Public Address (A Speech) Reviewed: “But What Is A Book?  An Artifact Which Only Exists When It Is Being Read and Understood.”  Given by James V. Schall, Professor, Department of Government, Georgetown University.  Delivered at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, May 4, 2012.

Publication Source: Vital Speeches of the Day, July 12, 2012, Vol. 78 Issue 7, pp. 243-247.  Check with your local educational institution or public library on how to get a copy of the speech through their research databases; or use your access privileges from your school or local library to their research databases to find the article.

Subjects: The Nature of Books, and Books and Reading

Background: The Reverend James V. Schall SJ (1928 – 2019) was an American Jesuit Roman Catholic priest, teacher, writer, and philosopher.  He was Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and retired in December 2012.  He was a prolific author and public speaker.

Schall describes his speech as a lecture, which is a form of presentation he believes brings bearing on the subject matter to be presented by being substantial in its written form and then substantial in its being spoken.ⁱ  This makes his lecture a learned presentation, with an emphasis towards classical learning.  He presents his learning in the spirit of sharing and without pedantry.  And, though classical works are emphasized, Schall states that not all of the important books to read are the great books, or the classics.ⁱⁱ   And, in fact, he cites other books in his lecture that are mystery novels and a Peanuts cartoon. 

I have read Schall’s lecture a number of times and I learn more about what he is saying with each rereading.  Schall uses a variety of elements (i.e. source materials and observations) in his lecture and brings these elements together in a tour de force closing for his lecture.  In my review of Schall’s lecture, I cannot cover all the elements he used in his lecture, nor can I replicate the closing of his lecture.  I will focus my review on the core source material of Schall’s lecture, which are three quotes he uses to define the nature of a book.  I suggest you read his lecture to see what an accomplishment his lecture is.

INTRODUCTION

The subject matter of James Schall’s lecture is the question of, What Is A Book.  The emphasis is on the italicized word “is” and Schall conducts a philosophical inquiry into what is the essence of a book that makes it a book and not some other object.  He anchors his inquiry with three quotations: one from Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, English writer); one from Robert Sokolowski (American philosopher and Roman Catholic priest); and one from Saint Augustine (354-430, Christian philosopher of Classical Antiquity).  I am organizing my review of Schall’s lecture as follows:

1.  Preliminary Matters Setting The Dimensions Of James Schall’s Inquiry Into What Is A BookA.  What Shapes A Book Is That It Is A Human Product

   B.  What A Philosophical Inquiry Is

2. The Quote From Robert Sokolowski:  A Book Is Constructed To Be Intelligible
3.  The Quote From Samuel Johnson:  A Book Leads a Person to Knowledge of the Truth
4.  The Quote From Saint Augustine:  A Book Inspires Change in a Person
5. Summing Up What a Book Is

I. Preliminary Matters Setting The Dimensions Of James Schall’s Inquiry Into What Is A Book

A. What Shapes a Book Is that It Is A Human Product

What shapes a book -gives a book its dimensions- is that a book is a significant human product that a person relates to intellectually and emotionally when reading.  The two dimensions are defined as follows:

• First, a book is an artifact produced by the human mind and human ingenuity.ⁱⁱⁱ  To be produced a book requires an author “…who wants to say something to others in an organized, coherent form.”^iv  Then required are mechanical/technological processes putting a book into a format, whether electronic or physical, to be accessible to others to read.
• Second, though a book exists as a product of the intellect, it also a product that generates feelings.  Schall states that “…some books move our souls. We cannot forget them ”^v  To demonstrate this Schall uses a Peanuts carton in which Charlie Brown is reading to Schroeder about Ludwig van Beethoven (German Composer, 1770-1827) conducting the first public performance of his Ninth Symphony in 1824.  When the symphony performance ends, Beethoven has his back to the audience and, because of his deafness, he cannot hear the standing ovation of the audience.  A female singer in the chorus, with tears in her eyes, leads Beethoven to the front of the stage to see the cheering audience.  Schroeder is touched by the final scene and weeps.  Schall states, “Books even reading from them out loud, can do this to us, they can put us there where we are not. Like Schroeder we too are tempted to weep on hearing such as passage.”

B. What A Philosophical Inquiry Is

Schall states that a philosophical inquiry seeks “to distinguish” one thing from another.^vi  To distinguish is to determine the differences and similarities between things, which in turn determines what things are and are not.  Schall asserts that the human mind does not come into full accord of itself until it can make distinctions:

“The human mind becomes fully what it is when it, as it were, is full of understood distinctions, fully aware of the differences and similarities of things.  All things that exist simply are.  Their ‘are-ness’ manifests itself in what they do.  What they do flows from what they are, ‘Agere sequitur esse,’ as the classical principle went.  The action of a thing flows from what it is.”^vii

In setting the dimensions of a book and in his defining his approach as a philosophical inquiry, Schall is prompting us to see that a book is a living thing, being the product of the human mind and engaging human thoughts and feelings.  The author of a book and the reader of a book both possess intellects and feelings, and in the reading of a book the writer and reader form a reciprocal relationship to understand each other that determines a book’s existence and effect.  The subtitle to Schall’s lecture reveals this: “An Artifact Which Only Exists When It Is Being Read And Understood.” This is the best summary sentence of what Schall is seeking to achieve in his lecture.  In the quotes that follow, Schall singles outs in each quote an essence, or basic property, that makes a book exist when it is being read and understood.

II.  The Quote From Robert Sokolowski: A Book Is Constructed to be Intelligible

[Quote from Robert Sokolowski (From his book, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions, 1992): “Someone who denies there is anything essential in things would have to assert that there is really no difference between a scatterbrained, loose, associative account of a topic, and an account in which the thing is effectively presented.  He would have to say there is no difference between a speech in which the speaker never gets to the point and one in which the point is clearly made.  No one can really deny that such differences exits.”]

Robert Sokowloski’s quote gives attention to a person who maintains that there is no essential differences between things.  Schall states such a person “…denies that we can know anything essential from things.  No order is found in reason or in things themselves.”^viii

Soklowski tests such a person’s claim by questioning whether there is a difference between a disorganized and unclear presentation and an organized and clear presentation.  Could people really not distinguish between the two presentations and consider them to be the same thing?  The answer is no. People can compare and judge the difference between a presentation that has random thoughts unconnected to one another not making a point from a presentation that has ordered thoughts connected to one another making a point.  To quote Schall: “…we can detect order and disorder in what is described [presented].  Otherwise, we would not be able to distinguish one thing from another.  Nothing we say would have any meaning.  There would be no sense in speaking to anyone of anything.”^ix

Applying that there is distinction between an ordered and unordered presentation yields one essential property of a book:  a book orders its ideas so they can be understood.  Schall terms the ordering of the ideas in a book as a book’s “intelligibility”:  the author has structured a book’s ideas so that the reader can understand and evaluate them when reading the author’s book.  Intelligibility is what distinguishes a book from another object, and therefore is part of the essence of a book’s existence.

III.  The Quote From Samuel Johnson: A Book Leads a Person to Knowledge of the Truth

[Ouote from Samuel Johnson (From the book Boswell’s Life of Johnson, by James Boswell): “Dr. Johnson advised me to-day, to have as many books about me as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon which I had a desire for instruction at the time.  ‘What you read then (said he,) you will remember, but if you have not a book immediately ready, and the subject moulds in your mind, it is a chance if you again have a desire to study it.’  He added, ‘If a man never has an eager desire for instruction, he should prescribe a task for himself.  But it is better when a man reads from immediate inclination.’”]

The important part of Samuel Johnson’s quote to Schall is that there is an expectation, or “immediate inclination”, that should lead one to read a book.  Schall elucidates this immediate inclination as a person seeking to gain knowledge about a thing and this immediate inclination to gain knowledge about a thing has two goals: a lesser goal and a greater goal.

The lesser goal in gaining knowledge is acquiring facts about a thing (a thing being an object, a subject, etc.).  Facts give a person more information about a thing, but knowing and retaining the facts about a thing does not in large part increase a person’s overall knowledge of a thing.  A person’s mind and memory contain much more than facts in understanding what a thing is.  Because of this, Schall eliminates the lesser a goal of seeking knowledge as the real meaning of Johnson’s quote.

The greater goal of gaining knowledge is for a person to know the truth about a thing.  This is to know what a thing is about:  why it is what it is; what are the connection of its facts that makes it what it is; and the similarities and dissimilarities it has to other things-what distinguishes it from other things.  Schall states that a person knowing the truth about a thing relies on their intending to bridge the gap between not knowing the truth and knowing the truth about a thing.  A person achieving knowing the truth about a thing achieves as a rule pleasure by having a greater understanding of what the thing is. Using the Aristotelian notion of “capex ominium,” and Johnson’s quote about intending to gain knowledge about things, Schall states:

“The human mind as such, as Aristotle tells us, is capax ominium, a capacity or power to know all things.  This means primarily knowing the relations of things one to another.  All things are knowable.  Each is this thing, not that.  We distinguish.  The very act of knowing is one of wonder and contemplation that something is.  We just want to know.  Yet, we have to ‘intend.’  We have to be gripped by the unsettlement of not knowing and the corresponding pleasure of knowing.  Like all pleasures, the pleasure of knowing follows on and is intrinsic to the act of knowing, which is not as such simply pleasure.  Some things we want to know, as Aristotle told us, even if they are painful.”^x

What distinguishes a book and is an essential part of a book’s existence is that a book leads the reader to a greater knowledge of the truth about the subject matter that the author presents.  Further, the reader judges the truth or falsity of the author’s ideas given in a book.  To judge the truth and falsity of a book’s ideas results from the intelligibility of the author’s ordering of their ideas about the subject matter being written about.^xi

IV. The Quote From Saint Augustine: A Book Inspires Change in a Person

[From Saint Augustine’s book, Confessions: “At the time…the only thing that pleased me in Cicero’s book (the lost Hortensius) was his advice not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly.”]

Aristotle’s notion of the mind seeking out the knowledge of all things is seeing people as rational beings using their intellects.  People also experience living through their emotions, or feelings, and can be inspired by ideals to understand and to live by that can change them.  Reading a book is an avenue to finding ideals that can lead people to personal change.  Schall gives Saint Augustine’s quote as proof of Augustine’s personal change from reading a book.

Augustine was precocious young man about eighteen or nineteen years old.  He was living in a small town in present day Algeria and was teaching at a school in a nearby town.  During this time he read the philosophical dialogue the Hortensius, or On Philosophy, (the work was later lost to history, or is no longer extant), by Marcus Tallius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC, Roman statesman and philosopher). From reading Cicero’s book, Augustine was inspired by the ideal of becoming a philosopher and this changed him personally.  He pursued with determination becoming a philosopher and became a great philosopher, producing ideas that changed and influenced world history.

Schall connects Augustine’s reading Cicero’s work to Johnson’s quote of reading a book “from immediate inclination”, further elucidating the phrase to mean that a person is moved emotionally by their reading:

“I bring this scene [Augustine reading Cicero] up here because of Samuel Johnson’s notion that we should read ‘from immediate inclination,’ that is that we are moved by what we read.  When Augustine put down his copy of the Hortensius, some four hundred years after it was written, he, Augustine, decided he wanted to be a philosopher…. The world would be changed because Augustine read a book and wanted thence to be a philosopher.  To be sure, in the beginning he was a very bad philosopher.  But he was also brilliant and eventually able to think out of bad philosophy to explicate things on the reading of which we are still mostly in awe.”^xii

Augment the above quote with the following:  the ideas left by men and women in their books continue to burn and give light through time and bequeath a heritage to understand and live by.  Take again the particular case of Augustine.  He was inspired as a young man in about 372 AD to become philosopher by reading Cicero’s work that was written about 400 years early (45 BC).  Augustine became a great philosopher and, in his 50s, tells in his work Confessions of his experience of reading Cicero.  Fifteen hundred years after Augustine wrote Confessions, Schall, as a professor in college, assigns Confessions as an important work of thought and philosophy to a class he is teaching.  Augustine heeded the legacy of Cicero and Schall heeded the legacy of Augustine and Cicero.

What distinguishes a book and is part of the essence of a book is that it can inspire a person -moves a person- to understand and achieve ideals because a book can transmit a legacy of thought through time that is to be understood and to be lived by.  Schall would state this, using the building blocks already in place about the essence of a book, as:  “A book is something that can change the world because it records the ideas of men.  Ideas that can be tested for coherence and incoherence, truth and falsity because of the order of things.”^xiii

V. Summing Up Of What a Book Is

Schall sums up the essence of a book in the closing of his lecture as follows:

“A book is an artifact which really exists when it is being read and understood.  The book is the intelligibility we encounter when we understand and judge its truth… [books also contain] the signs of our humanity.  These signs are preserved for us in books that we read and tell others about because we just cannot keep what is true or moving… to ourselves.  Ultimately this is what a book is.^xiv

This is to say that a book lives when it is opened and read by a reader because it has these essential properties:

• A book is intelligible-it can be understood by the reader.  A book has a continuity in its structure that connects its ideas so they can be grasped by the reader.
• Gaining knowledge about the truth of a thing from a book.  Flowing from a book’s intelligibility is the primary goal of the reader to gain knowledge about the truth of a thing.  And in determining the truth of a thing, or matter, a reader judges the truth or falsity of a book’s idea’s as presented by the author in their book.
• A book transmits the heritage of humankind over time to understand to live by.  A person is led by “immediate inclination” (Johnson’s quote) to read a book for the continuing heritage of ideas and ideals it contains.  In order to understand the ideas and ideals a book contains, the reader evaluates the orderly structure of the ideas, or thoughts, given a book and then judges the truth or falsity of the ideas given in a book .  Further a book has a magnitude in its effect:  it can inspire, or emotionally move, a person to new ideals to understand and live by.  It is part of people’s humanity to feel and to seek fulfillment as with Augustine becoming a philosopher, or as with Schroeder who recognizes the poignancy of the story about Beethoven, conducting while deaf and well over 100 years ago his Ninth Symphony, one of the greatest classical symphonies ever composed.  And it is part of our humanity to communicate about what is true and moving in what we have read to other people that continues the cumulative heritage of humankind.

FOOTNOTES: