Reading For Understanding and Information

Most of us do not know what the limits of our comprehension are. We have never tried our powers to the full. It is my honest belief that almost all of the great books in every field are within the grasp of all normally intelligent men, on the condition, of course, that they acquire the skill necessary for reading them and make the effort. Of course, those more favoured by birth will reach the goal more readily but the race is not always to the swift.

There are several minor points here which you must observe. It is possible to be mistaken in your judgment of something you are reading. You may think you understand it, and be content with what you get from an effortless reading, whereas in fact much may have escaped you. The first maxim of sound practice is an old one: the beginning of wisdom is a just appraisal of one's ignorance. So the beginning of reading as a conscious effort to understand is an accurate perception of the line between what is intelligible and what is not.

I have seen many students read a difficult book just as if they were reading the sports page. Sometimes I would ask at the beginning of a class if they had any questions about the text, if there, was anything they did not understand. Their silence answered in the negative. At the end of two hours, during which they could not answer the simplest questions leading to an interpretation of the book, they would admit their deficiency in a puzzled way. They are puzzled because they were quite honest in their belief that they had read the text. They had, indeed, but not in the right way.

If they had allowed themselves to be puzzled while reading, instead of after the class was over; if they had encouraged themselves to note the things they did not understand, instead of putting such matters immediately out of mind, almost in shame and embarrassment, they might have discovered that the book in front of them was different from their usual diet.

Let me summarize now the distinction between these two types of reading. We shall have to consider both because the line between what is readable in one way and what must be read in the other is often hazy. To whatever extent we can keep the two kinds of reading distinct, we can use the word "reading" in two distinct senses.

The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else which, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us. Such things may increase the store of information we remember, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity which comes from getting over our depth – that is, if we were both alert and honest.

The second sense is the one in which I would say a man has to read something that at first he does not completely understand. The writer is communicating something which can increase the reader's understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one man would never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by "learning" I mean understanding more, not remembering more information which has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.

There is clearly no difficulty about getting new information in the course of reading if, as I say, the novel facts are of the same sort as those you already know, so far as their' intelligibility goes. Thus, a man who knows some of- the facts of American history and understands them in a certain light can readily acquire by reading, in the first sense, more such facts and understand them in the same light. But suppose he is reading a history which seeks not merely to give him some more facts but to throw a new and, perhaps, more profound light on all the facts he knows. Suppose there is greater understanding here than he possesses before he starts to read. If he can manage to acquire their greater understanding, he is reading in the second sense. He has literally elevated himself by his own activity, though indirectly, of course, this was made possible by the writer who had something to teach him.

What are the conditions under which this kind of reading takes place? There are two. In the first place, there is initial inequality in understanding the writer must be superior to the reader, and his book must convey in readable form the insights he possesses and his potential readers lack. In the second place, the reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, the communication is perfectly consummated.

In short, we can learn only from our betters. We must know who they are and how to learn from them. The man who has this sort of knowledge possesses the art of reading the sense with which I am especially concerned. Everyone probably has some ability to read in this way. But all of us without exception, can learn to read better and gradually gain more by our efforts through applying them to more rewarding materials.

But we must remember that there is a genuine distinction between reading for information and reading for understanding. Both information and understanding are knowledge in some sense. Getting more information is learning and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. What is the difference?

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same and different, and so forth.

Most of us are acquainted with this distinction in terms of the difference between being able to remember something and being able to explain it. If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or the world, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. That happens only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

A single example may help us here. What I am going to report happened in a class in which we were reading Thomas Aquina's treatise on the passions, but the same thing has happened in countless other classes with many different sorts of material. I asked a student what St. Thomas had to say about the order of the passions. He told me quite correctly that love, according to St. Thomas, is the first of all the passions and that the other emotions which he named accurately follow ma certain order. Then I asked him what it meant to say this. He looked startled. Had he not answered my question correctly? I told him he had, but repeated my request for an explanation. He had told me what St. Thomas said. Now I wanted to know what St. Thomas meant. The student tried, but all he could do was to repeat, in slightly altered order, the same words he had used to answer my original question. It so became obvious that he did not know what he was talking about, even though he would have made a good score in any examination which went no further than my original question or questions of a similar sort.

I tried to help him. I asked him whether love was first in the sense of being a cause of other emotions. I asked him how hate and anger, hope and fear, depended on love. I asked him about the relation of joy and grief to love. And what is love? Is love hunger for good and thirst for drink; or is it only that wonderful feeling which is supposed to make the world go round? Is the desire for money or fame, knowledge or happiness, love? In so far as he could answer these questions by repeating more or less accurately the words of St. Thomas, he did. When he made errors of reporting, other members of the class could be called upon to correct them. But neither he nor they could make any headway with explaining what it was all about.

I tried still another tack. I asked them, begging their pardon about their own emotional experiences. They were all old enough to have had a few passions. Did they ever hate anybody, and did it have anything to do with loving that person or somebody else? Had they ever experienced a sequence of emotions, one of which somehow led into another? They were very vague, not because they were embarrassed or because they had never been emotionally upset but because they were totally unaccustomed to thinking about their experiences in this way clearly they had not made any connection between the words they ad read in a book about the passions and their own experiences. These things were as in worlds apart.

It was becoming apparent why they did not have the faintest understanding of what they had read. It was just words they had memorized to be able to repeat somehow when I shot a question at them. That was what they did in other courses. I was asking too much of them. I still persisted. Perhaps, if they could not understand Aquinas in the light of their own experience, they might be able to use the vicarious experience they got from reading novels. They had read some fiction. Here and there some of them had even read a great novel. Did passions occur in these stories? They did as badly here as before. They answered by telling me the story in a superficial summary of the plot. They understood the novels they had read about as little as they understood St. Thomas.

Finally, I asked whether they had ever taken any other courses in which passions or emotions had been discussed. Most of them had had an elementary course in psychology, and one or two of them had even heard of Freud, and perhaps read a little of him. When I discovered that they had made no connection whatsoever between the physiology of emotion, in which they had probably passed creditable examinations, and the passions as St. Thomas discussed them; when I found out they could not even see that St. Thomas was making the same basic point as Freud, I realized what I was up against. These students were college juniors and seniors. They would read in one sense but not in another. All their years in school they had been reading for information only, the sort of information you have to get from something assigned in order to answer quizzes and pass examinations. They never connected one book with another, one course with another, or anything that was said in books or lectures with what happened to them in their own lives.

Not knowing that there was something more to do with a book than commit its more obvious statements to memory, they were totally innocent of their dismal failure when they came to class. According to their lights, they had conscientiously prepared the day's lesson. It had never occurred to them that they might be called upon to show that they understand what they had read. Even when a number of such class sessions began to make them aware of this novel requirement, they were helpless. At best they became a little more aware that they did not understand what they were reading, but they could do little about it. Here, near the end of their schooling, they were totally unskilled in the art of reading to understand.

When we read for information, we acquire facts. When we read for understanding, we learn not only facts but their significance. Each kind of reading has its virtue, but it must be used in the right place. If a writer does not understand more than we do, or if in a particular passage he makes no effort to explain, we can only be informed by him, not enlightened. But if an author has insights we do not possess and if, in addition, he has tried to convey them in what he had written, we are neglecting his gift to us if we do not read him differently from the way in which we read newspapers or magazines.

The books we acknowledge to be great or good are usually those which deserve the better sort of reading. It is true, of course, that anything can be read for information as well as understanding. One should be able to remember what the author said as well as know what he meant. In a sense, being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened. The point, however, is not to stop at being informed. It is as wasteful to read a great book solely for information as to use a fountain pen for digging worms.

Montaigne speaks of "an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it". The one is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC's, cannot read at all. The other is the ignorance of those who had misread many books. They are, as Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had la name for such mixture of learning and folly, which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

Being well read too often means the quantity, too seldom the quality of reading. It was not the pessimistic and misanthropic Schopenhauer who inveighed against too much reading, because he found that, for the most part, men read passively and glutted themselves with toxic overdoses of unassimilated information. Bacon and Hobbes made the same point. Hobbes said: "If I read as many books as most men" - he meant "misread" - "I should be as dull-witted as they". Bacon distinguished between "books to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested". The point that remains the same throughout, rests on the distinction between different kinds of reading appropriate to different kinds of literature.