How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [131]
We cannot in this book give you any advice about how to read modem philosophy as long as it is concerned exclusively with second-order questions. However, there are philosophical books that you can read, and that we believe you should read. These books ask the kinds of questions that we have called first-order ones. It is not accidental that they were also written primarily for a lay audience rather than exclusively for other philosophers.
How to Read Philosophy 277
Up to about 1930, or perhaps even a little later, philosophical books were written for the general reader. Philosophers hoped to be read by their peers, but they also wanted to be read by ordinary, intelligent men and women. Since the questions that they asked and tried to answer were of concern to everyone, they thought that everyone should know what they thought.
All of the great classical works in philosophy, from Plato onward, were written from this point of view. These books are accessible to the lay reader; you can succeed in reading them if you wish to. Everything that we have to say in this chapter is intended to help you do that.
On Philosophical Method
It is important to understand what philosophical method consists in-at least insofar as philosophy is conceived as asking and trying to answer first-order questions. Suppose that you are a philosopher who is troubled by one of the childishly simple questions we have mentioned-the question, for instance, about the properties of everything that exists, or the question about the nature and causes of change. How do you proceed?
If your question were scientific, you would know that to answer it you would have to perform some kind of special research, either by way of developing an experiment to test your answer, or by way of observing a wide range of phenomena.
If your question were historical, you would know that you would also have to perform research, although of a different kind. But there is no experiment that will tell you what all existing things have in common, precisely in respect to having existence. There are no special kinds of phenomena that you can observe, no documents that you can seek out and read, in order to find out what change is or why things change. All you can do is reflect upon the question. There is, in short, nothing to do but think.
You are not thinking in a total vacuum, of course. Philoso-278 HOW TO READ A BOOK
phy, when it is good, is not "pure" speculation-thinking divorced from experience. Ideas cannot be put together just anyway. There are stringent tests of the validity of answers to philosophical questions. But such tests are based on common experience alone-on the experience that you already have because you are a human being, not a philosopher. You are as well acquainted through common experience with the phenomena of change as anybody else; everything in the world about you manifests mutability. As far as the mere experience of change goes, you are in as good a position to think about its nature and causes as the greatest philosophers. What distinguishes them is that they thought about it extremely well: they formulated the most penetrating questions that could be asked about it, and they undertook to develop carefully and clearly worked-out answers. By what means? Not by investigation. Not by having or trying to get more experience than the rest of us have. Rather, by thinking more profoundly about the experience than the rest of us have.
Understanding this is not enough. We must also realize that not all of the questions that philosophers have asked and tried to answer are truly philosophical. They themselves were not always aware of this, and their ignorance or mistake in this crucial respect can cause unperceptive readers considerable difficulty. To avoid such difficulties, it is necessary to be able to distinguish the truly philosophical questions from the other questions that a philosopher may deal with, but that he should have waived and left for later scientific investigation to answer.
The philosopher was misled by failing