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Philosophy:

Mortimer Adler: 1902-2001

The Day Philosophy Died

Friday June 29 8:27 AM ET

Philosopher, Reformer Adler Dies

By F.N. D'ALESSIO, Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - Philosopher and education reformer Mortimer J. Adler, who sought to bring intellectualism to the general public with the Great Books program, his own best-selling books and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has died. He was 98.

The former Chicagoan died Thursday at his home in San Mateo, Calif.

As an author and editor, Adler built a publishing empire on an unlikely foundation: the philosophic system of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.

That system influenced his work as compiler of the Great Books of the Western World and as editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Earlier, in the 1930s, it was the underlying theme of the educational reforms Adler and his colleagues carried out at the University of Chicago under the leadership of then-president Robert Maynard Hutchins.

In an age of relativism and multiculturalism, Adler championed what he viewed as universal values and the Western tradition. His heroes - Aristotle, Aquinas, John Locke and John Stuart Mill - were assailed as irrelevant by student activists in the 1960s and subjected to "politically correct'' attack in later decades.

But Adler said: "You can't be a philosopher and an activist. If you do, you get all mixed up.''

While many modern philosophers aimed their teaching at graduate students and readers of specialized journals, Adler addressed the general public. The Great Books Foundation he and Hutchins established in 1946 oversaw groups in thousands of communities, offering people the opportunity to read and discuss classic works of literature.

Discussion of the books is a big part of the learning process, he stressed, saying, "Solitary reading is as horrible as solitary drinking.''

Adler also wrote or co-wrote more than 45 books. Several, including the 1940 How to Read a Book, became best sellers.

"Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never write books for my fellow professors to read,'' Adler said. ``I have no interest in the academic audience at all. I'm interested in Joe Doakes. A general audience can read any book I write - and they do.''

He thought it preposterous that people could ever consider their education as finished, saying adults should go on learning forever.

"Our minds, unlike our bodies, are able to grow and develop until death overtakes us,'' he said.

A Columbia University graduate, Adler had been a protege of Professor John Erskine, pioneer of the Great Books concept, and he helped teach seminars there until 1929, when Hutchins summoned him to the University of Chicago.

The revolution in undergraduate teaching launched by Hutchins, Adler and their colleagues at Chicago challenged accepted modern educational theory. It stressed a core curriculum that all students must study.

Adler left the university in 1952 to direct the Institute for Philosophical Research, but he retained his connection with Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In that year, the first edition of Britannica's Great Books of the Western World appeared. It incorporated the Syntopicon, Adler's codification of 102 "great ideas'' culled from the Great Books' 74 authors.

He also coordinated production of The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, which appeared in 1974, when he became chairman of Britannica's board of editors.

The short, stocky Adler did not fit the popular image of a philosopher.

A New York native, he dropped out of high school at age 14 after being suspended from the school newspaper.

Aspiring to be a journalist, Adler became an assistant at a newspaper and enrolled in night courses at Columbia University. There, he discovered the writings of great thinkers such as Mill and Socrates and enrolled at Columbia full time.

At his 80th birthday party, Adler offered some rules for success and happiness. "Never work more than seven days a week or 12 hours a day, and sometimes a little less. To grow younger with the years, work harder as you get older.'' Adler also advised his guests: "Never exercise - as for dieting, eat only the most delicious calories.''

Adler's first marriage ended in divorce; his second wife, Caroline, died in 1998. He is survived by sons Douglas, Philip, Mark and Michael.

June 28, 2001, National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Mortimer Adler left school at 15 to work as a secretary to the editor of
the New York Sun. Two years later he read Plato, and resolved to become a
philosopher.

That kind of thing doesn't happen very often; on the other hand phenomena
like Mortimer Adler don't happen very often. There was nothing in the world
he did not think about and seek to memorialize in his own writings. He
teamed up with Robert Hutchins, who was president of the University of
Chicago, and took on the creation of a library of great books. For the very
idea of this there were those who scorned him, but on trivial grounds, when
you come down to it. There was a seminar in Washington in 1990 at which a
dozen resplendent scholars were assembled to give their opinions of a
second version of the Great Books. Several had been added (Twain, Balzac),
one or two dropped (Fielding, Sterne). Gertrude Himmelfarb wanted to know
why there wasn't a book in the collection by Burke. Dr. Adler answered that
Burke hadn't ever written a book. 

That sounded tricky, but it wasn't, really: A formalistic point can have formal 
standing, and Adler was insisting that the Great Books had to be books in 
the first instance, and even a collection of Burke's speeches didn't make 
a book out of them. And the sniping went on.

What Adler did, with his staff and his coadjutor Hutchins, was to reprint
443 Great Books in a 54-volume set. But hold on a minute, that wasn't all.
He contributed what he called a "syntopicon." This took a 100-odd "great
ideas" and set out to identify the treatment of them in the Great Books.

The ideas (alphabetically, angel was the first, world the last) were
treated, or not treated, by Homer, the first Great Book, on over to Freud,
the latest Great Book. The syntopicon introduced each idea with a
10,000-word essay, followed by an outline of topics. Under angels: "1.
Inferior deities or demi-gods in polytheistic religion," ending with, "8.
Criticism and satire with respect to the belief in angels and demons;"
followed by 17 pages giving the volume, and where in it the subtopics
appeared.

A mind-numbing enterprise insufficiently celebrated for its scope,
ambition, and utility. But Adler suffered from the constancy of his belief
that philosophy oughtn't to appeal only to the specialists. Adler wanted
more people, at age 17, to experience Plato, and he didn't trivialize Plato
but tried in a scholarly way with unscholarly enthusiasm to sing out the
joys of following Plato around.

WFB: You begin by reaching a very interesting conclusion [in your book, How
to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th Century Pagan], which I would like
to hear you dilate on, namely that it doesn't really matter whether there
was a prime mover [i.e., a force that created the first earthly thing].

Adler: That, it seems to me, is terribly important. That is, if one begins
by assuming that the world started at some time -- there was a time when
there was nothing and the world began.

WFB: You're making a temporal point?

Adler: That's right. A temporal point. Then one has begged the question
because one has assumed God's existence.

WFB: Why?

Adler: Because if anything comes into existence out of nothing, it needs a
cause, and that cause has to be the -- my word for that cause -- is
exnihilation [The creation of something from nothing.]

WFB: Why can't that cause be chemical?

Adler: Because all of our natural science, which I think is reliable,
teaches us that the causes in nature do nothing but cause change. There is
no natural cause that is the cause of existence or being.

Adler would go on in that way, talking as offhandedly as if conversing with
a neighbor in a bus seat, passing the time of day. He did a new edition of
the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was the dogged philosopher if ever there
was one, an exuberant practitioner of philosophy, ambitious proponent of
the extraordinary proposition that human beings need to think even as they
need bread and water, and that philosophy is the great granary of mankind.

It is curious that the large obituary in the New York Times, by William
Grimes, neglected to mention that Mortimer Adler, doctor of psychology and
law and philosophy, found himself in later years believing in the premises
of Christianity and, toward the end, in the mandate of the Roman Catholic
Church. Religious belief is unfashionable in metropolitan intellectual
circles, but on that subject, Mortimer Adler could have written 20 books,
and in fact did.

August 8, 2001

INSIGHT Magazine, by John Berlau

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GREAT IDEAS?

Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler recently passed away, but his legacy lives on in the Great Books programs he inspired and succeeded in establishing across the nation.

Mortimer J. Adler died in late June at the age of 98. Born in 1902, he was a philosopher and educator who lived through almost every year of the 20th century. But he was not a man of that century, at least not in establishment academic circles.

From the 1920s until his death, Adler most often was a voice in the wilderness crying out against educational trends he saw as destructive. He fought progressive education's child-centered academic curriculum and vocation-centered training. Instead he championed general education in the classics. At a time when moral relativism has become dominant, Adler proclaimed that there still were universal moral truths to be found in the works of Plato and Aristotle.

Academics heaped scorn on him for writing about philosophy in simple terms for the masses in books with titles such as Ten Philosophical Mistakes and Six Great Ideas and Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy. He would maintain throughout his life that "philosophy is everybody's business."

Adler was dubbed "the Lawrence Welk of the philosophy trade" by one critic. Dwight MacDonald of the New Yorker derisively referred to Adler's work as "The Handy Key to Kulture." In the 1990s, when Adler and his colleagues released a revised edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, he was attacked viciously because the series contained few works by women and none from blacks. Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates blasted the Great Books for showing "profound disrespect for the intellectual capacities of people of color -- red, brown or yellow."

Adler calmly explained that the authors were chosen not because they were "dead white males" but because their work had stood the test of time. He noted that the guidebook for the series recommended many "good books" by blacks and women, as well as works by white male authors that didn't make the cut. But a "Great Book" must be "relevant to human problems in every century, not just germane to current  20th century problems," Adler wrote. "The educational purpose of the Great Books is not to study Western civilization," Adler explained in the 1970s. "Its aim is not to acquire knowledge of historical facts. It is rather to understand the great ideas."

Even in death, Adler still may be an outcast in academia, but he inspired legions of followers who have formed colleges, homeschooling cooperatives and Great Books discussion groups in major cities based on his ideas about education. And although his political positions often were of the left – he once advocated socialism and world government -some of his biggest champions today come from the political right.

"The Great Books are alive and well as a powerful approach to education," Stephen Balch, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, a group that pushes for a core curriculum of Western classics, tells Insight. "It's alive and well in large part because of his efforts as the architect of this kind of grand design for education. Those who favor an education in the service of civilization are in his debt for all the work he did over the years to establish the Great Books model and to bring the Great Books to the American population generally, not just those at colleges and universities. He certainly wanted as many people to read the Great Books as possible, based on a belief that they did speak to everybody."

Longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly credits Adler with championing an education in Western classics to everyone, against the "progressive" educators who thought the classics were irrelevant to many students. Progressive educator John Dewey "didn't believe in individuals excelling in knowledge," Schlafly tells Insight. "He believed that the purpose of education was to socialize people and have them do what they're told, and Adler was a good counterbalance to that."

In the early 1980s, Adler and his colleagues set forth a detailed program of primary schooling called Paideia, which is the Greek word for the upbringing of children. In his book The Paideia Proposal, Adler proposed that the education for all children "must be general and liberal" and "nonspecialized and nonvocational," no matter the perceived intellectual capacity of the child. Using milk containers as an analogy, he said "the half-pint container as well as the gallon container should be filled to the brim with the same quality of substance -- cream of the highest attainable quality for all, not skimmed milk for some and cream for others." Adler also emphasized that as much as possible the great works should be taught in the Socratic method, in which children discuss what they have read, rather than as a top-down lecture.

Today, the Paideia Group Inc. consults with schools wanting to set up programs. Adler, who was honorary chairman, sometimes would go in and lead the children of participating schools in discussions. "I have such wonderful letters from students who have been in the seminars thanking Mortimer for what it has done for their lives," Paideia Group President Patricia Weiss tells Insight.

The Paideia Group concentrates on public schools, Weiss says, because Adler was such a strong advocate of universal public education. Still, she says, public schools often are resistant to change. She hopes that charter schools will give teachers and parents more flexibility to implement Paideia.

Meanwhile, the Great Books curriculum really is taking off in homeschooling. Patrick Carmack, who homeschools his children in Oklahoma, cofounded the Great Books Academy after reading Adler's books on education in 1999. The program assigns Great Books for participating children to read and holds online Socratic discussion groups in the style that Adler proposed. The directors met with Adler in 2000, and his longtime colleague Max Weismann serves as chairman. Carmack says the curriculum is being used by parents in every state and internationally, and he expects 4,000 homeschoolers to be enrolled in the next two years.

The Angelicum Academy puts forth a similar Great Books

homeschooling program but with more emphasis on Catholic works.

At the college level, St. John's College offers a four-year nonelective Great Books program that Adler helped design in the 1930s. The college, which has campuses in Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe, N.M., uses no textbooks, at Adler's prompting. The only texts are the primary materials that students read and discuss. Textbooks merely are "catalogs of  information" that "essentially are undiscussable," Adler wrote.

At Wright College, a community college in Chicago, Bruce Gans started a Great Books elective course in which one-fifth of the student body now has enrolled. Gans faced objections from other faculty that works by "dead white males" wouldn't go over well with their mostly black and Hispanic students going to school while working. But he tells Insight that every year he gets letters and notes on the final exams from such students saying how much reading the great works has bettered their lives.

Adler maintained that schooling did not make one educated; it merely prepared students for a life of learning. "No one can be an educated person, while immature," Adler wrote in The Paideia Proposal. "Only through the trials of adult life, only with the range and depth of experience that makes for maturity, can human beings become educated persons." …

Young people "certainly cannot become mature as long as they remain in school; on the contrary, they suffer from prolonged adolescence," Adler wrote in his autobiography Philosopher At Large. "That is a pathological condition which can be prevented only by getting the young out of school as soon after the onset of puberty as possible."

This way, Adler said, universities would be "populated with students who return to educational institutions because they have a genuine desire for further formal study instead of students who occupy space in our higher institutions as the result of social pressures."

Regardless of whether a person went to college, Adler maintained that lifelong learning was essential for personal happiness. Adler defined happiness as Aristotle did, not as instant pleasures but the joy and satisfaction that comes from living a virtuous life. He never stopped learning and wrote more than 20 books after he turned 70. "The loss of immediate or short-term memory that inevitably accompanies advancing years in no way diminishes the power of creative, analytic and reflective thought," Adler wrote in his second autobiography, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, published when he was 89.

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