How to Read the Classics: "Critical Reading" or "Respectful Attention"?
- Mar 13
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 13
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...