Staying Long Enough to Understand

On Reading, Attention, and Practical Judgement

A student puts down her book. She has read the same page three times and is still unsure what the author means. Her phone lies beside her. She could ask for a summary and have the main points within seconds. It is tempting. She has more texts to read, an assignment to submit, and a life beyond the syllabus.

But what is she supposed to learn? To reproduce the conclusion? Or also to follow a line of thought, notice where she loses the thread, and examine why she disagrees?

Reading matters to practical philosophy because it gives us practice in revising our initial understanding. An overlooked detail changes the whole. An objection unsettles something we took for granted. What first seemed meaningless turns out to demand something we have yet to learn. This practice does not automatically make us wiser in our encounters with others. But it gives us something to bring to those encounters: the experience that our own understanding needs to be challenged.

The starting point for this essay is David Adam’s review in Nature of James Marriott’s book The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society. I am responding to the question raised by the review, without claiming to offer an independent assessment of the book: What do we lose if we stop reading sustained and demanding texts?

Marriott’s argument, as presented by Adam, concerns more than reading habits. Sustained reading develops our ability to follow complex arguments and engage with other perspectives. A public sphere that seeks to scrutinise reasons and hold those in power accountable needs these capacities. If attention is repeatedly interrupted before an argument has time to unfold, part of the basis for reasoned disagreement is weakened as well.

This is a serious concern. It deserves more than a nostalgic defence of the printed book.

At the same time, Adam identifies weaknesses in the opposition between enlightening print and the mind-numbing screen. Printed newspapers have also spread misinformation and failed vulnerable groups. Well-read people are perfectly capable of being callous. And when concern about the future of reading becomes concern that people are choosing the wrong genres, another problem arises: a crime novel may open up questions of guilt and justice, while a philosophical treatise may be read as confirmation of everything the reader already believes.

Paper does not make a claim true. A bookshelf does not confer sound judgement. The crucial question is what we practise while we read, and whether we allow that practice to have consequences beyond the reading chair.

Hans-Georg Gadamer gives us a language for this. In Truth and Method (1960/2010, Norwegian edition), he describes how understanding always begins with presuppositions. We never approach a text entirely without expectations about what it says. Prejudices here mean more than negative attitudes; they are also the provisional assumptions that enable us to begin to understand.

The task, then, is not to become free of presuppositions. It is to put them at stake. We must give the text an opportunity to challenge what we expected to find.

In practice, this means pausing when something does not fit, rather than immediately treating it as a flaw in the text. Perhaps we have misunderstood a concept. Perhaps a later sentence changes the meaning of the first. Perhaps the argument does not hold, but then we must examine where it fails. Openness takes work; it carries no obligation to agree.

Here, too, lies the connection with practical judgement. Gadamer uses Aristotle’s phronesis as a model for understanding: the general acquires its concrete meaning in the encounter with a particular situation, rather than being applied as a ready-made recipe. We practise distinguishing between what the matter before us reveals and what we expected to see. This carries over into other situations only when we recognise our own tendency to reach conclusions too quickly and actually allow something new to correct us. Reading offers practice in this movement, no guarantee that we will make it.

Consider a professional preparing for a conversation. She opens the case record and reads: “Has missed three appointments. Assessed as having little motivation for further support.”

The first sentence describes a sequence of events. The second interprets it. In a quick reading, they merge. Before the person has entered the office, the professional has already been given an explanation of whom she is about to meet.

This, too, is reading in practice. A phrase in a case record influences which questions are asked, what attracts attention, and what passes unnoticed. If the professional expects resistance, she risks hearing hesitation as yet another sign of a lack of motivation. The text has begun to shape the encounter before the other person has had a chance to speak.

Then a detail appears that does not fit. The person has kept all the appointment letters. On one of them, several words are underlined.

“I don’t understand what you mean by this,” he says.

The professional asks him to show her where he lost the thread. Gradually, he tells her about earlier meetings when he nodded without understanding, and about the shame of having to ask yet again. The three missed appointments remain a fact. But they no longer provide the same basis for the assessment “little motivation”.

One detail has changed the whole. The professional must read the case record again in the light of what she has now heard.

Here the connection between reading and ethics becomes concrete. The case record is already a text between people. How it is read affects how help is offered and responsibility assigned. A person is more than the record says, and has a claim to be heard when the description is inaccurate. In the encounter, openness towards a text therefore also becomes a question of power: Is the person described given a real opportunity to correct the description?

After the conversation, the professional writes: “Wishes to receive further support but has not understood parts of the appointment letters. Agreed to go through the information verbally before the next meeting.”

This note, too, is provisional. But the next reader encounters a different starting point. The record now bears traces of someone having allowed her initial understanding to be challenged.

Such attention takes time. A professional who has to move on before a question has been fully asked has little opportunity to notice the detail that changes the case. The same applies to a student rewarded for producing a correct answer while the work of understanding remains invisible.

At this point, criticism of the distractions of our time must become more than a call for self-discipline. The phone constantly offers something easier than the sentence we are struggling with. But the opportunity for sustained attention also depends on working hours, finances, caring responsibilities, and access to places where we can be left in peace.

Norwegian history also reminds us that reading and sustained study have not been the exclusive preserve of elites. Popular education, public libraries, and the labour movement’s study circles have, in different ways, made knowledge accessible to more people. Within the labour movement, educational work was connected to the opportunity to participate and gain influence. This is an important corrective to the idea of reading as a private luxury.

The problem, then, is not that sustained attention asks something of us. The problem arises when the demand is made without creating the conditions that make it possible.

We cannot demand reflection from people while organising their days so that every pause appears inefficient.

Artificial intelligence brings this tension into sharp focus. The student receives a summary before she has worked out what she does not understand. The professional receives a summary of the case record before she has examined how its assessments came about. This saves time. But if “little motivation” is carried forward as an established personal characteristic, the initial interpretation also becomes quicker and easier to adopt.

Useful assistance would instead make the distinction between event and assessment clear: three appointments were missed; the reason has not been established. The summary would then open up a question that someone must still take responsibility for investigating.

The same applies in education. Assistance has value when it brings the student back to the task of examining the subject. If it takes over the reading, the objections, and the writing, the very practice the assignment was intended to provide disappears. The question then becomes what education actually rewards: ready-made answers or the ability to justify and revise them.

Attention is thus both a personal practice and an institutional responsibility. Individuals must be willing to examine their understanding. Education and working life must make room for that examination. Technology must be judged by whether it opens the matter up for us or closes it before we have had time to ask.

The student is still sitting with the difficult page in front of her. She asks for help with a single concept. Then she puts her phone away and reads the paragraph again. This time she sees where the argument changes direction. She still disagrees, but now she knows which sentence she needs to answer.

The page is the same. Her objection has changed.

Referanser

Adam, D. (2026, October 15). Does the decline of book reading mark the end of rational thinking? Nature, 658(8136), 601–603. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03224-7

Gadamer, H.-G. (2010). Sannhet og metode: Grunntrekk i en filosofisk hermeneutikk [Truth and method: Outlines of a philosophical hermeneutics] (L. Holm-Hansen, Trans.). Pax. (Original work published 1960)

Marriott, J. (2026). The new dark ages: The end of reading and the dawn of a post-literate society. Bodley Head.