Here's the Thing

We’ve now looked at some of the connections between reading and selfhood, and between reading and ethics. In this chapter I’d like to turn to the link between reading and a third philosophical topic: ontology. Ontology, as I’m using the term, is the study of being: an investigation of the things that exist, considered simply as things that exist. The question I want to raise is whether the experiences of readers reveal anything about their dealings with things. Does the experience of reading teach us anything about the nature of things as such, or about the roles that things play in our lives? To be clear, I’m not suggesting that reading or the study of it are ways of solving metaphysical problems on the cheap. I’m not suggesting that reflecting on reading will yield straightforward solutions to the sorites paradox or the problem of the one and the many. And I’m certainly not suggesting that the experiences of readers give them privileged insights into the nature of reality— that a voracious reader knows more than anyone else about what really exists as opposed to what merely appears to. What interests me is the possibility that readers’ experiences shed light on the meanings that things have for us. After all, reading is a way of encountering things that matter to us: namely, books and the other things that we read. Perhaps reflecting on the ways in which these things matter to readers will reveal something about the ways in which things more generally matter to us. This is an ontological question, but it's a question for a descriptive ontology, since it concerns how we do, in fact, understand things, rather than with how a scientist or a philosopher would say we ought to understand them. It could also be called a question for a hermeneutical ontology, since it's concerned with the meanings of things rather than the sheer fact of them.

All of this must sound hopelessly ambitious. Any attempt to reflect on the meanings of things raises a great many thorny issues. For one thing, the meanings of things, and particularly the things we read, emerge under highly specific social and historical conditions and vary tremendously from one setting to another.