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3. THE MEETING OF OBJECTIONS: The philosophical style developed in the Middle Ages and perfected by St. Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas’ style is a combination of question-raising and objection-meeting.
A question is posed; the opposite (wrong) answer to it is given; arguments are educed in support of that wrong answer; these are countered first by an authoritative text (often a quotation from Scripture); and finally, Aquinas introduces his own answer or solution with the words “I answer that.”
4. THE SYSTEMIZATION OF PHILOSOPHY: In the seventeenth century, a fourth style of philosophical exposition was developed by two notable philosophers, Descartes and Spinoza. Fascinated by the promised success of mathematics in organizing man’s knowledge of nature, they attempted to organize philosophy itself in a way akin to the organization of mathematics.
5. THE APHORISTIC STYLE: There is one other style of philosophical exposition that deserves mention, although it is probably not as important as the other four. This is the aphoristic style adopted by Nietzsche in such works as Thus Spake Zarathustra and by certain modern French philosophers.
Consistency, Emerson said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
A philosopher, faced with a problem, can do nothing but think about it. A reader, faced with a philosophical book, can do nothing but read it—which means, as we know, thinking about it. There are no other aids except the mind itself.
the rules of reading, as we have stated and explained them, apply more directly to the reading of philosophical books than to the reading of any other kind.
When you have read a philosophical book well—and that means reading other philosophers on the same subject, too—you are in a position to judge.
you can nevertheless read such a theological book well by treating its dogmas with the same respect you treat the assumptions of a mathematician. But you must always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.
Social science divisions usually include departments of anthropology, economics, politics, and sociology.
although history, viewed as accounts of particular events and persons, may be scientific in the minimal sense of constituting systematic knowledge, it is not a science in the sense that of itself it yields systematic knowledge of patterns or laws of behavior and development.
you must, as it were, check your opinions at the door. You cannot understand a book if you refuse to hear what it is saying.
Knowing that more than one book is relevant to a particular question is the first requirement in any project of syntopical reading. Knowing which books should be read, in a general way, is the second requirement. The second requirement is a great deal harder to satisfy than the first.
both inspectional and analytical reading can be considered as anticipations or preparations for syntopical reading. It is here, in fact, that inspectional reading comes into its own as a major tool or instrument for the reader.
to read a hundred books analytically might well take you ten years.
The first thing to do when you have amassed your bibliography is to inspect all of the books on your list. You should not read any of them analytically before inspecting all of them.
give you a clear enough idea of your subject so that your subsequent analytical reading of some of the books on the list is productive. And second, it will allow you to cut down your bibliography to a more manageable size.
There are five steps in syntopical reading.
roughly in the order in which they occur, although in a sense all of them have to take place for any of them to.
STEP 1 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: FINDING THE RELEVANT PASSAGES
In syntopical reading, it is you and your concerns that are primarily to be served, not the books that you read.
You do not want to lose sight of the fact that you are reading it for an ulterior purpose—namely, for the light it may throw on your own problem—not for its own sake.
STEP 2 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: BRINGING THE AUTHORS TO TERMS
now you are faced with a number of different authors, and it is unlikely that they will have all used the same words, or even the same terms. Thus it is you who must establish the terms, and bring your authors to them rather than the other way around.
Syntopical reading, in short, is to a large extent an exercise in translation.
STEP 3 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: GETTING THE QUESTIONS CLEAR
We should not expect that all of our authors will answer our questions in the same way. If they did, we would once again have no problem to solve; it would have been solved by consensus.
STEP 5 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: ANALYZING THE DISCUSSION
Among conflicting opinions, one may, of course, be wholly true and all the rest false; but it is also possible that each expresses some portion of the whole truth;
would be dogmatic, not dialectical, if, on any of the important issues that it identified and analyzed, it asserted or tried to prove the truth or falsity of any view. If it did that, the syntopical analysis would cease to be syntopical; it would become simply one more voice in the discussion, thereby losing its detached and objective character.
that a different type of contribution to the pursuit of understanding can and should be made. And this contribution consists in being resolutely objective and detached throughout. The special quality that a syntopical analysis tries to achieve can, indeed, be summarized in the two words “dialectical objectivity.”
it is easier to take no sides than to look at all sides.
We have already observed that including novels, plays, and poems in a syntopical reading project is difficult, and this is so for several reasons. First of all, the backbone or essence of a story is its plot, not its positions on issues. Second, even the most talkative characters seldom take clear positions on an issue—they tend to talk, in the story, about other matters, mainly emotional relations. Third, even if a character does make such a speech—as, for example, Settembrini does about progress in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain—we can never be sure that it is the author’s view that is being
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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 read—without prejudging their meaning or significance. The Syntopicon is an example of such a work.
SURVEYING THE FIELD PREPARATORY TO SYNTOPICAL READING 1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject by recourse to library catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books. 2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject. Note: These two steps are not, strictly speaking, chronologically distinct; that is, the two steps have an effect on each other, with the second, in particular, serving to modify the first. II. SYNTOPICAL READING OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY AMASSED IN STAGE I 1. Inspect
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the method, at least as it is exemplified in our discussion of analytical and syntopical reading, does not apply to every book. The reason is that some books do not require it.
If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity.
A book that can do no more than amuse or entertain you may be a pleasant diversion for an idle hour, but you must not expect to get anything but amusement from it. We are not against amusement in its own right, but we do want to stress that improvement in reading skill does not accompany it.
Reading for information does not stretch your mind any more than reading for amusement. It may seem as though it does, but that is merely because your mind is fuller of facts than it was before you read the book. However, your mind is essentially in the same condition that it was before. There has been a quantitative change, but no improvement in your skill.
The great majority of the several million books that have been written in the Western tradition alone—more than 99 per cent of them—will not make sufficient demands on you for you to improve your skill in reading.
you should not expect to learn anything of importance from them. In fact, you do not have to read them—analytically—at all. Skimming will do.
How do you know that you do not ever have to read such books again? You know it by your own mental reaction to the experience of reading them. Such a book stretches your mind and increases your understanding. But as your mind stretches and your understanding increases, you realize, by a process that is more or less mysterious, that you are not going to be changed any more in the future by this book.
Of the few thousand such books there is a much smaller number—here the number is probably less than a hundred—that cannot be exhausted by even the very best reading you can manage.
If the book belongs to the second class of books to which we referred before, you find, on returning to it, that there was less there than you remembered. The reason, of course, is that you yourself have grown in the meantime.
But if the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books—you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you.
what you only now begin to realize is that the book was so far above you to begin with that it has remained above you, and probably always will remain so. Since it is a really good book—a great book, as we might say—it is accessible at different levels. Your impression of increased understanding on your previous reading was not false. The book truly lifted you then. But now, even though you have become wiser and more knowledgeable, it can lift you again. And it will go on doing this until you die.
Our estimate was that the number is considerably less than a hundred. But the number is even less than that for any given reader.
it actually so unreal? We do not think so. We are all to some extent persons marooned on a desert island. We all face the same challenge that we would face if we really were there—the challenge of finding the resources within ourselves to live a good human life.
The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used.
