Franz Rosenzweig’s description of the peculiarities of philosophical reading reads familiar and true:

The reader has a particularly high regard for the first pages of philosophical books. He believes they are the basis for all that follows. Consequently he also thinks that in order to have refuted the whole, it’s enough to refute these pages. Hence the immense interest in Kant’s teaching of space and time, in the form in which he developed it at the beginning of the Critique. Hence the comical attempts to “refute” Hegel by refuting the first triad of his Logic, and Spinoza by refuting his definitions. And hence the helplessness of the general reader in the face of philosophical books. He thinks they must be “especially logical,” and understands by this the dependence of every succeeding sentence on every preceding one; so that when the famous one stone is pulled out, as a consequence “the whole collapses.” In truth, this is nowhere less the case than in philosophical books. Here a sentence does not follow from the preceding one, but more likely from the one following. Whoever has not understood a sentence or a paragraph is little helped if, in the conscientious belief that he must not leave anything behind that is not understood, he reads it perchance again and again or even starts over again. Philosophical books deny themselves such a methodical ancien régime-strategy, which thinks it may not leave behind any fortification without having conquered it. They want to be conquered napoleonically, in a bold attack on the enemy’s central force, upon the conquest of which the small outlying fortifications will fall automatically. Thus, whoever does not understand something can most assuredly expect enlightenment if he courageously goes on reading. The reason why this rule is difficult for the beginner, and, as the cases cited above show, also for many a nonbeginner to accept, lies in the fact that thinking and writing are not the same. In thinking, one stroke really strikes a thousand connections. In writing, these thousand must be artfully and cleanly arranged on the string of thousands of lines. As Schopenhauer said, his entire book wants to impart only a single thought which, however, he could not impart more briefly than in the entire book Thus, if a philosophical book is worth reading at all, it is certainly so only when one either does not understand its beginning or at the very least misunderstands it. For otherwise the thought that it imparts is scarcely worth re-considering, since one evidently already has it, if one knows right at the beginning of its exposition “where it is leading up to.” All this is valid only for books; only they can be written and read without any consideration for the passing of time. Speaking and hearing follow other laws. Of course, only real speaking and hearing, not the kind that derogates itself a “lecture” and during which the hearer must forget that he has a mouth and becomes at best a writing hand. But, at any rate, for books it is so.

Just where that decisive battle of understanding is fought, where the whole can be seen at a glance, cannot be said in advance; in all probability already before the last page, but hardly before the middle of the book; and surely not by two readers at precisely the same point. At least when they are readers who read on their own and not readers who, because of their learning, already know before the first word what is written in a book, and because of their ignorance do not know it even after the last one. In respect to older books, the last-mentioned readers’ virtues are most often found in two sorts of people, professors and students; in respect to newer ones they tend to be found in one and the same person.