Education: Mortimer Adler: A Philosopher for Everyman

In assessing the perpetual thinking machine that goes by the name of Mortimer Adler, Harvard Sociologist David Riesman says, “There is something marvelously relentless about him.” Both the marvel and the relentlessness shine through in Adler’s newly published Ten Philosophical Mistakes (Macmillan; $12.95), which takes to task a Who’s Who of the major philosophers since Thomas Aquinas. In the process, the book tells the rest of the world not only what to think but also why it should follow the latest gospel according to Mortimer.

A man of sweeping intellectual interests and no visible pedagogic doubts, Adler spun out Ten Philosophical Mistakes in 15 mornings of whirlwind writing. “Writing is the easy part,” he explains. “It’s the thinking beforehand that takes time.” Many of Adler’s 33 previous books were written just as quickly, and their titles and tone are no less imperative. A sampling: How to Think About War and Peace, Reforming Education, How to Read a Book, How to Think About God.

Writing is not the half of what the unquenchable Adler, 82, manages to do. A former professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, he recently completed a worldwide junket to promote the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he is editorial board chairman. He was a founder of Britannica’s 54- volume Great Books of the Western World, and personally wrote every one of the 5,000- to 10,000-word essays defining the 102 Great Ideas that constitute the heart of a prodigious index to the Great Books. In addition, he started and still directs the Institute for Philosophical Research, which is devoted to publishing learned tracts. He passionately pushes his Paideia program, an experimental educational system that is imbuing selected elementary and high schools in Atlanta, Oakland and Chicago with a rigorous curriculum taught in part by the Socratic method. Adler’s prescription for such sustained productivity: “I take almost no exercise, and I work harder every year than the year before.”

Adler has made a point of pondering and whacking at the errors of his chosen victims in modern philosophy for more than 50 years. As a brash undergraduate at Columbia, he once confronted the august philosopher John Dewey so sharply on a theological issue that the great man stormed from the room growling, “Nobody is going to tell me how to love God.” In Ten Philosophical Mistakes Adler makes only an occasional swipe at Dewey and leaves God pretty much alone. But he takes on Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx and a passel of other post-16th century thinkers, whose common and “disastrous” mistake, says Adler, was to invent new kinds of wisdom without building on the ancient truths. “The modern philosophers start as if they had no predecessors,” he scolds.

Adler’s personal hero-philosopher is Aristotle, whose Ethics Adler has read no fewer than 25 times. While conceding advances in logic, political theory and the philosophy of science, Adler argues that, except for Aquinas’ massive Summa Theologiae, barely an ethical or metaphysical yard has been gained in all the centuries since Aristotle. He is particularly hard on the empiricists, notably Locke. According to Adler, Locke’s worst error was to posit that ideas are what each individual consciously experiences and since different individuals’ experiences inevitably vary, ideas also vary. Adler finds such notions “repugnant to reason.” He calls up the Thomistic view, derived from Aristotle, that ideas are the basic concepts, the universal truths by which we understand experiences. Those truths are immutable. Otherwise, mankind would have no common base of understanding nor any common denominators such as good and justice, or, indeed, truth. Adler believes uncompromisingly in those denominators.

He takes on Hobbes, Hume and others for asserting that the human mind fundamentally is a sensory organ, rather than an instrument that can also intellectualize. He dismasts Darwin for categorizing man as simply an animal with higher sensory perceptions, rather than an organism that, alone among living creations, can conceive such abstractions as right and wrong. Adler is equally hard on determinists like Marx on grounds that if all consequences are predetermined, then no man can be held responsible for his acts.

Throughout the book, Adler persistently pulls both modern philosophy and the reader back to immutable human rights and moral responsibilities as defined in classic philosophy. He has no patience with any suggestion that these truths may be simply old opinions. “If philosophy were mere opinion,” he writes, “there would be no philosophical mistakes.” The fact that his own Great Books program at Britannica is chockablock with the works of Locke, Hume, Darwin and the others is, to Adler, no mistake at all. “It is important to know errors,” he says. “A full understanding of truth is to understand the errors it corrects.”

Adler’s one reservation about his latest work is that it presents only ten major mistakes. There are, he says, at least 18. But Adler wants to reach a mass audience, and 18 mistakes would have taken up too many pages. Says he: “I try to write a 200-page book that costs about $12. I hate $18 books.” Adler knows that with such an approach he can expect to be roundly ignored in philosophical journals, an expectation that is dryly confirmed by Kenneth Seeskin, philosophy chairman at Northwestern. Says Seeskin: “Professional philosophers as a rule don’t read Adler’s work.”

No matter. Adler’s greatest pleasure is in reaching ordinary people, prodding what he believes to be the innate desire to learn. Proudly, he shows a recent letter from David Call, a journeyman plumber in Utah: “I am writing on behalf of a group of construction workers (mostly plumbers!),” notes Call, “who have finally found a teacher worth listening to. We have been studying your books for over a year now and have put together a sizable library of your writings. We may be plumbers during the day, but at lunch time and at night and on weekends, we are philosophers at large.” Beams Adler, whose 1977 autobiography was proudly titled Philosopher at Large: “I’ve finally lived long enough to have a general audience.”