How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (42 page)

The truth, then, insofar as it can be found-the solution to the problem, insofar as that is available to us-consists rather in the ordered discussion itself than in any set of propositions or assertions about it. Thus, in order to present this truth to our minds-and to the minds of others-we have to do more than merely ask and answer the questions. We have to ask them in a certain order, and be able to defend that order; we must show how the questions are answered differently and try to say why; and we must be able to point to the texts in the books examined that support our classification of answers.

Only when we have done all of this can we claim to have analyzed the discussion of our problem. And only then can we claim to have understood it.

We may, indeed, have done more than that. A thorough analysis of the discussion of a problem may provide the groundwork for further productive work on the problem by others. It can clear away the deadwood and prepare the way for an original thinker to make a breakthrough. Without the work of analysis, that might not have been possible, for the dimensions of the problem might not have been visible.

The Need for Objectivity

An adequate analysis of the discussion of a problem or subject matter identifies and reports the major issues, or basic intellectual oppositions, in that discussion. This does not imply that disagreement is always the dominant feature of every discussion. On the contrary, agreement in most cases accompanies disagreement; that is, on most issues, the opinions or views that present opposite sides of the dispute are shared by several authors, often by many. Seldom do we find a solitary exponent of a controversial position.

The agreement of human beings about the nature of things in any field of inquiry establishes some presumption of the truth of the opinions they commonly hold. But their disagreement establishes the counter-presumption-that none of the opinions in conflict, whether shared or not, may be wholly true. Among conflicting opinions, one may, of course, be wholly true and all the rest false; but it is also possible that each expresses some portion of the whole truth; and, except for flat and isolated contradictions (which are rare in any discussion of the kind of problems we are dealing with here), it is even possible that all the conflicting opinions may be false, just as it is possible for that opinion to be false on which all seem to agree. Some opinion as yet unexpressed may be the truth or nearer to it.

This is another way of saying that the aim of a project of syntopical reading is not final answers to the questions that are developed in the course of it, or the final solution of the problem with which the project began. This is particularly true of the report we might try to make of such syntopical reading. It would be dogmatic, not dialectical, if, on any of the important issues that it identified and analyzed, it asserted or tried to prove the truth or falsity of any view. If it did that, the syntopical analysis would cease to be syntopical; it would become simply one more voice in the discussion, thereby losing its detached and objective character.

The point is not that one more voice carries no weight in the forum of human discussion on important issues. The point is that a different type of contribution to the pursuit of understanding can and should be made. And this contribution consists in being resolutely objective and detached throughout.

The special quality that a syntopical analysis tries to achieve can, indeed, be summarized in the two words "dialectical objectivity."

The syntopical reader, in short, tries to look at all sides and to take no sides. Of course, he will fail in this exacting ideal. Absolute objectivity is not humanly possible. He may succeed in taking no sides, presenting the issues without prejudice to any partisan point of view, and treating opposing views impartially. But it is easier to take no sides than to look at all sides. In this latter respect, the syntopical reader will undoubtedly fail. All possible sides of an issue cannot be exhaustively enumerated. Nevertheless, he must try.

Taking no sides is easier than looking at all sides, we say, but it remains difficult even so. The syntopical reader must resist certain temptations and know his own mind. Perfect dialectical objectivity is not guaranteed by avoiding explicit judgments on the truth of conflicting opinions. Partiality can intrude in a variety of subtle ways-by the manner in which arguments are summarized, by shades of emphasis and neglect, by the tone of a question or the color of a passing remark, and by the order in which the various different answers to key questions are presented.

In order to avoid some of these dangers, the conscientious syntopical reader may resort to one obvious device and use it as much as possible. That is, he must constantly refer back to the actual text of his authors, reading the relevant passages over and over; and, in presenting the results of his work to a wider audience, he must quote the opinion or argument of an author in the writer's own language. Although it may appear to do so, this does not contradict what we said earlier about the necessity of finding a neutral terminology in which to analyze the problem. That necessity remains, and when summaries of an author's argument are presented, they must be presented in that language and not the author's. But the author's own words, carefully quoted so as not to wrench them out of context, must accompany the summary, so that the reader can judge for himself whether the interpretation of the author is correct.

Only the syntopical reader's firm intention to avoid them can be relied on to prevent other sorts of departure from dialectical objectivity. That ideal demands a deliberate effort to balance question against question, to forgo any comment that might be prejudicial, to check any tendency toward overemphasis or underemphasis. In the last analysis, although a reader may be the judge of the effectiveness of a written report of a dialectical exposition, only the writer of it-only the syntopical reader himself-can know whether he has satisfied these requirements.

An Example of an Exercise in Syntopical Reading : The Idea of Progress

An example may be helpful to explain how syntopical reading works. Let us consider the idea of progress. We do not take this subject at random. We have done extensive research on it. The example would not be so useful to you if that were not so.

The investigation of this important historical and philosophical idea occupied several years. The first task was to produce a list of works to be examined for relevant passages-to amass a bibliography (it finally ran to more than 450 items) .

This task was accomplished by a series of inspectional readings of several times that many books, articles, and other pieces. It is important to point out that in the case of the idea of progress, as would be true in the case of most other important ideas, many of the items finally judged to be relevant were found more or less by accident, or at least with the help of educated guesses. There were obvious places to start; many recent books contain the word "progress" in their titles. But others do not, and most of the older books, although relevant to the subject, do not even employ the term.

A few fictional and poetical works were read, but on the whole it was decided to concentrate on expository works. We have already observed that including novels, plays, and poems in a syntopical reading project is difficult, and this is so for several reasons. First of all, the backbone or essence of a story is its plot, not its positions on issues. Second, even the most talkative characters seldom take clear positions on an issue they tend to talk, in the story, about other matters, mainly emotional relations. Third, even if a character does make such a speech-as, for example, Settembrini does about progress in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain-we can never be sure that it is the authors view that is being represented. Is the author being ironic in allowing his character to go on about the subject? Is he intending you to see the foolishness of the position, rather than its wisdom? Generally speaking, an intensive effort of synthetic interpretation is required before a fictional work can be placed on one side or another of an issue. The effort is so great, and the results essentially so dubious, that usually it is prudent to abstain.

The discussion of progress in the many works that remained to be examined was, as is usually the case, apparently chaotic. Faced with this fact, the task was, as we have indicated, to develop a neutral terminology. This was a complex undertaking, but one example may help to explain what was done.

The word "progress" itself is used by authors in a number of different ways. Most of these different ways reflect no more than shades of meaning, and they can be handled in the analysis. But the word is used by some authors to denote a certain kind of movement forward in history that is not an improvement. Since most of the authors use the word to denote a historical change in the human condition that is for the better, and since betterment is of the essence of the conception, the same word could not be applied to both views. In this case, the majority gained the day, and the minority faction had to be referred to as authors who assert "non-meliorative advance" in history. The point is that when discussing the views of the minority faction, we could not employ the word "progress," even though the authors involved had used it themselves.

The third step in syntopical reading is, as we have noted, getting the questions clear. Our intuition about the primary question in the case of progress turned out to be correct upon examination. The first question to ask, the question to which authors can be interpreted as giving various answers, is, Does progress occur in history? Is it a fact that the general course of historical change is in the direction of improvement in man's condition? Basically, there are three different answers to this question put forth in the literature of the subject: (1) Yes, (2) No, and (3) We cannot know. However, there are a number of different ways of saying Yes, several different ways of saying No, and at least three different ways of saying that we cannot know whether human progress occurs or not.

The multifarious and interrelated answers to this primary question constitute what we decided to call the general controversy about progress. It is general in the sense that every author we studied who has anything significant to say about the subject takes sides on the various issues that can be identified within it. But there is also a special controversy about progress, which is made up of issues that are joined only by progress authors-authors who assert that progress occurs.

These issues have to do with the nature or properties of the progress that they all, being progress authors, assert is a fact of history. There are only three issues here, although the discussion of each of them is complex. They can be stated as questions: (1) Is progress necessary, or is it contingent on other occurences? (2) Will progress continue indefinitely, or will it eventually come to an end or "plateau out"? (3) Is there progress in human nature as well as in human institutions -in the human animal itself, or merely in the external conditions of human life?

Finally, there is a set of subordinate issues, as we called them, again only among progress authors, about the respects in which progress occurs. We identified six areas in which progress is said by some authors to occur, although other writers deny its occurrence in one or more of these are as although never in all (since they are by definition authors who assert the occurrence of some kind of progress) . The six are: (1) progress in knowledge, (2) technological progress, (3) economic progress, (4) political progress, (5) moral progress, and (6) progress in the fine arts. The discussion of the last point raises special problems, since in our opinion no author genuinely asserts that such aesthetic progress occurs, although a number of writers deny that progress occurs in this respect.

The structure of the analysis of progress just described exemplifies our effort to define the issues within the discussion of this subject and to analyze the discussion itself-in other words, to take the fourth and fifth steps in syntopical reading.

And something like this must always be done by a syntopical reader, although of course he does not always have to write a long book reporting his researches.

The Syntopicon and How to Use It

If you read this chapter carefully, you will have noticed that, although we spent some time discussing it, we did not really solve what we called the paradox of syntopical reading.

That paradox can be stated thus: Unless you know what books to read, you cannot read syntopically, but unless you can read syntopically, you do not know what to read. Another way to state it is in the form of what may be called the fundamental problem of syntopical reading, namely, that if you do not know where to start, you cannot read syntopically; and even if you have a rough idea of where to begin, the time required to find the relevant books and relevant passages in those books may exceed the time required to take all of the other steps combined.

Actually, of course, there is at least a theoretical resolution of the paradox and solution of the problem. Theoretically, you could know the major literature of our tradition so thoroughly that you had a working notion of where every idea is discussed in it. But if you are such a person, you need no help from anybody, and we cannot tell you anything you do not know about syntopical reading.

On the other hand, even if you did not have this knowledge yourself, you might be able to apply to someone else who did. But you should recognize that if you were able to apply to such a person, his advice might turn out to be almost as much a hindrance as a help. If the subject was one on which he had himself done special research, it would be hard for him merely to tell you the relevant passages to read without telling you how to read them and that might well get in your way. But if he had not done special research on the subject, he might not know a great deal more than yourself, although it might seem so both to him and to you.

What is needed, therefore, is a reference book that tells you where to go to find the relevant passages on a large number of subjects of interest, without at the same time saying how the passages should be read-without prejudging their meaning or significance. The Syntopicon is an example of such a work. Produced in the 1940's, it is a topical index to the set of books titled Great Books of the Western World. Under each of some 3,00 topics or subjects, it lists references to pages within the set where that subject is discussed. Some of the references are to passages covering many pages, others are to key paragraphs or even parts of paragraphs. No more time is required to find them than is needed to take down the indicated volume and flip through its pages.