HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  The conversation about current political issues thus enlarges itself to take in the whole of European political thought. If we go back to the Constitution and the writings of '76, we are inevitably led further, as each writer reveals himself to be a reader in turn. Little has been left out. If we add Plato's Republic and Laws which Aristotle read and answered, and Cicero's Republic and Laws which were read by Roman jurists, and through them influenced the development of law throughout medieval Europe, almost all the great political books have been drawn in.

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  That is not quite true. By returning to the original conversation, and taking a fresh start, we may discover the few major omissions. Suppose there is an ex-Nazi in our midst, and he quotes Mein Kampf to us. Since it is not clear that Hitler ever read the great books, the political utterances of Mussolini might be more productive of leads. We may remember that Mussolini was once a socialist. If we pursue these lines in all their ramifications, other books inevitably find their way into the conversation.

  There would be Hegel's Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. Here we would find the justifications of state absolutism, the deification o£ the state. There would also be writings of Carlyle, especially such books as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Here we would find the theory of the superman as above the canons of right and wrong, the theory of a successful use of might as its own ultimate justification. And behind Hegel on the one hand, and Carlyle on the other—in the latter case through the influence of Schopenhauer—would be the greatest of German thinkers, Immanuel Kant. Anyone who reads Kant's Science of Right will see that he cannot be held responsible for the positions of certain of his followers.

  There might also be a Communist at our table, either Khrushchevist or Stalinist. Both sorts swear by the same book. The conversation would not get very tar without Karl Marx being mentioned. His great work, Capital, would also be mentioned, even though no one had read it, not even the Communist. But if anyone had read Capital, and other literature of revolution, he would have found a trail which led, on the one hand, to Hegel again —a starting point for both Communism and Fascism—and, on the other hand, to the great economic and social theorists of England and France: to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, to Malthus's essay on Population, and to Guizot's History of Civilization in Europe.

  A lawyer present might turn the discussion away from economic theory by turning it to the problems of government, and especially those of a democracy. He may have just recently read Walter Lippmann's The Public Philosophy. Or he might raise questions about the role of the UN in current crises abroad, and refer to Arnold Toyn-bee's Civilization on Trial. These books would bring others in their train.

  Becoming interested in the problems of democracy, and of our own democratic government in particular, we might go from Lippmann to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and to Calhoun's Disquisition on Government. The issues both of these books raise about the possible tyranny of majority rule and the protection of the rights of minorities would lead us to John Stuart Mill's essay on Representative Government and to his essay On Liberty. The latter, in turn, especially its magnificent chapter on freedom of thought and discussion, would send us to Milton's Areopagitica.

  Mill's two essays, by the way, are being paraphrased every day, with approval or disapproval, by men who have not read them, so much have they become a part of the contemporary controversy between liberals and conservatives.

  The discussion of Toynbee's views about war and peace and about the role of international or supranational organizations in the prevention of war might turn our attention to the failure of the league of the ancient Greek cities to prevent the Peloponnesian War. Toynbee tells us how much his own views were influenced by reading Thucyd-ides' tragic account of that war. The whole subject of war, and especially the distinction between the hot war of bombs and battles and the cold war of diplomats, propaganda agencies, and spies would probably open up another line of reading for us, beginning with von Clausewitz's On War, and going back through Kant's little treatise on Perpetual Peace and Rousseau's essay on A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe to Dante's thirteenth-century vision o£ world peace through world government, set forth with unassailable logic in the opening book of his De Monarchia.

  Discussions of democracy and government, on the one hand, or of international affairs and war and peace, on the other, have a way of getting into thorny questions about the intrinsic defects of human nature, and about the intricacies of semantic clarification. The question about man's aggressiveness might suggest the reading of Freud's little essay Why War? And it we started on that, the whole history of psychology might unfold in another list of books, including Pavlov's work Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, William James's Principles of Psychology, Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, Descartes' work on The Passions of the Soul, and so on. Since we started out by considering the psychological aspects of politics and of war, Machiavelli's The Prince would also become relevant, tor it raises the fundamental question about the benevolence or malice o£ men in relation to their fellow men.

  The problem of the meaning of words, and especially the problem of their tricky ambiguity, would, of course, lead someone to refer to current books by linguistic philosophers of one school or another. All this current literature—and there is a spate of it—has deep roots in the tradition of Western thought, from the very beginning in the dialogues of Plato and in the treatises of Aristotle, wherein hardly a step is taken without attention being paid to the multiple meanings of the critical terms of the discussion. If we pursue this interest in the meanings of words and their uses in thought, all the great works in the liberal arts would eventually have to be rediscovered.

  A list of required readings would include Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, especially Book III on language; Hobbes's Leviathan, especially the first book, and his Rhetoric, which closely follows Aristotle's Rhetoric. It would also include Plato's dialogues about language and oratory (the Cratylus, Gorgias, and Phaedrus, especially), and two great medieval works on teaching and being taught—one by St. Augustine and one by St. Thomas, both called Of the Teacher. I dare not start on logical works, because the list might be too long, but John Stuart Mill's System of Logic, Bacon's Novum Organum, and Aristotle's Or-ganon must be mentioned.

  One other direction is possible. The consideration of political and economic issues tends to raise the basic ethical problems about pleasure and virtue, about happiness, the ends of life, and the means thereto. Someone may have read Jacques Maritain's Moral Philosophy and noticed what this living-follower of Aristotle and Aquinas had to say about contemporary problems, especially the moral aspects of current political and economic issues. That would not only lead us back to the great moral treatises of the past—Aristotle's Ethics and the second part of Aquinas's Summa Theologica—but it might also get us into a many-sided dispute. To see it through, we would have to consult Mill's Utilitarianism, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, and Spinoza's Ethics. We might even return to the Roman Stoics and Epicureans, to the Meditations of Marcus Au-relius, and Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.

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  You should have observed a number of things in this ramification of conversation or reflection about current problems. Not only does one book lead to another, but each contains implicitly a large diversity of leads. Our conversation or thought can branch out in many directions. and each time it does another group of books seems to be drawn in. Notice, furthermore, that the same authors are often represented in different connections, tor they have usually written about many of these related topics, sometimes in different books, but often in the same work.

  Nor is it surprising that, as one goes back to the medieval and ancient worlds, the same names are repeated many times. Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Aquinas, for instance, stand at the fountainhead. They have been read and discussed, agreed with and disagreed with by the writers of modern times. And when they have not been read, th
eir doctrines have filtered down in many indirect -ways, through such men as Hooker.

  So tar we have dealt mainly with practical matters-politics, economics, morals—

  although you probably observed a tendency to become theoretical. We turned to psychology by way of Freud's influence on the lawyers. If the ethical controversy had been followed a bit further, we would soon have been in metaphysics. In fact, we were, with Maritain's discussion of free will and with Spinoza's Ethics. Kant's Critique of Practical Reason might have led us to his Critique of Pure Reason, and all the theoretic questions about the nature of knowledge and experience.

  Suppose we consider briefly some theoretic questions. We have been concerned with education throughout this book. Someone who had read Mr. Hutchins' book. The Higher Learning in America, might raise a question about metaphysics and its place in higher education. That usually starts a discussion about what metaphysics is. And usually someone says there is no such thing. We would probably be referred to John Dewey's Democracy and Education and his Quest for Certainty to see that all valid knowledge is scientific or experimental. It all the leads therein were followed, we might soon find ourselves back to the source of the current anti-metaphysical trend: Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and perhaps even Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

  Someone who had read books such as Whitehead's Process and Reality and Science and the Modern World, or Santayana's Realm of Essence and Realm of Matter, or Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge, might object to the dismissal of metaphysics. The 'protagonist might defend the claims of theoretic philosophy to give us knowledge about the nature of things, of a different sort and apart from science. It he had read those books well, he would have been led back to the great speculative works of modem and ancient times; to Descartes' Principles of Philosophy; to Aquinas's little work on Being and Essence; to Aristotle's Metaphysics, and to Plato's dialogues, the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and the Sophist.

  Or let us suppose that our theoretic interests turn to the natural sciences rather than to philosophy. I have already mentioned Freud and Pavlov. The problems'of human behavior and human nature open into a lot of other questions. Not only man's nature but his place in nature would concern us. All these roads lead to Darwin's Origin of Species and thence, on bypaths, to Lyell's Antiquity of Man and Malthus's essay on Population.

  Recently there have been a lot of books about the practice of medicine, and a few about the theory of it. Man's normal hypochondria makes him abnormally interested in doctors, health, and the functioning of his own body. Here there are many routes in reading, but they would all probably go through Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine and Harvey's book on The Motion of the Heart, all the way back to Galen's Natural Faculties and Hippocrates' amazing formulations of Greek medicine.

  Einstein and Infeld's The Evolution of Physics refers us to the great milestones in the development of man's experimental knowledge. Here our reading would be deepened if we looked into Poincare's Foundations of Science and Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences. They, in turn, would take us to such works as Faraday's Experimental Researches into Electricity and Mendeleev's Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements; perhaps even to Newton's Optics, and Galileo's Two New Sciences.

  The most exact sciences are not only the most experimental but also the most mathematical ones. If we are interested in physics, we cannot avoid considering mathematics. Here, too, there have been many recent books, but I think none so good as a little masterpiece by Whitehead called An Introduction to Mathematics. Bertrand Russell's various writings on the meaning of mathematics are also worthy of consideration.

  If we read these works, we might turn to Forsyth's Mathematics, in Life and Thought.

  From it, we could not help returning to the starting points of modern mathematics in Descartes' Geometry and the mathematical works of Newton. Modern commentaries, like those of Hogben, Dantzig, and Kasner and Newman, would be extremely helpful, but I think we would also find it necessary to see the whole of modern mathematics in the light of its contrast with the Greek accomplishment, especially Euclid's Elements of Geometry, Nicomachus's Introduction to Arithmetic, and Apollonius's Treatise on Conic Sections.

  The connection of the great books and the versatility of their authors may now appear even more plainly than before. Descartes and Whitehead were both mathematicians and metaphysicians. Malthus's essay on Population was not only a work in social science, but also influenced Darwin's notions about the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Newton was not only a great experimental physicist but also a great mathematician. Leonardo's Notebooks contain both his theory of perspective in painting and the record of his mechanical investigations and inventions.

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  I am going to take one step further. Even though we have been primarily concerned with expository works, a recitation of the great books would be sorely deficient if the masterpieces of belles-lettres were not mentioned. Here, too, contemporary works might generate an interest in their forebears. The modern novel has a varied history which opens up when we go back from D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, to the forms of narration they have tried to modify. These four, along with Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Isaac Singer, lead us to Flaubert, Maupassant, and Balzac, and to the great Russians Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Nor will we forget our own Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Henry James; or Hardy, Dickens, and Sir Walter Scott. Behind all these lie the great eighteenth-century novels of Defoe and Fielding. Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones would remind us of many others, including Swift's Gulliver. Our travels would not be complete, of course, until we came to Cervantes' Don Quixote and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.

  The plays, both pleasant and unpleasant, by Shaw and other moderns follow an even longer tradition of dramatic writing. There would be not only the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov, who influenced Shaw considerably, and the earlier comedies of Sheridan and Moliere; but behind the tragedies of Synge and O'Neill, as well as the plays of Shakespeare and other Elizabethans, there lie the Greek comedies of Aristophanes and the great tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus.

  Finally, there are the long narrative poems, the great epics: Goethe's Faust, Milton's Paradise Lost, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dante's Divine Comedy, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

  I have not mentioned all the books and authors in Great Books of the Western World and in Gateway to the Great Books, but I have referred to a large number of them as they might group themselves in the course of conversation, or in the pursuit of interests aroused by contemporary issues or current books. There are no fixed barriers between these groups. They flow into one another at every turn.

  This is not only true of such obviously related subject matters as politics and ethics, ethics and metaphysics, metaphysics and mathematics, mathematics and natural science.

  It appears in more remote connections. The writers of The Federalist refer to Euclid's axioms as a model for political principles. A reader of Montaigne and Machia-velli, as well as, of course, of Plutarch, will find their sentiments and stories, even their language, in the plays of Shakespeare. The Divine Comedy reflects the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle's Ethics, and Ptolemy's astronomy. And we know how frequently Plato and Aristotle refer to Homer and the great tragic poets.

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  Perhaps you see now why I have said so often that the great books should be read in relation to one another and in the most varied sorts of connection. Thus read, they support each other, illuminate each other, intensify each other's significance. And, of course, they make one another more readable. In reciting their names and tracing their connections, I have gone backward from contemporary books, taking each step in terms of the books an author himself read. That has shown you how the whole tradition of the great books is involved in our life today.

  But if you wish to use one great book to help you read another,
it would be better to read from the past into the present, rather than the other way around. It you first read the books an author read, you will understand him better. Your mind has grown as his did, and therefore you are better able to come to terms with him, to know and understand him.

  To proceed in the other direction is sometimes more exciting. It is more like doing detective work, or playing hare and hounds. Even when you get this excitement out of reading the books backwards, you will nevertheless have to understand them in the forward direction. That is the way they happened, and they can be completely understood in no other way.

  Our wanderings among the great books help me to make another point. It is difficult to say of any contemporary book that it is great. We are too near it to make a sober judgment. Sometimes we can be relatively sure, as in the case of Einstein's work, the novels o£ Proust and Joyce, or the philosophy of Dewey, Whitehead, and Maritain. But, for the most part, we must refrain from such elections. The hall of fame is too august a place for us to send our twentieth-century candidates, without enclosing return postage.

  But current books can certainly be good, even if we cannot be sure they are great. The best sign I know that a current book is good, and that it may even be judged great some day, is the obviousness of its connection with the great books. Such books are drawn, and draw us, into the conversation which the great books have had. Necessarily their authors are well read. They belong to the tradition, whatever they think of it, or however much they seem to revolt from it.

  Let me state one further conclusion. We suffer today not only from political nationalism but cultural provincialism. We have developed the cult of the present moment. We read only current books for the most part, it we read any at all. Not only shall we fail to read the good books of this year well, if we read them only, but our failure to read the great books isolates us from the world of man, just as much as unqualified allegiance to the hammer and sickle makes one a Russian or Chinese first, and a man later—if ever. It is our most sacred human privilege to be men first, and citizens or nationals second. This is just as true in the cultural sphere as the political. We are not pledged to our country or our century.