How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [155]
-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 areasalthough 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 The Fourth level of Reading : Syntopical Reading 329
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. 0
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 knowl-0 Now that such a book has be written and published, we hope that it wil indeed make possible a breakthrough in thought such as we envisaged as the fruit of syntopical reading, and that the book on progress may facilitate further work in its field, as other books produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research on the ideas of freedom, happiness, justice, and love have done in theirs-work that was inordinately difficult before these books appeared.
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edge 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
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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