How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (25 page)

Facts are also-again to some extent-culturally determined. An atomic scientist, for example, maintains a complicated, hypothetical structure of reality in his mind that determines-for him-certain facts that are different from the facts that are determined for and accepted by a primitive. This does not mean that the scientist and the primitive cannot agree on any facts; they must agree, for instance, that two plus two is four, or that a physical whole is greater than any of its parts.

But the primitive may not agree with the scientist's facts about nuclear particles, just as the scientist may not agree with the primitive's facts about ritual magic (That was a hard sentence to write, because, being culturally determined ourselves, we tend to agree with the scientist rather than the primitive and were thus tempted to put the second "fact" in quotation marks.But that is precisely the point.)

A good encyclopedia will answer your questions about facts if you remember the points about facts that we have outlined above. The art of using an encyclopedia as an aid to reading is the art of asking the proper questions about facts. As with the dictionary, we have merely suggested the questions; the encyclopedia will supply the answers.

You should also remember that an encyclopedia is not the best place to pursue understanding. Insights may be gained from it about the order and arrangement of knowledge; but that, although an important subject, is nonetheless a limited one. There are many matters required for understanding that you will not find in an encyclopedia.

There are two particularly striking omissions. An encyclopedia, properly speaking, contains no arguments, except insofar as it reports the course of arguments that are now widely accepted as correct or at least as of historical interest. Thus a major element in expository writing is lacking. An encylopedia also contains no poetry or imaginative literature, although it may contain facts about poetry and poets. Since both the imagination and the reason are required for understanding, this means that the encyclopedia must be a relatively unsatisfying tool in the pursuit of it.

PART THREE: Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter

13. HOW TO READ PRACTICAL BOOKS

In any art or field of practice, rules have a disappointing way of being too general. 1be more general, of course, the fewer, and that is an advantage. The more general, too, the more intelligible-it is easier to understand the rules in and by themselves. But it is also true that the more general the rules, the more remote they are from the intricacies of the actual situation in which you try to follow them.

We have stated the rules of analytical reading generally so that they apply to any expository book-any book that conveys knowledge, in the sense in which we have been using that term. But you cannot read a book in general. You read this book or that, and every particular book is of a particular sort.

It may be a history or a book in mathematics, a political tract or a work in natural science, or a philosophical or theological treatise. Hence, you must have some flexibility and adaptability in following the rules. Fortunately, you will gradually get the feeling of how they work on different kinds of books as you apply them.

It is important to note here that the fifteen rules of reading, in the form in which they were presented toward the end of Chapter 11, do not apply to the reading of fiction and poetry.

The outlining of the structure of an imaginative work is a different matter from the outlining of an expository book. Novels and plays and poems do not proceed by terms, propositions, and arguments-their fundamental content, in other words, is not logical, and the criticism of such works is based on different premises. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that no rules at all apply to reading imaginative literature. In fact, there is a parallel set of rules for reading such books that we will describe in the next chapter. These are useful in themselves; but the examination of them and their differences from the rules for reading expository works also throws light on the latter rules.

You need not fear that you will have to learn a whole new set of fifteen or more rules for reading fiction and poetry. The connection between the two kinds of rules is easy to see and state. It consists in the underlying fact, which we have emphasized over and over, that you must ask questions when you read, and specifically that you must ask four particular questions of whatever you are reading. These four questions are relevant to any book, whether fiction or nonfiction, whether poetry or history or science or philosophy. We have seen how the rules of reading expository works connect with and are developed from these four questions. Similarly, the rules of reading imaginative literature are also developed from them, although the difference in the nature of the materials read causes some dissimilarities in the development.

That being the case, in this part of the book we will have more to say about these questions than about the rules for reading. We will occasionally refer to a new rule, or to a revision or adaptation of an old one. But most of the time, as we proceed to suggest approaches to the reading of different kinds of books and other materials, we will emphasize the different questions that must be primarily asked, and the different kinds of answers that can be expected.

In the expository realm, we have noted that the basic division is into the practical and the theoretical-books that are concerned with the problems of action, and books that are concerned only with something to be known. The theoretical is further divisible, as we have noted, into history, science (and mathematics) , and philosophy. The practical division cuts across all boundaries, and we therefore propose to examine the nature of such books a little further, and to suggest some guidelines and precautions when you read them.

The Two Kinds of Practical Books

The most important thing to remember about any practical book is that it can never solve the practical problems with which it is concerned. A theoretical book can solve its own problems. But a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living.

Take this book, for example. It is a practical book. If your interest in it is practical (it might, of course, be only theoretical), you want to solve the problem of learning to read. You would not regard that problem as solved and done away with until you did learn. This book cannot solve the problem for you. It can only help. You must actually go through the activity of reading, not only this book but many others. That is what it means to say that nothing but action solves practical problems, and action occurs only in the world, not in books.

Every action takes place in a particular situation, always in the here and now and under a particular set of circumstances. You cannot act in general. The kind of practical judgment that immediately precedes action must be highly particular. It can be expressed in words, but it seldom is. It is almost never found in books, because the author of a practical book cannot envisage the concrete practical situations in which his readers may have to act. Try as he will to be helpful, he cannot give them concrete practical advice. Only another person in exactly the same situation could do that.

Practical books can, however, state more or less general rules that apply to a lot of particular situations of the same sort. Whoever tries to use such books must apply the rules to particular cases and, therefore, must exercise practical judgment in doing so. In other words, the reader himself must add something to the book to make it applicable in practice. He must add his knowledge of the particular situation and his judgment of how the rule applies to the case.

Any book that contains rules-prescriptions, maxims, or any sort of general directions-you will readily recognize as a practical book. But a practical book may contain more than rules. It may try to state the principles that underlie the rules and make them intelligible. For example, in this practical book about reading, we have tried here and there to explain the rules by brief expositions of grammatical, rhetorical, and logical principles. The principles that underlie rules are usually in themselves scientific, that is, they are items of theoretical knowledge. Taken together, they are the theory of the thing.

Thus, we talk about the theory of bridge building or the theory of contract bridge. We mean the theoretical principles that make the rules of good procedure what they are.

Practical books thus fall into two main groups. Some, like this one, or a cookbook, or a driver's manual, are primarily presentations of rules. Whatever other discussion they contain is for the sake of the rules. There are few great books of this sort. The other kind of practical book is primarily concerned with the principles that generate rules. Most of the great books in economics, politics, and morals are of this sort.

This distinction is not sharp and absolute. Both principles and rules may be found in the same book. The point is one of relative emphasis. You will have no difficulty in sorting books into these two piles. The book of rules in any field will always be immediately recognizable as practical. The book of practical principles may look at first like a theoretical book. In a sense it is, as we have seen. It deals with the theory of a particular kind of practice. You can always tell it is practical, however. The nature of its problems gives it away. It is always about a field of human behavior in which men can do better or worse.

In reading a book that is primarily a rule-book, the major propositions to look for, of course, are the rules. A rule is most directly expressed by an imperative rather than a declarative sentence. It is a command. It says: "Save nine stitches by taking a stitch in time." That rule can also be expressed declaratively, as when we say, "A stitch in time saves nine." Both forms of statement suggest-the imperative a little more emphatically, but not necessarily more memorably-that it is worth while to be prompt.

Whether it is stated declaratively or in the form of a command, you can always recognize a rule because it recommends something as worth doing to gain a certain end. Thus, the rule of reading that commands you to come to terms can also be stated as a recommendation: good reading involves coming to terms. The word "good" is the giveaway. That such reading is worth doing is implied.

The arguments in a practical book of this sort will be attempts to show you that the rules are sound. The writer may have to appeal to principles to persuade you that they are, or he may simply illustrate their soundness by showing you how they work in concrete cases. Look for both sorts of arguments.

The appeal to principles is usually less persuasive, but it has one advantage. It can explain the reason for the rules better than examples of their use.

In the other kind of practical books, the kind dealing mainly with the principles underlying rules, the major propositions and arguments will, of course, look exactly like those in a purely theoretical book. The propositions will say that something is the case, and the arguments will try to show that it is so.

But there is an important difference between reading such a book and reading a purely theoretical one. Since the ultimate problems to be solved are practical-problems of action, in fields where men can do better or worse-an intelligent reader of such books about "practical principles" always reads between the lines or in the margins. He tries to see the rules that may not be expressed but that can, nevertheless, be derived from the principles. He goes further. He tries to figure out how the rules should be applied in practice.

Unless it is so read, a practical book is not read as practical. To fail to read a practical book as practical is to read it poorly. You really do not understand it, and you certainly cannot criticize it properly in any other way. If the intelligibility of rules is to be found in principles, it is no less true that the significance of practical principles is to be found in the rules they lead to, the actions they recommend.

This indicates what you must do to understand either sort of practical book. It also indicates the ultimate criteria for critical judgment. In the case of purely theoretical books, the criteria for agreement or disagreement relate to the truth of what is being said. But practical truth is different from theoretical truth. A rule of conduct is practically true on two conditions : one is that it works; the other is that its working leads you to the right end, an end you rightly desire.

Suppose that the end an author thinks you should seek does not seem like the right one to you. Even though his recommendations may be practically sound, in the sense of getting you to that end, you will not agree with him ultimately. And your judgment of his book as practically true or practically false will be made accordingly. If you do not think careful and intelligent reading is worth doing, this book has little practical truth for you, however sound its rules may be.

Notice what this means. In judging a theoretical book, the reader must observe the identity of, or the discrepancy between, his own basic principles or assumptions and those of the author. In fudging a practical book, everything turns on the ends or goals. If you do not share Karl Marx's fervor about economic justice, his economic doctrine and the reforms it suggests are likely to seem to you practically false or irrelevant.

You may think, as Edmund Burke did, for example, that preserving the status quo is the most desirable objective; everything considered, you believe that to be more important than removing the inequities of capitalism. In that case, you are likely to think that a book like The Communist Manifesto is preposterously false. Your main judgment will always be in terms of the ends, not the means. We have no practical interest in even the soundest means to reach ends we disapprove of or do not care about.

The Role of Persuasion