How Reading Becomes Action
Hello and welcome to wild:philosophy. I write about … yeah, that’s the question I am currently asking myself. What is it even that I write about.
I’m still figuring it out.
What I know is this: I’m drawn to the places where big ideas touch daily life. Where personal and planetary transformation meet. Where philosophy becomes practical without losing its depth. I am in search for a way of life that deeply attunes me to life, lets me experience it with every fiber of my body, so clearly, that I am unable to cause meaningless harm.
If you’ve been reading for a while and have your own sense of what this space means to you, I’d genuinely love to hear it. You might see my work more clearly than I do.
With that, let’s get to today’s essay.
Yesterday, I spent fourteen hours reading. Not because I had to (fortunately), but because when one of those now very rare empty day appear, that’s what I do. I disappear into books. My best friend laughs at me – apparently I start every third sentence with “I read that...”
Another friend gets genuinely annoyed when I share theories. “We’ve known this stuff forever,” she’ll say, pointing to something practical like farming. “You just put fancy words on it.”
She’s not wrong. But she’s not entirely right either.
There’s this old debate in philosophy about how we should live. Should we pursue la vita contemplativa – the life of the mind, of reading and thinking? Or la vita activa – the life of action and engagement?
I think this split is unnecessary.
The Weight of This Division
In his book Vita Contemplativa, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han says
“Inactivity constitutes the human. The inactivity involved in any doing is what makes the doing something genuinely human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction.”
It’s the contemplative moment within action that makes us human.
Hannah Arendt saw it differently. She championed the active life, arguing that we reveal who we truly are through speech and action in the public realm. For her, sitting alone with books wasn’t where humanity happened – it was in the messy, unpredictable space where we act together, create politics, make history.
But what if we don’t separate these two in the first place – not saying that these two did.
Karen Barad argues that we don’t just observe reality from the outside – we’re part of the “intra-action.” When we measure or know something, we’re not discovering pre-existing facts. We’re participating in how reality comes to matter, both in the sense of becoming material and becoming significant. The very act of studying something changes it. The questions we ask shape what answers become possible. For Barad, knowledge practices are material practices that reconfigure the world. We’re not outside observers, we’re part of the phenomenon we’re trying to understand.
When we know something, we’re not just passively receiving information. We’re participating in reality’s ongoing creation. We are not detached observer.
Every act of knowing is already an intervention in the world.
For the longest time, one of my greatest fears that kept me from writing was whether what if I’m saying has already been said. Something already known.
How silly of me.
I now realize that even when someone else knows what I know, the way we know it is still different. We bring different contexts, associations, life experiences that make the known different for each knower. What’s painfully obvious is how AI is eroding this – churning out the same regurgitated knowledge stripped of personal context and lived experience. But that’s another essay.
When Knowing Stays Dead
In sustainability science, the knowledge-action gap is one of the key challenges. We know what to do about climate change. We have the data, the solutions, the pathways. But we don’t act. It’s where my research focuses.
But what I’ve learned from my own reading life is that not all knowing is created equal.
I still remember the torture of memorizing quality management guidelines when I studied mechanical engineering. The information just sat there, dead on the page. It was such a pain to make it stick. And once it did for the exam, it immediately unstuck itself afterwards. Quality management guidelines leave me completely mute. I am unable to respond, unable to connect, unable to care. By the way, if you’re interested in memorization, I highly recommend reading Memorising poems and stories is magic that remakes the material world by .
This inability to respond to the information is what the sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls “muteness” – the opposite of resonance. When information doesn’t touch us, when we can’t respond to it, it remains separate from our lives. It’s just data.
But we can also be in resonance with what we read, with data – and why AI writing might be different - it would be interesting to research whether we can be in resonance with something that is not (predominantely) written by humans, but this would require a different kind of science.
Esther Lightcap Meek – who wrote one of the books I got lost in yesterday - talks about “loving in order to know” – the idea that genuine knowledge requires a kind of personal involvement, even a pledge or covenant with what we’re trying to understand. You can’t really know something by standing at a distance, collecting neutral facts. You have to indwell it, live with it, let it live in you. She argues that all knowing is like learning to ride a bike – you can read all the physics textbooks you want, but knowing how to ride means integrating that knowledge so deeply it becomes part of your body’s wisdom.
The Bridge Was Always There
recently said: “We need writing - just not academic writing created to support or debunk theories that never get explored in real environments, or writing to fluff up egos. We need reflective writing where people connect the dots to answer questions that will transform, heal and grow people and communities.”
Yes. This is exactly it. Writing that bridges the supposed gap between knowing and doing. Writing that doesn’t pretend to be objective and detached, but admits it’s participating in the world’s becoming. Writing that carries wisdom, not just information.
The books I read don’t stay in some separate theoretical realm. They become me. They form me. My actions are shaped by what I’ve read, not because I consciously “apply” theories, but because knowledge that truly resonates doesn’t remain theoretical.
Books can be more than information delivery systems – they can be a way how wisdom travels across time. No single human can live it all. We can’t experience every heartbreak, witness every type of courage, make every mistake and learn from it. For thousands of years, this is how we’ve learned what it means to be human – through stories passed down, through sitting with elders who had lived more life than us. Most of us don’t have those wise elders anymore. What we have are books – not as replacement, but as continuation. When I read, I’m receiving the distilled understanding of lives I never lived, struggles I never faced, insights I couldn’t have reached alone. Through resonance, that wisdom can become part of me.
Let me get a bit metaphysical here (fair warning for those who aren’t into this): I understand my knowing as part of a bigger process – the universe coming to know itself through us, through me. When I learn something deeply, when it changes me, I’m participating in something larger than my individual mind.
It’s also deeply practical. When I stop treating contemplation and action as opposites, the books I read, the ideas I encounter – seep into how I see that annoying email, how I approach that difficult conversation, how I move through my days.
My friend who gets annoyed about my theories: She’s right that others have known things through practice that academics later “discover.” But she’s missing something too.
That there are different ways of knowing the same truth.
Both matter.
Both shape reality.
Propositional knowing (knowing that), as Varveake calls is, can transform and spill into other ways of knowing and becoming.
Is This Good for You?
I don’t want to debate whether theoretically we should live one way or the other.
The real question is: How do we honor both the pause and the leap? How do we read in a way that changes us, and act in a way that’s informed by genuine thought?
When knowledge resonates - when its about the in-between, in the relationship - with our context, with our lived experience, there’s no gap to bridge. There was never really a separation.
We don’t have to choose between being someone who thinks and someone who does.
It’s not whether we read or do. But rather how we read. Or do for that matter, as we can also be numb and mute in our activities, going through the motions without aliveness.
The universe knows itself through our knowing. And that knowing – whether it comes through books or soil, theories or practice – was never meant to be locked away from our living.
I was in conversation with the wonderful a few weeks back. If you are not familiar with his work, I highly recommend checking it out.
Thanks for reading wild:philosophy 🙏.
I genuinely appreciate your time and attention 🖤.
If you find this valuable, I’d be grateful if you recommended it to someone who might appreciate it too – it’s a simple way to support my work and help it find new readers. Also, please reach out anytime with ideas, comments, or thoughts. I’d love to hear from you. - Jes
"I start every third sentence with “I read that...”"
Yeah, even if no one remarks on it, *I* notice it. I can't have a conversation without bringing up some book or another, or multiple ones. At least my nerdy obsession gives me a way to stay in the conversation!
I feel like (as, perhaps, your friend might point out), that the Ancient Greeks had this right: you nurture the mind and the body. Read Han and Arendt.
Weirdly, for a guy who puts out a book every year or so, Han doesn't quite seem to get this. At least, he takes issue over and over with Arendt's work in *VC*!
I hadn't heard of Karen Barad, but after checking out her Wikipedia page, I'm excited to read her. I have run into the agential realism, though it wasn't called that, and I don't recall if she was mentioned or not. It was in a Carlo Rovelli book I read a few years back. For me, once you start digging into the quantum work, it makes a lot of sense. Everything is just fields and inter/intra-actions.
(And for me as an idealist, it hardly seems a big step from quantum fields as the basis of reality to consciousness, a point I made in my attempt at an accessible explanation of idealism I published a few days ago. If you're curious: https://moonspiders.substack.com/p/idealism-and-why-you-should-consider?r=3rjg0k . But I digress... as always.)
And so it goes up to us in the non-quantum world. What am I if not my memories, which ultimately come from my intra-actions with, well, everything around me. How would I know anything if not for these?
Also, I loved that article by Eleanor. Highly second your recommendation.
Esther Meek is new to me as well! Which book did you get lost in? Or, better, which of her books do you recommend reading first?
I started listening to your interview with Matthew Green, and when he explained how he gets into a doom&gloom funk and how your newsletter (which I consume in posts, but anyhow) helps pull him out of that... yeah. Likewise. I'm always delighted, relieved in a way, when I get a new post notification from you. Thank you.
"The books I read don’t stay in some separate theoretical realm. They become me. They form me. My actions are shaped by what I’ve read, not because I consciously “apply” theories, but because knowledge that truly resonates doesn’t remain theoretical."-- Embodied enactive rhizomatic reading. Listening resonating with this...