How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [69]
There is actually no point in answering critics of this sort. The only polite thing to do is to ask them to state your position for you, the position they claim to be challenging. If they cannot do it satisfactorily, if they cannot repeat what you 144 HOW TO READ A BOOK
have said in their own words, you know that they do not understand, and you are entirely justified in ignoring their criticisms. They are irrelevant, as all criticism must be that is not based on understanding. When you find the rare person who shows that he understands what you are saying as well as you do, then you can delight in his agreement or be seriously disturbed by his dissent.
In years of reading books with students of one kind and another, we have found this rule more honored in the breach than in the observance. Students who plainly do not know what the author is saying seem to have no hesitation in setting themselves up as his judges. They not only disagree with something they do not understand but, what is equally bad, they also often agree to a position they cannot express intelligibly in their own words. Their discussion, like their reading, is all words. Where understanding is not present, affirmations and denials are equally meaningless and unintelligible. Nor is a position of doubt or detachment any more intelligent in a reader who does not know what he is suspending judgment about.
There are several further points to note concerning the observance of this rule. If you are reading a good book, you ought to hesitate before you say, "I understand." The presumption certainly is that you have a lot of work to do before you can make that declaration honestly and with assurance.
You must, of course, be a judge of yourself in this matter, and that makes the responsibility even more severe.
To say "I don't understand" is, of course, also a critical judgment, but only after you have tried your hardest does it reflect on the book rather than yourself. If you have done everything that can be expected of you and still do not understand, it may be because the book is unintelligible. The presumption, however, is in favor of the book, especially if it is a good one. In reading good books, failure to understand is usually the reader's fault. Hence he is obligated to stay with the task imposed by the first two stages of analytical reading Criticizing a Book Fairly 145
a long time before entering on the third. When you say "I don't understand," watch your tone of voice. Be sure it concedes the possibility that it may not be the author's fault.
There are two other conditions under which the rule requires special care. If you are reading only part of a book, it is more difficult to be sure that you understand, and hence you should be more hesitant to criticize. And sometimes a book is related to other books by the same author, and depends upon them for its full significance. In this situation, also, you should be more circumspect about saying "I understand," and slower to raise your critical lance.
A good example of brashness in this last respect is furnished by literary critics who have agreed or disagreed with Aristotle's Poetics without realizing that the main principles in Aristotle's analysis of poetry depend in part on points made in other of his works, his treatises on psychology and logic and metaphysics. They have agreed or disagreed without understanding what it is all about.
The same is true of other writers, such as Plato and Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who have not been able to say everything they knew or thought in a single work. Those who judge Kant's Critique of Pure Reason without reading his Critique of Practical Reason, or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations without reading his Theory