What reading is like, psychologically
Alexander Samely's 'Reading and Experience: A Philosophical Investigation', reviewed by Philip Davis, Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology, University of Liverpool.
11 September 2024
You scan a page, and take in its meaning sequentially: word by word, sentence after sentence, one paragraph after another. But that segmentation into sense-units, says Alexander Samely, is merely a mechanical, computational model of reading. It's not what reading is like, psychologically, as an experience.
The page won't stay flat and two-dimensional. The boundaries between sentences won't keep them wholly separate from each other. The reader no longer simply 'sees' the print. Reading, says Samely, 'is not the same as perceiving some spatio-temporal thing'; 'the activity of reading dissolves the perceptive solidity of a page' (p.84).
It is not a continuous movement through homogeneous points. Instead, something suddenly happens: a compelling word, the turn of a clause. Even as the sentences drive forward to imminent understanding, you recall a moment from pages earlier. It is not just that something on page 150 reminds you of something you had hardly noticed back on page 40. Suddenly page 150 has gone backwards, page 40 has come forwards, and both are working together in your mind in a space no longer to do with consecutive pages.
This dynamic arises out of what Samely calls, after the Austro-German philosopher Husserl, 'passive synthesis'. It is an underlying and non-deliberate network of awareness that you don't have to be aware of; that you don't even know was there until it is recouped. But that unconsciousness is activated when two different things feel suddenly connected in the roused mind.
Samely calls it 'reflection' – not as leisurely perusal, but an experience of realisation in the midst of time. 'Reductive perspectives in psychology and neuroscience', he writes, 'often make the "later" simultaneous with the "now", eliminating the time-lag of reflection' (p.136).
This isn't just to do with reading. Reading here is a model of psychological experience and ontological possibility that challenges inflexible disciplines and over-literal labellings. Reading and Experience is a wonderfully demanding work of radical importance. Not the least of its claims is how much psychology, philosophy and literary reading need and involve each other. Wanted for Questioning: an institution that will help bring them more together.
Reading and Experience: A Philosophical Investigation (hardback £109.99, eBook £87.50) may be available online through your institution's library.
