Can a book be a friend? On the ethics of reading

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” Hemingway

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”  Kafka

Do you need a book to tell you how to read a book?

The American philosopher and educationist Mortimer Adler seemed to think so. In 1940 he published his How to Read a Book, an instruction manual offering a system of formal techniques intended to facilitate a fruitful interaction between reader and reading material.

Arguably Adler’s contract with his readership violates its own terms and conditions: it is not a compelling read. This might be in part because his concern was with the reading of non-fiction, and he thereby avoided discussion of the requirements of imagination which are specific to the reading of a novel.

But I “hat tip” him anyway because he was onto something we are prone to forget: the act of reading is the act of reading, one which – as is true of all actions — imposes certain responsibilities. There is such a thing as an “ethics of reading”.  Pace the childish subversions of the “deconstructionist” types, whose chief concern is to make the reader feel irrelevant by placing the meaning of a text beyond an impenetrable veil of obfuscation, we, as readers, have something to bring to the party. And if that means gatecrashing, then so be it. (I sometimes wonder what a deconstructionist book club would look like. Do people sit in a circle and take turns explaining just how that month’s choice lacks any meaning whatsoever?)

What, then, are these responsibilities of reading and where do they come from? Hemingway’s metaphor is useful here. David Bowie once said that there was a period in the 70s when he rarely slept, the reason being that he had, at this point in his fame, a lot of friends “and you have to give friends time”.

As with friendship, so with reading: courtship and disciplined attention over time are necessary conditions of success.  And with the investment of time comes a duty of discernment, the knowing when to just toss the book to one side on the grounds that it is not friendship material.  There must, for example, come a point at which just giving up on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest isn’t really “giving up” at all, but an act of refined aesthetic judgment (one which in my case was exercised shortly before Chapter Two). To think that you should see things through to the end with every book you open is not so much open-minded receptiveness as literary promiscuity.

Hemingway’s metaphor only takes us so far, of course. Obviously, a book can be cherished, a relationship of some sort is possible, but this can never amount to a friendship because it will lack what Aristotle suggested was an essential ingredient of friendship, namely reciprocity. There is too much going on in the fictional worlds of M Bovary or Tom Brown for them to be concerned about what you think of them. But if we enter those worlds mindful of our responsibilities as readers, then we might find and develop habits of moral and psychological insight which we can put to good use when we step back out again.

If we can’t be friends with the book, then what sort of relationship can we expect to share with its author? The brilliant Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, has suggested that he would prefer to have the company of books over people. Why? Because, he argues, when you read a book, you will be introduced to the author’s best version of himself. But when I read the Nicomachean Ethics or the Odyssey, on what grounds can I claim that I am “meeting” any version of Aristotle or Homer at all?  We might wish to argue that the ancient authors are relatable because they understand and describe the contours of the human condition. But doesn’t this reply assume a certain immutability to that condition? Is there such a thing as an “essential human nature”?

But now we have left the shallow waters of ethics and are treading water in the deeper end of metaphysics: best to swim back.

We can lighten things by turning to Kafka, for whom the pleasure we take in reading needs to be very unpleasant indeed if we are concerned with moral improvement. The purpose of reading is to take an axe to our petrified soul. (It is telling, incidentally, that Dante conceives of Hell as largely a place of unbearable cold rather than heat.) When we read properly, we are actively situating ourselves in places of spiritual and moral discomfort, so that catharsis can follow its natural course.

Is there a way of reconciling the apparently contradictory quotes which introduce this piece? Yes, but only if we accept that the best friendships are sometimes those which bring the most intense demands.

Sir Roger Scruton once remarked that the primary aim of a university education should be to teach the student how to read a difficult book from cover to cover. When she has done this once, she will have absorbed not merely the contents of that book but also the ethical resources which will help her to go on and read thousands more.

A final point. There is a contemporary moral contagion usually referred to as cognitive dissonance, the most striking symptom of which is a willingness to hold contradictory beliefs. Reading both exercises and disciplines the human mind. When reading a text, be it a novel, car maintenance manual, or work of philosophy, we rightfully expect a consistency that seems to have been abandoned in the prosecution of today’s “culture wars”.

It might be an exaggeration to say that the observable decline of the West is intimately connected to the decline of active reading – but it’s not much of one.

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