HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  It is our privilege, in fact, I would say it is our duty, to belong to the larger brotherhood of man which recognizes no national boundaries or any local or tribal fetishes. I do not know how to escape from the straitjacket of political nationalism, but I do know how we can become citizens of the world of letters, friends of the human spirit in all its manifestations, regardless of time and place.

  You can guess the answer. It is by reading the great books. Thus the human mind, wherever it is located, can be freed from current emergencies and local prejudices, through being elevated to the universal plane of communication. There it grasps the general truths, to which the whole human tradition bears witness.

  Those who can read well can think critically. To this extent, they have become free minds. If they have read the great books—and I mean really read them—they will have the freedom to move anywhere in the human world. Only they can fully lead the life of reason who, though living in a time and place, are yet not wholly of it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Free Minds and Free Men

  - 1 -

  let us not get confused about means and ends. Reading the great books is not for the sake of talking about them. Mentioning them by name may give you the appearance of literacy, but you do not have to read them to participate in parlor sports or outshine the silver at a dinner party. I hope I have made clear that there are better reasons for reading— really reading—the great books.

  So far as conversation is concerned, it is the other way around. I have recommended discussion as an aid to reading, not reading for the sake of "brilliant" conversation. The conversation between reader and author, which is an integral part of good reading, may not take place unless the reader is accustomed to the discussion of books. It he has friends with whom he talks about books, he is more likely to talk back to the books themselves.

  But there is another and more important point. Even reading the great books well is not an end in itself. It is a means toward living a decent human life, the life of a free man and a free citizen. This should be our ultimate objective. It is the ultimate theme of this book. I shall turn to it at the end of this chapter. For the present, I want to give a little more attention to the problem of discussion in relation to reading.

  You can, of course, carry on a conversation with a book alone, but that will seem to most people like talking to yourself. For lively conversation, you need more than books and the ability to read them. You need friends and the ability to talk and listen.

  Unfortunately, just having friends is not enough. We all have friends. But suppose our friends do not like to read books, and do not know how to read and talk about them.

  Suppose they are friends of the golf course or the bridge table, friends of music or of the theater, or anything except books. In that case, the kind of conversations I imagined in the last chapter will not take place.

  You may have conversations which start in the same way with current topics or recent books. Someone recites the newspaper headlines or the latest news broadcast. The big news these days is full of problems. It contains the seeds for countless conversations.

  But do they develop? Does the talk leave the level of the newspaper and the radio? If it does not, everyone will soon find the conversation dull and, tired of repeating the same old stuff, you will decide to play cards, go to the movies, or talk about your neighbors.

  No special literacy is required for that.

  Someone may have read a book, probably one thu Is now being talked about in well-informed circles. There is another chance for a conversation to begin. But it will falter and die away early unless by good luck there happen to be other readers of the same book. More likely the others will join in by mentioning other books they have recently read. No connections will be made. When everyone has given and taken recommendations about the next book to read, the talk will shift to the things people think they have in common. Even if several are present who have read the same book, the conversation is likely to choke because of their inability to discuss it in a way that leads somewhere.

  I may be exaggerating your situation somewhat, but I speak from my own experience of too many endlessly dull social evenings. It does not seem as if there were enough people who had a common background of reading. It has become fashionable to use the phrase

  "frame of reference." Good conversation requires all those who engage in it to speak within the same frame of reference. Communication not only results in something common; it usually needs a common background to begin with. Our failures in communication are as much due to the lack of an initial community of ideas as to our inabilities in talking and listening.

  What I am saying may sound as if it had drastic implications. Not only do I want you to learn to read, but now I am asking you to change your friends! I tear there is some truth in that. Either you yourself will not change very much, or you must change your friends.

  I am only saying what everyone knows, that friendship depends on a community of interests. If you read the great books, you will want friends with whom to discuss them.

  You do not have to find new ones if you can persuade your old ones to read along with you.

  I remember what John Erskine said when he launched the group of students I belonged to on the reading of the great books. He told us that for some years past he had noticed that college students could not talk to one another intelligently. Under the elective system, they went to different classes, meeting only now and then and reading only this or that textbook in common. Members of the same college year were not intellectual friends. When he had gone to Columbia at the beginning of the century, everyone took the same courses and read the same books, many of them great ones. Good conversation had flourished and, more than that, there had been friendships with respect to ideas as well as on the playing field or in fraternities.

  One of his motives in starting the Honors course was to .revive college life as an intellectual community. If a group of students read the same books and met weekly for two years to discuss them, they might find a new sort of fellowship. The great books would not only initiate them into the world of ideas but would provide the frame of reference for further communication among them. They would know how to talk intelligently and intelligibly to one another, not only about the books, but through the books about all the problems which engage men's thought and action.

  In such a community, Erskine said, democracy would be safe, tor democracy requires intelligent communication about and common participation in the solution of human problems. That was before anyone thought that democracy would ever again be threatened. As I remember, we did not pay much attention to Erskine's insight at the time. But he was right. I am sure of it now. I am sure that a liberal education is democracy's strongest bulwark.

  - 2 -

  I do not know what chance there is of changing the schools and colleges of this country.

  They are moving in the opposite direction today, away from the three R's and literacy.

  (Paradoxically enough, the current trends in education, which I have criticized, are also motivated by a devotion to democracy.) But I do know that something can be done about adult education. That is not yet entirely under the control of the teachers' colleges and schools of education. You and your friends are free to make plans tor yourself. You do not have to wait for someone to come along and offer you a program. You do not need any elaborate machinery to set up one. You do not even need any teachers. Get together, read the great books, and discuss them. Just as you will learn to read by reading, so you will learn to discuss by discussing.

  I have many reasons for thinking this quite feasible. When I went to Chicago and started to teach a reading course with President Hutchins, some people in a near-by suburb invited me to tell them about it. The group consisted of mature men and women, all of them college graduates, some of the men engaged in professional work, some in business, many of the women involved in local educational and political activities as well as in taking care of their f
amilies. They decided they would like to take the course.

  In college we read about sixty books in two years at the rate of one a week. Since the suburban group would not have as much time (what with babies and business to occupy them), they could only read a book a month. It would take them about eight years, therefore, to read the same list of books. Frankly, I did not think they would stick at it.

  At first they read no better than most college graduates do. They were starting from scratch, the veneer-thin scratch that a college education leaves. They found that their habits of reading, adjusted to the daily paper and even the best periodical or current book, were remarkably like no skill at all when they came to read the Iliad, The Divine Comedy, or Crime and Punishment; Plato's Republic, Spinoza's Ethics, or Mill's Essay on Liberty; Newton's Opticks or Darwin's Origin of Species. But they read them all and in the course of doing so they learned how to read.

  They kept at it because they felt their proficiency grow with each year, and enjoyed the mastery which skill provides. They can tell now what the author is trying to do, what questions he is trying to answer, what his most important concepts are, what reasons he has for his conclusions, and even what defects there are in his treatment of the subject.

  The intelligence of their discussion is clearly greater than it was ten years ago, and that signifies one thing surely: they have learned to read more intelligently.

  This group has kept together for ten years now. So tar as I can see, they plan to continue indefinitely, increasing the scope of their reading, and rereading some of the books they did poorly by in the earlier years. I may have helped them by leading their discussions, but I am sure they could now go on without my help. In fact, I am sure they would.

  They have discovered the difference it makes in their lives.

  They were all friends before they started, but now their friendships have matured intellectually. Conversation now flourishes where before it might soon languish and give way to other things. They have experienced the pleasure of talking about serious problems intelligently. They do not exchange opinions as they would the time of day.

  Discussion has become responsible. A man must support what he says. Ideas have connections with one another and with the world of everyday affairs. They have learned to judge propositions and arguments by their intelligibility and relevance.

  Several years before I went to Chicago, we had started a similar adult-education program in New York. Mr. Bu-chanan was then assistant director of the People's Institute, and he and I persuaded Mr. Everett Dean Martin to let us try reading the great books with groups of adults. We were proposing what was then a wild experiment in adult education. It is not an experiment any longer. We should not have thought it was one then, if we had remembered the facts of European history. The discussion of important problems has always been the way adults continue their education, and it has seldom taken place except against the common background provided by reading important books.

  We started about ten groups all around the New York area. They met in libraries, gymnasiums, church social halls, and Y.M.CA.'s. They consisted of all sorts of people-some who had been to college, some who had not, rich and poor, dull and brilliant. The leaders of these groups were young men most of whom had not read the books themselves but were willing to try. Their chief function was to conduct the discussion, to start it off by asking some leading questions, to keep it going when it bogged down, to clarify disputes when they threatened to becloud the real issues.

  It was a great success. It stopped only because it needed financial support it did not get to pay for staff and maintenance. But it can be revived anywhere and any time by any group of people who decide they will read and talk about the great books together. All you need are some friends to begin with, and you will be better friends before you are through.

  You may say that I have forgotten one thing. In both the New York and Chicago groups I have described, there were leaders responsible for conducting the discussion, leaders who may have had a little more experience than the rest of the group in reading the books. Trained leaders would help you get started, I admit. But they are a luxury, not a necessity.

  You can proceed in the most democratic fashion by electing a leader for each meeting.

  Let different people take turns at it. On each occasion the leader will probably leam more about reading and discussing the book than all the others. If every member of the group gets this experience in turn, the whole group will leam more quickly than if they imported a leader from the outside. There is this compensation in the plan I am suggesting, though it may be more difficult at the start.

  I do not have to tell you how a book should be discussed. All the rules for reading tell you that. They are a set of directions for discussing a book as well as reading it. Just as they should regulate the conversation you have with the author, so they govern the conversation you can have with your friends about the book. And, as I have said before, the two conversations mutually support each other.

  A discussion is led by the asking of questions. The rules for reading indicate the major questions which can be asked about any book, in itself or in relation to other books. The discussion is sustained by the answering of questions. Those who participate must, of course, understand the questions and be relevant in the remarks they make. But if you have acquired the discipline of coming to terms with an author, you and your friends should have no difficulty in coming to terms with each other. In fact, it is easier, because you can help one another reach an understanding. I am supposing, of course, that you will have good intellectual manners, that you will not judge until you understand what the other fellow is saying, and that when you do judge, you will give reasons.

  Every good conversation is a unique thing. It has never happened that way before and will never happen again, The order ot the questions will be different in every case.

  The opinions expressed, the way they are opposed and clarified, will vary from book to book and from group to group discussing the same book. Yet every good discussion is the same in some respects. It moves freely. The argument is followed wherever it leads.

  Understanding and agreement are the constant goals, to be reached by infinitely various routes. A good conversation is neither aimless nor empty. When something worth discussing has been well discussed, discussion is not the stale and unprofitable thing most people think it is.

  Good discussion of important problems in the light of great books is almost a complete exercise in the arts of thinking and communicating. Only writing is left out. Bacon said:

  "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."

  Perhaps even exactitude can be attained through the precision which well-regulated discussion demands. In any case, the mind can be sufficiently disciplined by reading, listening, and talking.

  - 3 -

  The mind which is trained to read well has its analytical and critical powers developed.

  The mind which is trained to discuss well has them further sharpened. One acquires a tolerance for arguments through dealing with them patiently and sympathetically. The animal impulse to impose our opinions upon others is thus checked. We learn that the only authority is reason itself—the only arbiters in any dispute are the reasons and evidences. We do not try to gain ascendancy by a show of force or by counting the noses of those who agree with us. Genuine issues cannot be decided by the mere weight of opinion. We must appeal to reason, not depend on pressure groups.

  We all want to learn to think straight. A great book may help us by the examples it affords of penetrating insight and cogent analysis. A good discussion may give further support by catching us when we are thinking crooked. If our friends do not let us get away with it, we may soon learn that sloppy thinking, like murder, will always out.

  Embarrassment may reduce us to making an effort we had never supposed was within our power. Unless reading and discussion enforce these demands for straight and clear thinking, most of us go
through life with an amazingly false confidence in our perceptions and judgments. We think badly most of the time and, what is worse, we do not know it because we are seldom found out.

  Those who can read well, listen and talk well, have disciplined minds. Discipline is indispensable for a free use of our powers. The man who has not the knack of doing something gets tied up in knots when he tries to perform. The discipline which comes from skill is necessary for facility. How far can you go in discussing a book with someone who does not know how to read or talk about it? How far can you get in your own reading without a trained ability?

  Discipline, as I have said before, is a source of freedom. Only a trained intelligence can think freely. And where there is no freedom in thinking, there can be no freedom of thought. Without free minds, we cannot long remain free men.

  Perhaps you are now prepared to admit that learning to read may be significantly related to other things—in fact, to all the rest of a reader's life. Its social and political implications are not remote. Before I consider them, however, let me remind you of one immediate justification for bothering to learn to read.

  Reading—and with it thinking and learning—is enjoyable for those who do it well. Just as we enjoy being able to use our bodies skillfully, so we can derive pleasure from a competent employment of our other faculties. The better we can use our minds, the more we appreciate how good it is to be able to think and learn. The art of reading can be praised, therefore, as intrinsically good. We have mental powers to use and leisure in which to employ them disinterestedly. Reading is certainly one way of fulfilling them.

  If such praise were all, I should not be satisfied. However good reading may be as an immediate source of pleas-nre, it is not completely an end in itself. We must do more than think and learn in order to lead a human life. We must act. If we wish to preserve our leisure for disinterested activities, we cannot shirk our practical responsibilities. It is in relation to our practical life that reading has its ultimate justification.