How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [74]
Prejudice and J udgment
Now let us consider the situation in which, having said you understand, you proceed to disagree. If you have tried to abide by the maxims stated in the previous chapter, yop disagree because you think the author can be shown to be wrong on some point. You are not simply voicing your prejudice or expressing your emotions. Because this is true, then, from an ideal point of view, there are three conditions that must be satisfied if controversy is to be well conducted.
The first is this. Since men are animals as well as rational, it is necessary to acknowledge the emotions you bring to a dispute, or those that arise in the course of it. Otherwise you are likely to be giving vent to feelings, not stating reasons. You
Agreeing or Disagreeing With an Author 155
may even think you have reasons, when all you have are strong feelings.
Second, you must make your own assumptions explicit.
You must know what your prejudices-that is, your prejudgments-are. Otherwise you are not likely to admit that your opponent may be equally entitled to different assumptions.
Good controversy should not be a quarrel about assumptions.
If an author, for example, explicitly asks you to take something
.for granted, the fact that the opposite can also be taken for granted should not prevent you from honoring his request. If your prejudices lie on the opposite side, and if you do not acknowledge them to be prejudices, you cannot give the author's case a fair hearing.
Third and finally, an attempt at impartiality is a good antidote for the blindness that is almost inevitable in partisanship.
Controversy without partisanship is, of course, impossible. But to be sure that there is more light in it, and less heat, each of the disputants should at least try to take the other fellow's point of view. If you have not been able to read a book sympathetically, your disagreement with it is probably more contentious than civil.
These three conditions are, ideally, the sine qua non of intelligent and profitable conversation. They are obviously applicable to reading, insofar as that is a kind of conversation between reader and author. Each of them contains sound advice for readers who are willing to respect the civilities of disagreement.
But the ideal here, as elsewhere, can only be approximated. The ideal should never be expected from human beings.
We ourselves, we hasten to admit, are sufficiently conscious of our own defects. We have violated our own rules about good intellectual manners in controversy. We have caught ourselves attacking a book rather than criticizing it, knocking straw men over, denouncing where we could not support denials, proour prejudices as if ours were any better than the author's.
1 56 HOW TO READ A BOOK
We continue to believe, however, that conversation and critical reading can be well disciplined. We are therefore going to substitute for those three ideal conditions, a set of prescriptions that may be easier to follow. They indicate the four ways in which a book can be adversely criticized. Our hope is that if a reader confines himseH to making these points, he will be less likely to indulge in expressions of emotion or prejudice.
The four points can be briefly summarized by conceiving the reader as conversing with the author, as talking back. After he has said, "I understand but I disagree," he can make the following remarks to the author: ( 1 ) ''You are uninformea'; ( 2 ) ''You are misinformea'; ( 3 ) ''You are illogical-your reasoning is not cogent"; ( 4 ) ''Your analysis is incomplete."
These may not be exhaustive, though we think they are.