“Reading generously.”

I love the turn of phrase as well as the principle, from PrawfsBlawg:

When I was a graduate student in comparative literature, I had the good fortune of having a popular, older professor in his last semester of teaching….

 This particular professor, himself no deconstructionist, took a moment at the end of his last class of his last semester of teaching, after a long and accomplished career, to urge us to do one thing as we went forward in our careers: read generously. We are taught from a very young age to read critically, of course, and he insisted that there is nothing wrong with this. But, he mourned, there is such a spirit of skepticism toward the text that now dominates our discourse. We are encouraged to take it to task, tear it apart, read it against the grain at every possible turn. There is a place for this, no doubt, he said, but don’t forget how to read with a spirit of generosity toward the text. Try to see what it is saying to you; accept it on its own terms, if only to strengthen your own critique. It is nearly impossible to learn anything from a text if you are not willing to read it in this spirit.

This has always stuck with me…. I think it not only makes us better critics and scholars to read generously – I would even venture to say that we owe it, almost as an ethical responsibility, to our colleagues and our readers. Is it possible not only to read critically but also, at the same time, to read generously?

We could listen generously too.  A commenter at that site adds:

I would think the norm (is?) should be a "principle of charity" as we say in philosophy (and rhetoric) prior to practice of any deconstructionist critique (I'm still not quite sure what that is) or a hermeneutic of suspicion. In philosophy at least, this can entail the reader's re-formulation of an argument in stronger terms than the original or in a way unanticipated by the author. One frequently finds, however, performance anxiety and unbridled ambition combining in a premature "critique" that ends up saying more about the critic than the work-at-hand. Of course some folks are just downright nasty or possessed of an irritable dispostion or bewitched by some belief or ideology that precludes the possibility of any charitable reading of a text (I've thought this applies to some extent, for example, to Frederick Crews' reading of Freud).

I would think the blogosphere could take a few lessons from the old prof or from the philosopher-commenter.

h/t Mr. Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy.