III. Is it true? (Only after you know what is being said, and how, can you consider whether it is true or probable. This question calls for the exercise of critical judgment.
You must decide to accept or reject the information being offered you. You must be especially alert to detect the distortions of propaganda in renderings of the news. In reading for enlightenment, you must decide whether you agree or disagree with what you have come to understand. The rules you must follow here are those of the third, or critical, reading.)
IV. What of it? (Unless what you have read is true in some sense, you need go no further. But if it is, you must face this question. You cannot read for information intelligently without determining what significance is, or should be, attached to the facts presented. Facts seldom come to us without some interpretation, explicit or implied.
This is especially true if you are reading digests of information which necessarily select the facts according to some evaluation of their significance, some principle of interpretation. And if you are reading for enlightenment, there is really no end to the inquiry which, at every stage of learning, is renewed by the question, What of it? ) These four questions summarize all the obligations of a reader. The first three indicate, moreover, why there are three ways of reading anything. The three sets of rules re spond to something in the very nature of human discourse. If communications were not complex, structural analysis would be unnecessary. If language were a perfect medium instead of a relatively opaque one, there would be no need for interpretation. If error and ignorance did not circumscribe truth and knowledge, we should not have to be critical.
The fourth question turns on the distinction between Information and understanding.
When the material you have read is itself primarily informational, you are challenged to go further and seek enlightenment. Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the search for significance.
Knowing these questions is, of course, not enough. You must remember to ask them as you read and, most of all, you must be able to answer them precisely and accurately.
The ability to do just that is the art of reading, in a nutshell.
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Ability to read anything well may be the goal, but the goal does not indicate the best place to begin acquiring the art. You cannot begin to acquire the right habits by reading any sort of material; perhaps I should say that some kinds of material make it easier to acquire the discipline than others. It is too easy, for instance, to get something out of newspapers, magazines, and digests, even when one reads them poorly and passively.
Moreover, all our bad habits of perfunctory reading are associated with these familiar materials. That is why, throughout this book, I insisted that trying to read for understanding rather than information—because more difficult and less usual—provides you with a better occasion tor developing your skill.
For the same reason, reading good books, or better, the great books, is the recipe for those who would learn to read. It is not that the rigors of difficult reading are the punishment which fits the crime of sloppy habits; rather, from the point of view of therapy, books which cannot be understood at all unless they are read actively are the ideal prescription for anyone who is still a victim of passive reading. Nor do I think that this medicine is like those drastic and strenuous remedies which are calculated either to kill or cure the patient. For in this case, the patient can determine the dosage. He can increase the amount of exercise he takes in easy stages. The remedy will begin to work as soon as he begins ind the more it works, the more he can take.
The place to begin, then, is on the great books. They are so apt tor the purpose, it is almost as if they were written for the sake of teaching people how to read. They stand to the problem of learning how to read almost as water does to the business of learning how to swim. There is one important difference. Water is indispensable for swimming.
But after you have learned to read by practicing on the great books, you can transfer your abilities to reading good books, to reading any books, to reading anything. The man who) can keep afloat in the deeps need not concern himseif about the shallows.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Great Books
As I noted in the Preface, it was necessary to revise this chapter to make it fit the new Appendix to this edition of How to Read a Book. However, the chapter is not as radically revised as it might have been. Let me explain why.
This chapter was originally intended to introduce the recommended great books that were listed in the Appendix. It discussed the character of great books in general, and set forth the criteria by which we can tell whether a book is truly great. It went on to show, by the use of examples, how these books take part in a great conversation—how they are interwoven in the fabric of our thought. The revised chapter still does that, except that I have changed the examples to fit the books and authors listed in the new Appendix.
Since I wrote the original chapter, however, remarkable advances have occurred in the reading and the discussion of great books. I have called attention to these changes in the Preface to this edition. The publication and distribution of Great Books of the Western World and of Gateway to the Great Books is largely responsible tor them. The existence of these sets, and particularly the existence of the Syntopicon, has also radically altered the context of this chapter, in two ways.
Volume i of Great Books of the Western World contains as essay by Robert M.
Hutchins, titled "The Great Conversation." Here Mr. Hutchins says, at greater length and with much more force and eloquence, everything that I said about the character of great books in my original Chapter 16, and he describes the interplay of these books with one another better than I could ever hope to do. From one point of view, therefore, I need not really revise this chapter at all. The essay that I would like it to be has been written by Mr. Hutchins.
The existence of the Syntopicon is an even more important reason why I have not attempted to revise this chapter more than superficially. The Syntopicon, with its vast number of references to the great books, by idea, topic, and subtopic, makes' it possible to read them in an entirely new way. In the Preface to the Syntopicon (pages xi-xxxi of Volume 2 in Great Books of the Western World), I describe this new way of reading, which I call "syntopical reading," and which consists of "reading in" the whole set of great books as contrasted with "reading through" a single work. Hence I would only have repeated here, with less space at my disposal, what I said there.
Finally, I have discovered on reading this chapter again after many years, that its discussion of how to read great books without the Syntopicon is revealing about the Syntopicon itself. Twenty-five years ago, I could not even hope that the kind of reading that the Syntopicon makes possible would ever be available. (I had dreamed of the Syntopicon, but I did not then think it would ever be a reality.) Now, looking back, I see even more clearly how useful and powerful a tool the Syntopicon is. Reading great books without its help is an intellectual experience hardly to be equaled in the world of thought. But reading them with it as a guide is even more rewarding. I hope the reader will see this when he peruses this chapter, and will forgive me, too, for leaving it to stand as an obvious anachronism—for the sake of his education.
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there is no end to the making of books. Nor does there seem to be any end to the making of book lists. The one is the cause of the other. There have always been more books than anyone could read. And as they have multiplied at an ever increasing rate through the centuries, more and more blue-ribbon lists have had to be made.
It is just as important to know what to read as how to read. When you have learned to read, you will still have, I hope, a long life to spend in reading. But, at best, you will be able to read only a few books of all that have been written, and the few you do read should include the best. You can rejoice in the fact that there are not too many great books to read. There are fifty-four volumes in Great
Books of the Western World—tern hundred and forty-five works by seventy-tour authors.
The listing of the best books is as old as reading and writing. The teachers and librarians of ancient Alexandria did it. Their book lists were the backbone of an educational curriculum. Quintilian did it for Roman education, selecting, as he said, both ancient and modern classics. It was done again and again in the Middle Ages by Mohammedans, Jews, and Christians, and for a similar purpose. In the Renaissance, such leaders of the revival of learning as Montaigne and Erasmus made lists of the books they read. They offered themselves as models of gentlemanly literacy.
Humanistic education was built on a foundation of "humane letters," as the phrase went.
The reading prescribed was primarily in the great works of Roman literature—its poetry, biography, and history, and its moralistic essays.
In the nineteenth century, there were still other book lists. If you want to know the books which went into the making of a leading liberal of his day, look at John Stuart Mill's Autobiography. Perhaps the most famous book list made in the last century was Auguste Comte's. Comte was the French thinker who epitomized the nineteenth century's devotion to science and to progress through science.
It is to be expected, of course, that the selection of "best books" will change with the times. Yet there is a surprising uniformity in the lists that represent the best choices of any period. In^very age, both b.c. and a.d., the list makers include both ancient and modern books in their selections, and they always wonder whether the modems are up to the great books of the past. The changes which each later age makes are mainly additions rather than substitutions. Naturally, the list of great books grows in the course of time, but its roots and outlines remain the same.
The reason for this is that the famous lists are genuinely many-sided. They try to include all that is great in the human tradition. A bad selection would be one motivated by a sectarian bias, directed by some kind of special pleading. There have been lists of this sort, which picked only the books that would prove a certain point. The European tradition cannot be boxed that way. It includes much that must necessarily appear false or misguided when judged from any particular point of view. Wherever one finds the truth, there will always be great errors in its company. To list the great books adequately, one must include all that have made a difference, not simply those one agrees with or approves of.
Until sixty or seventy years ago, a college course was built around a set of required readings. Under the impact of the elective system and other educational changes, the requirements in this country were gradually relaxed to a point where the bachelor's degree no longer meant general literacy. The great books still appeared here and there, in this course and that, but they were seldom read in relation to one another. Frequently they were made supplementary to the textbooks which dominated the curriculum.
Things were at their worst when I entered college at the start o£ the twenties. As I have already reported, I also saw the upward turn begin. John Erskine had persuaded the Columbia faculty to institute an Honors course, devoted to the reading of great books.
The list, which he was largely instrumental in composing, included between sixty and seventy authors, representing all fields of learning and all kinds of poetry. It differed from other current selections by having a higher standard of choice, and also by trying to include every great book, not only those of a certain period or a certain kind.
The Erskine list has been modified and revised many times since its inception. Mr.
Hutchins and I have used it with some alterations at the University of Chicago. The four-year program of reading at St. John's College is substantially the same list, though it has been enriched by additions from the fields of mathematics and natural science. A similar list, though somewhat shorter, is being used at many colleges now in courses required tor all students. And the list of Great Books of the Western World, supplemented by Gateway to the Great Books, is a fairly accurate expression of what anyone would name as the great works of Western culture.
I had one experience which gave me insight into this business of listing the great books.
I acted as secretary tor the faculty which taught the Honors course at Columbia during the years when the original list was being revised. Various members of the faculty had expressed dissatisfaction. They wanted to drop some authors and include others. To settle matters, we constructed a master list of about three hundred books, many more than anyone would wish included, but long enough to contain any author anyone might name.
We then proceeded to vote, gradually excluding the books or authors which the voting indicated as not generally agreed on. After many ballots, we obtained a list which satisfied everyone. It had eighty items on it, only about fifteen more than Erskine's enumeration. It contained almost all the titles on the original list. From those two years of revision, I learned the extent to which there is unanimity of judgment about the great books. It became clear that it would be difficult to make a list much longer than a hundred authors about whom such universal agreement could be obtained. When you get beyond that, you would be catering to the interests of specialists in this period or that subject matter. Our experience was similar when we constructed the list of Great Books of the Western World.
Strictly speaking, a catalogue is not something to read. It is for reference purposes. That is why I have listed the contents of Great Books and of Gateway in the Appendix. In this chapter, I am going to try to make that list come to life by talking about the books.
I shall try, therefore, to collect the great books into smaller groups, each group participating in a conversation about some particular problem in which you may be already interested. In some cases, the conversations will overlap, as the problems do. In other cases, conversation about one problem will lead to another. Thus, instead of lying side by side in a graveyard row, the books may appear to you as they should—the lively actors in a living tradition. I will not name all the books in this chapter, but I shall be able to bring enough of them into conversation with one another, so that you can imagine the job completed. If you are induced to join in the conversation by reading some of these books, they will take care of the rest.
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Before I begin, however, it may be wise to say a little more about what a great book is. I have used the phrase again and again, hoping that what I said in Chapter Four a-bout great books as original communications would suffice for the time. In Chapter Eight, I suggested that among poetical works there was a parallel distinction. Just as great expository books are those which, more than others, can increase our understanding, so the great works of imaginative literature elevate our spirit and deepen our humanity.
In the course of other chapters, I may have mentioned other qualities which the great books possess. But now I want to bring together in one place all the signs by which the great books can be recognized—repeating some, adding new ones. These are the signs which everyone uses in making lists or selections.
(1) I used to say jocularly that the great books were those everybody recommends and nobody reads, or those everyone says he intends to read and never does. The joke (it is Mark Twain's, really) may have its point for some of our contemporaries, but the remark is false for the most part. In fact, the great books are probably the most widely read. They are not best sellers for a year or two. They are enduring best sellers. James Bond has had relatively few readers compared to Don Quixote or the plays of Shakespeare. It would be reasonable to estimate, as a recent writer did, that Homer's Iliad has been read by at least 25,000,000 people in the last 3,000 years. When you realize the number of languages into which these books have been translated, and the number of years during which they have been read, you will not think that a number of readers running high into the millions is exaggerated.
It does not follow, of course, that every book which reaches a tremendous audience ranks as a classic by reason of that fact alone. Three Weeks, Quo Vadis, and Ben-Hur, to mention only
fiction, are cases in point. Nor do I mean that a great book need be a best seller in its own day. It may take time for it to accumulate its ultimate audience. The astronomer Kepler, whose work on the planetary motions is now a classic, is reported to have said of his book that "it may wait a century for a reader, as God has waited 6,000
years for an observer."
(2) The great books are popular, not pedantic. They are not written by specialists about specialties for specialists. Whether they be philosophy or science, or history or poetry, they treat of human, not academic, problems. They are written for men, not professors.
When I say they are popular, I do not mean they are popularizations in the sense of simplifying what can be found in other books. I mean they were initially written for a popular audience. They were intended for beginners. This, as I pointed out earlier, is a consequence of their being original communications. With respect to what these books have to say, most men are beginners.
To read a textbook for advanced students, you have to read an elementary textbook first.
But the great books arc all elementary. They treat the elements of any subject matter.
They are not related to one another as a series o£ textbooks, graded in difficulty or in the technicality o£ the problems with which they deal. That is what I meant by saying that they are all for beginners, even though they do not all begin at the same place in the tradition of thought. There is one kind of prior reading, however, which does help you to read a great book, and that is the other great books the author himself read. If you begin where he began, you are better prepared tor the new departure he is going to make. This is the point I suggested before, when I said that even the mathematical and scientific books can be read without special instruction.
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