How to Read the Classics: "Critical Reading" or "Respectful Attention"?
by James Hankins
You don’t have to go very far into the extensive literature devoted to the “defense of the humanities” before you find the proud claim that the humanities teach “critical thinking.” What this ordinarily means, when it comes to reading books, is that students are taught a discipline of taking a text apart and seeing how it ticks, as though it were a machine.
In more benign examples of criticism this might amount to rhetorical analysis, which aims to understand the function of the discourse—whether, for example, it is designed for judicial purposes (defending or attacking a case), or to deliberate on a course of action (as in a legislative body), or to celebrate merit, especially in ceremonial speeches like Pericles’ Funeral Oration. One can then break down a work, paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence, to examine how an author has achieved his purpose within the constraints of the specific circumstantiae.
This is certainly a useful form of critical analysis, but in traditional, premodern education it was an advanced skill, to be practiced after a student had learned grammar and read some simple texts. In the Latin Middle Age this often meant memorizing the octo auctores morales, the “eight moral authors” including verse collections like the Distichs of Cato and the Fables of Avienus. Rhetorical analysis was saved for later stages in students’ education, when they were reading more advanced texts such as the orations of Cicero.
Then there is the malign sort of “critical reading,” modeled by modern Marxists and intellectuals shaped by the Marxist tradition. This sort of reading involves “seeing through” the text, taking its surface meaning and filtering it through Marxist “critique,” so that its real meaning, its hidden ideological intention, is exposed. This is a meaning of which the author of the text may or may not be aware. An author may be intentionally cloaking his real intentions, like political consultants using language with more positive connotations to sell unpopular policies. A policy might be described as “investing in the future” rather than “raising taxes,” for example. Or a writer might be considered so sunken in ideological blindness that he or she is unaware of the real meaning of what they are writing. An author like Edmund Burke, for example, might be unaware that in attacking the French Revolution he is merely promoting the class interests of landowners and the bourgeoisie.
Words like “merely” often do a lot of work in “critique” of this kind. They underline the reductive aims of the interpreter, his intention to rip away or expose the naked, unspoken socio-economic interests of the writer. In French literary theory of the 1960s this was called “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” meant to describe the école de soupçon. The “school of suspicion” included writers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Such writers tried to teach readers to cultivate distrust towards the “surface” meaning of a text, which might hide shameful or discreditable motives beneath its surface. Practicing the hermeneutics of suspicion upon its canonical texts is one reason why the West has fallen into its present state of self-hatred.
Both benign and malign forms of critical reading are for advanced students who are already presumed to be highly literate. But what of the kind of reading that goes on in classical schools, where middle school or high school students are coming to grips for the first time with serious authors? How should they practice reading the classics, and with what frame of mind? Is it enough to learn a text at the level of grammar and vocabulary? Cultural context is important, of course, and one of the things Allen Guelzo and I are trying to teach via The Golden Thread is the value of history for understanding great works of literature and art. But I’m talking here about the proper attitude of mind when actually sitting down with, say, Sophocles’ Antigone or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and trying to take in its meaning.
For this early stage in a young person’s life as a reader, I believe Western pedagogy has something to learn from China’s Confucian tradition. A great commentator on Confucius, the neo-Confucian writer Zhu Xi, who lived in the 12th century, taught that young scholars had to learn to read in a particular way he called jìng
(敬), often translated as “reverential attention.” This mode of reading is essentially the dead opposite of “critical reading” of the marxisante type.
To read with jìng means more than just an attitude of mind. It means sitting up straight in your chair and paying attention (shades of Jordan Peterson!), but also holding your body in the dignified way you would adopt when coming before a magistrate or conducting a ritual. You should keep your mouth shut, your hands composed, and face the book head-on or with eyes slightly downcast. The posture required by jìng supports the virtues necessary for deep, transformative reading.
The reading virtues include reverential attention (or focus), carefulness, patience, and humility. Humility implies respect for the authority of the author and recognition of one’s own limitations. Reverence is the proper attitude for someone encountering things above one’s own capacity to understand—objects of wonder and awe. Haste should be avoided; extraneous biases towards the text—contemporary associations, for example—should be set aside. The reading virtues do not, as might be thought, induce passivity but rather an active willingness to wait for the text to speak to you. In particular, one should be humbly attentive to how the book can improve one’s own moral condition or spiritual insight. The deep goal of jìng reading is moral self-cultivation.
Memorization and copying of key passages in a beautiful script is encouraged. One should avoid at this early stage, Zhu Xi advised, trying to impose one’s own interpretation on a text, especially by writing essays on it. Such exercises imply equality with the author—a challenge to the natural hierarchy that ranks (from top to bottom) the canonical author, one’s own teacher, and oneself as student. Subverting that order would amount to irreverence or hubris (to use the ancient Greek word). Listening to a teacher’s commentary and asking for clarification is more appropriate to students in schools.
Some readers might suppose that jìng reading would be an obstacle to the benign forms of critical reading that may properly be learned at the university level. I rather think the opposite is the case. Most forms of critical textual study—philological criticism, for example, or historical hermeneutics or jurisprudential reasoning—presuppose an ability to understand an author’s intention. That is precisely the skill taught by reverential attention. Moreover, in teaching graduate students over several decades I have not infrequently met with students with a great deal of what I call ‘brain noise.’ This normally comes from students having acquired a strong forma mentis from the study of some powerful, counter-intuitive doctrine such as Hegelianism, Marxism, or Jungian psychology. Their particular habit of mind makes it difficult for them to take in other ways of thinking. When I listen to them trying to summarize or explain, say, the metaphysics of Aristotle, I’m aware of the wheels of their mind turning, trying to make sense of the text in terms of their own prepossessions. Perhaps if they had practiced jìng reading in a classical middle or high school they might be readier to learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophies.