; Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince and Discourses on Livy); Søren Kierkegaard (The Sickness Unto Death and The Present Age); Albert Camus; Hegel; Jacques Lacan; Hasok Chang; David Hume, A. J. Ayer, and Rudolf Carnap; Jacques Derrida; Franz Kafka (Diaries); the Stoics, including Epictetus and Musonius Rufus; Aristotle; Socrates and Plato’s Euthyphro; Salvador Dalí (a painting of Abraham Lincoln); Leo Tolstoy; John Steinbeck; and Ludwig Wittgenstein. John Stewart’s books on Kierkegaard and nineteenth-century nihilism are also mentioned.