I have inveighed elsewhere against the Aristotelian practice-theory and the Kantian prudence-morality distinctions, and I shall try not to repeat myself here. Instead, I want briefly to say what can be salvaged from both distinctions. For there is, I think, a useful distinction which is vaguely shadowed forth by these two useless distinctions. This is between knowing what you want to get out of a person or thing or text in advance and hoping that the person or thing or text will help you want something different – that he or she or it will help you to change your purposes, and thus to change your life. This distinction, I think, helps us highlight the difference between methodical and inspired readings of texts…

What ‘theory’ has not done, I think, is to provide a method for reading, or what [J.] Hillis Miller calls ‘an ethic of reading.’ We pragmatists think that nobody will ever succeed in doing either. We betray what Heidegger and Derrida were trying to tell us when we try to do either. We start succumbing to the old occultist urge to crack codes, to distinguish between reality and appearance, to make an invidious distinction between getting it right and making it useful.