There are few things I enjoy as much as reading. Not only are the ideas enlightening, they challenge me intellectually, which is a rare thing, and stimulate brain muscles that the normal course of the day doesn’t touch in the least. While experiencing the world is also a thing in it of itself, reading allows us to *understand* the world we are experiencing in a way that changes how we are in it. It also allows and helps us to explore ourselves, our thoughts, who we are and might become and gives us the tools to understand a complex and diverse world that we only have a small window into in our own lives. Likewise, when we read, reading deepens our appreciation for the descriptive complexity of the world and the experiences of others. But finding something I like to read: not always easy. It is like an investigator’s path: reading one thing which references another and then reading that next thing, like a detective following clues…
Heidegger has this notion of “deseverance:” it is an activity of Dasein (his terminology), human beings, that is about, I think (if I understand it correctly) disclosing and taking up things in and from our environment and utilizing them in the service of our for-the-sake-which, which is our sort of guiding purposes which organizes what we do and what we use to do what we do so that we can live this for-the-sake-of-which. Perhaps reading aids us in this deseverance, making our world more accessible to use by giving the linguistic tools to access an understanding of the environment (the world) and ourselves otherwise not known.
Bearer of Pity 