How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [67]
There is a certain truth here, of course, but there is also a good deal of nonsense about the aura of impeccability with which books are thus surrounded, and the false piety it produces. Readers may be like children, in the sense that great authors can teach them, but that does not mean they must not be heard from. Cervantes may or not have been right in saying,
"There is no book so bad but something good may be found in it." It is more certain that there is no book so good that no fault can be found with it.
140 HOW TO READ A BOOK
It is true that a book that can enlighten its readers, and is in this sense superior to them, should not be criticized by them until they understand it. When they do, they have elevated themselves almost to equality with the author. Now they are fit to exercise the rights and privileges of their new position.
Unless they exercise their critical faculties now, they are doing the author an injustice. He has done what he could to make them his equal. He deserves that they act like his peers, that they engage in conversation with him, that they talk back.
We are discussing here the virtue of teachability-a virtue that is almost always misunderstood. Teachability is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgment. He can be trained, perhaps, but not taught. The most teachable reader is, therefore, the most critical. He is the reader who finally responds to a book by the greatest effort to make up his own mind on the matters the author has discussed.
We say "finally" because teachability requires that a teacher be fully heard and, more than that, understood before he is judged. We should add also that sheer amount of effort is not an adequate criterion of teachability. The reader must know how to judge a book, just as he must know how to arrive at an understanding of its contents. This third group of rules for reading, then, is a guide to the last stage in the disciplined exercise of teachability.
The Role of Rhetoric
We have everywhere found a certain reciprocity between the art of teaching and the art of being taught, between the skill of the author that makes him a considerate writer and the skill of the reader that makes him handle a book with con-Criticizing a Book Fairly 141
sideration. We have seen how the same principles of grammar and logic underlie rules of good writing as well as rules of good reading. The rules we have so far discussed concern the achievement of intelligibility on the part of the writer and the achievement of understanding on the part of the reader. This last set of rules goes beyond understanding to critical judgment. Here is where rhetoric comes in.
There are, of course, many uses of rhetoric. We usually think of it in connection with the orator or the propagandist.
But in its most general significance, rhetoric is involved in every situation in which communication takes place among human beings. If we are the talkers, we wish not only to be understood but also to be agreed with in some sense. If our purpose in trying to communicate is serious, we wish to convince or persuade-more precisely, to convince about theoretical matters and to persuade about matters that ultimately affect action or feeling.
To be equally serious in receiving such communication, one must be not only a responsive but also a responsible listener. You are responsive to the extent that you follow what has been said and note the intention that prompts it. But you also have the responsibility of taking a position. When you take it, it is yours, not the author's. To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man.