The Highest Level of Reading

For every educated adult—or even child—reading is an indispensable form of training. But not everyone is able to master the techniques of reading, much less the highest level of reading and its methods.

Syntopical reading, also called comparative reading, is the highest level of reading. It is the most complex and the most systematic of all forms of reading. Syntopical reading can be divided into the following levels and stages.

1. Preparation Stage

The levels of reading build progressively. This means that higher levels of reading include the lower levels that come before them, and syntopical reading is no exception. There are two requirements for doing syntopical reading. The first is this: a particular question never involves just one book. The second is this: you must know, in general, which books ought to be read. The second requirement is even harder to fulfill than the first.

At this point, the greatest difficulty is how to determine the “particular question” in order to choose the “books that ought to be read.” This is where the techniques of inspectional reading come in: examine all the books on the reading list, skim them, and read them superficially so that you can determine in the shortest possible time whether a given book will help with your topic of study. Then apply the techniques of analytical reading: among the many books related to these key terms, identify those that share a “common meaning.” Finally, move on to syntopical reading.

2. Reading Stage

Step 1: Find the relevant chapters

There is one very important point to keep in mind: in syntopical reading, the primary focus is you and the subject you care about—not the books themselves. Therefore, the first step, after inspectional reading, is to identify the chapters most relevant to your subject. These passages become the source of strength for your inquiry, even though they may be far removed from the author’s original purpose in writing. For this reason, at this stage, there is a different way of approaching agreement with the author.

Step 2: Lead the authors to an agreement with you

In analytical reading, we try to grasp the author’s main point in order to come to terms with the author. In syntopical reading, however, the material we work with comes from all kinds of different authors. At this point, it is up to you to establish the terms of agreement—to lead the authors into an agreement with you, rather than following them. The real difficulty in syntopical reading lies in forcing the authors to use your language. Put simply, syntopical reading is a large-scale act of translation. We are not translating from one language into another; rather, we are imposing a common vocabulary on many authors, whether or not they use the same language, whether or not they are concerned with the problem we want to solve, and whether or not they have created the ideal terminology for our purposes.

Step 3: Clarify the questions

Before this, we need to establish a set of impartial propositions to govern our questions. These questions often follow a pattern. First, they are usually concerned with the existence or nature of the concept or phenomenon under study. Second, they may concern how this phenomenon was discovered, or how this concept manifests itself. Finally, there are questions about the implications that follow from answering the earlier ones. The ability to raise questions and answer them precisely—through disciplined training—is the art of reading.

Step 4: Define the issues

A true issue arises only when two authors have a substantial understanding of the same question, yet give completely opposite or contradictory answers. And when many such issues revolve around a closely related set of questions, a “controversy” emerges. Usually, differences in answers arise because people hold different views of the subject; more often, however, they arise from differences in understanding.

Step 5: Analyze the discussion

As far as discoverable truth is concerned, and as far as the answers to the questions we can find are concerned, it is grounded less in any particular set of propositions or claims than in the discussion itself, clearly ordered. Therefore, to make everything clearer, we must ask questions in a definite sequence and be able to recognize why that sequence matters. We must explain the different answers to these questions and the reasons for them, and we must also be able to find, in the books we have examined, the evidence that supports classifying the answers in this way.