Mortimer Adler Totally Explained

Everything about Mortimer J Adler totally explained

Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American Aristotelian philosopher and author. He was born in New York City, the son of an immigrant jewelry salesman. He dropped out of school at 14 years of age and went to work as a secretary and copy boy at the New York Sun, hoping to become a journalist. After a year, he took night classes at Columbia University to improve his writing. It was there that he became interested, after reading the autobiography of the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill, in the great philosophers and thinkers of Western civilization. Adler was driven to continue his reading after learning that Mill had read Plato when he was only five years old, while he hadn't read him at all. A book by Plato was lent to him by a neighbor and Adler became hooked. He then decided to study philosophy at Columbia, where he received a scholarship. Because he hadn't learned to swim and was otherwise non-athletic, Adler was unable to fulfill the requirement then in place of swimming laps in the College pool and was therefore unable to complete the requirements for his bachelors degree. It didn't prevent him from enrolling in the graduate program, and Columbia awarded the B.A. to Adler in 1984 in recognition of his lifetime achievements.
Adler became an instructor at Columbia in the 1920s. He continued to participate in the Honors program (today the Core Curriculum) which had been started by John Erskine. This program focused on the reading of the great Classics. His tenure at the university included study with such eminent thinkers as Erskine and John Dewey, the famous American pragmatist philosopher. This kind of environment inspired his early interest in reading and the study of the "Great Books" of Western Civilization. He also promoted the idea that philosophy should be integrated with science, literature, and religion.

Biography

Dropping out of school at age 14, Adler became a copy boy for the New York Sun. Originally wanting to become a journalist, Adler took writing classes at night where he discovered the works of men he'd come to call heroes: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and others. He went on to study at Columbia University. Though he failed to pass the required swimming test for a bachelor's degree (a matter that was rectified when Columbia gave him an honorary degree in 1983), he stayed at the university and eventually received an instructorship and finally a doctorate in psychology. While at Columbia University, Adler wrote his first book: Dialectic, published in 1927.
   In 1930 Robert Hutchins, the newly appointed president of the University of Chicago, whom Adler had befriended some years earlier, arranged for him to be hired by Chicago’s law school as a professor of the philosophy of law; the philosophers at Chicago (who included James H. Tufts, E.A. Burtt, and George H. Mead) had "entertained grave doubts as to Mr. Adler's competence in the field [ofphilosophy]" and resisted Adler's appointment to the University's Department of Philosophy. Adler was the first "non-lawyer" to join the law school faculty. Adler also taught philosophy to business executives at the Aspen Institute.
   Adler and Hutchins went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in 1952. He also served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica since its inception in 1949, and succeeded Robert Hutchins as its chairman from 1974. As the director of editorial planning for the fifteenth edition of Britannica from 1965, he was instrumental in the major reorganization of knowledge embodied in that edition. He introduced the Paideia Proposal which resulted in his founding the Paideia Program, a grade-school curriculum centered around guided reading and discussion of difficult works (as judged for each grade). With Max Weismann, he founded The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas.
   Adler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works (such as How to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers. He was also an advocate of economic democracy and wrote an influential preface to Louis Kelso's The Capitalist Manifesto

. Adler was often aided in his thinking and writing by Arthur Rubin, an old friend from his Columbia undergraduate days. In his own words:

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never write books for my fellow professors to read. I've 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.

Adler took a long time in his own life to make up his mind about theological issues. He considered himself a pagan when he wrote How to Think About God in 1980. In Volume 51

of the Mars Hill Audio "Journal" (2001), Ken Myers includes his 1980 interview with Adler, conducted after How to Think About God was published. Myers reminisces, "During that interview, I asked him why he'd never embraced the Christian faith himself. He explained that while he'd been profoundly influenced by a number of Christian thinkers during his life, ...there were moral—not intellectual—obstacles to his conversion. He didn't explain any further."
Myers goes on to point out that Adler finally "surrendered to the Hound of Heaven" and "made a confession of faith and was baptized" only a few years after that interview. Offering insight into Adler's conversion, Myers quotes Adler from a subsequent 1990 article in Christianity magazine: "My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy." In 2000, Adler became a Roman Catholic.

Philosophy

Moral Philosophy

Adler referred to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as the “ethics of common sense” and also as “the only moral philosophy that's sound, practical, and undogmatic”. In other words, it's (according to Adler) the only ethical doctrine that answers all the questions that moral philosophy "should" and "can" attempt to answer, neither more nor less, and that has answers that are true by the standard of truth that's appropriate and applicable to normative judgments. In contrast, Adler believed that other theories or doctrines try to answer more questions than they can or fewer than they should, and their answers are mixtures of truth and error, particularly the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
   Adler believed we're as enlightened by Aristotle’s Ethics today as were those who listened to Aristotle's lectures when they were first delivered because the ethical problems that human beings confront in their lives have not changed over the centuries. Moral virtue and the blessings of good fortune are today, as they've always been in the past, the keys to living well, unaffected by all the technological changes in the environment, as well as those in our social, political, and economic institutions. Adler believed that the moral problems to be solved by the individual are the same in every century, though they appear to us in different guises.
   According to Adler, six indispensable conditions must be met in the effort to develop a sound moral philosophy that corrects all the errors made in modern times. First and foremost is the definition of prescriptive truth, which sharply distinguishes it from the definition of descriptive truth. Descriptive truth consists in the agreement or conformity of the mind with reality. When we think that that which is, is, and that which is not, is not, we think truly. To be true, what we think must conform to the way things are. In sharp contrast, prescriptive truth consists in the conformity of our appetites with right desire. The practical or prescriptive judgments we make are true if they conform to right desire; or, in other words, if they prescribe what we ought to desire. It is clear that prescriptive truth can't be the same as descriptive truth; and if the only truth that human beings can know is descriptive truth--the truth of propositions concerning what is and is not--then there can be no truth in ethics. Propositions containing the word "ought" can't conform to reality. As a result, we've the twentieth-century mistake of dismissing all ethical or value judgments as noncognitive. These must be regarded only as wishes or demands we make on others. They are personal opinions and subjective prejudices, not objective knowledge. In short, the very phrase "noncognitive ethics" declares that ethics isn't a body of knowledge. Second, in order to avoid the naturalistic fallacy, we must formulate at least one self-evident prescriptive truth, so that, with it as a premise, we can reason to the truth of other prescriptives. Hume said that if we'd perfect or complete descriptive knowledge of reality, we could not, by reasoning, derive a single valid ought. Third, the distinction between real and apparent goods must be understood, as well as the fact that only real goods are the objects of right desire. In the realm of appetite or desire, some desires are natural and some are acquired. Those that are natural are the same for all human beings as individual members of the human species. They are as much a part of our natural endowment as our sensitive faculties and our skeletal structure. Other desires we acquire in the course of experience, under the influence of our upbringing or nurturing, or of environmental factors that differ from individual to individual. Individuals differ in their acquired desires, as they don't in their natural desires. This is essentially the difference between "needs" and "wants." What is really good for us isn't really good because we desire it, but the very opposite. We desire it because it's really good. By contrast, that which only appears good to us (and may or may not be really good for us) appears good to us simply because we want it at the moment. Its appearing good is the result of our wanting it, and as our wants change, as they do from day to day, so do the things that appear good to us. In light of the definition of prescriptive truth as conformity with right desire, we can see that prescriptions are true only when they enjoin us to want what we need, since every need is for something that's really good for us. If right desire is desiring what we ought to desire, and if we ought to desire only that which is really good for us and nothing else, then we've found the one controlling self evident principle of all ethical reasoning--the one indispensable categorical imperative. That self-evident principle can be stated as follows: we ought to desire everything that's really good for us.The principle is self evident because its opposite is unthinkable. It is unthinkable that we ought to desire anything that's really bad for us; and it's equally unthinkable that we ought not to desire everything that's really good for us. The meanings of the crucial words "ought" and "really good" co-implicate each other, as do the words "part" and "whole" when we say that the whole is greater than any of its parts is a self-evident truth. Given this self-evident prescriptive principle, and given the facts of human nature that tell us what we naturally need, we can reason our way to a whole series of prescriptive truths, all categorical. Fourth, in all practical matters or matters of conduct, the end precedes the means in our thinking about them, while in action we move from means to ends. But we can't think about our ends until, among them, we've discovered our final or ultimate end--the end that leaves nothing else to be rightly desired. The only word that names such a final or ultimate end is "happiness." No one can ever say why he or she wants happiness because happiness isn't an end that's also a means to something beyond itself. This truth can't be understood without comprehending the distinction between terminal and normative ends. A terminal end, as in travel, is one that a person can reach at some moment and come to rest in. Terminal ends, such as psychological contentment, can be reached and then rested in on some days, but not others. Happiness, not conceived as psychologically experienced contentment, but rather as a whole life well lived, isn't a terminal end because it's never attained at any time in the course of one's whole life. If all ends were terminal ends, there couldn't be any one of them that's the final or ultimate end in the course of living from moment to moment. Only a normative end can be final and ultimate. Happiness functions as the end that ought to control all the right choices we make in the course of living. Though we never have happiness ethically understood at any moment of our lives, we're always on the way to happiness if we freely make the choices that we ought to make in order to achieve our ultimate normative end of having lived well. But we suffer many accidents in the course of our lives, things beyond our control--outrageous misfortunes or the blessings of good fortunes. Moral virtue alone--or the habits of choosing as we ought--is a necessary, but not sufficient condition of living well. The other necessary, but also not sufficient condition is good fortune.
   The fifth condition is that there isn't a plurality of moral virtues (which are named in so many ethical treatises), but only one integral moral virtue. There may be a plurality of aspects to moral virtue, but moral virtue is like a cube with many faces. The unity of moral virtue is understood when it's realized that the many faces it has may be analytically but not existentially distinct. In other words, considering the four so-called cardinal virtues--temperance, courage, justice, and prudence--the unity of virtue declares that no one can have any one of these four without also having the other three. Since justice names an aspect of virtue that's other regarding, while temperance and courage name aspects of virtue that are self-regarding, and both the self- and other regarding aspects of virtue involve prudence in the making of moral choices, no one can be selfish in his right desires without also being altruistic, and conversely. This explains why a morally virtuous person ought to be just even though his or her being just may appear only to serve the good of others. According to the unity of virtue, the individual can't have the self-regarding aspects of virtue-- temperance and courage--without also having the other regarding aspect of virtue, which is justice.
   The sixth and final condition in Adler’s teleological ethics is acknowledging the primacy of the good and deriving the right therefrom. Those who assert the primacy of the right make the mistake of thinking that they can know what is right, what is morally obligatory in our treatment of others, without first knowing what is really good for ourselves in the course of trying to live a morally good life. Only when we know what is really good for ourselves can we know what are our duties or moral obligations toward others. The primacy of the good with respect to the right corrects the mistake of thinking that we're acting morally if we do nothing that injures others. Our first moral obligation is to ourselves--to seek all the things that are really good for us, the things all of us need, and only those apparent goods that are innocuous rather than noxious.

The Intellect

Adler was a self proclaimed “moderate dualist”, and viewed the positions of both psychophysical dualism and materialistic monism to be opposite sides of two extremes. Regarding dualism, he dismissed the extreme form of dualism that stemmed from such philosophers as Plato (body and soul) and Descartes (mind and matter):
monism. He believed that while mind and brain may be existentially inseparable, and so regarded as one and the same thing, the mental and the physical may still be analytically distinct aspects of it. He put this theory to the test in the following manner:
Works

Dialectic (1927)
The Nature of Judicial Proof: An Inquiry into the Logical, Legal, and Empirical Aspects of the Law of Evidence (1931, with Jerome Michael)
Diagrammatics (1932, with Maude Phelps Hutchins)
Crime, Law and Social Science (1933, with Jerome Michael)
Art and Prudence: A Study in Practical Philosophy (1937)
What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology (1937)
St. Thomas and the Gentiles (1938)
The Philosophy and Science of Man: A Collection of Texts as a Foundation for Ethics and Politics (1940)
How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940), 1966 edition subtitled A Guide to Reading the Great Books, 1972 revised edition with Charles Van Doren, The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading: ISBN 0-671-21209-5
A Dialectic of Morals: Towards the Foundations of Political Philosophy (1941)
How to Think About War and Peace (1944)
The Revolution in Education (1944, with Milton Mayer)
The Capitalist Manifesto (1958, with Louis O. Kelso) ISBN 0-8371-8210-7
The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (1958)
The New Capitalists: A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings (1961, with Louis O. Kelso)
The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Controversies about Freedom (1961)
Great Ideas from the Great Books (1961)
The Conditions of Philosophy: Its Checkered Past, Its Present Disorder, and Its Future Promise (1965)
The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (1967)
The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense (1970)
The Common Sense of Politics (1971)
The American Testament (1975, with William Gorman)
Some Questions About Language: A Theory of Human Discourse and Its Objects (1976)
Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (1977)
Reforming Education: The Schooling of a People and Their Education Beyond Schooling (1977, edited by Geraldine Van Doren)
Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (1978) ISBN 0-684-83823-0
How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan (1980) ISBN 0-02-016022-4
Six Great Ideas: Truth-Goodness-Beauty-Liberty-Equality-Justice (1981) ISBN 0-02-072020-3
The Angels and Us (1982)
The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto (1982)
How to Speak / How to Listen (1983) ISBN 0-02-500570-7
Paideia Problems and Possibilities: A Consideration of Questions Raised by The Paideia Proposal (1983)
A Vision of the Future: Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better Society (1984) ISBN 0-02-500280-5
The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus (1984, with Members of the Paideia Group)
Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985) ISBN 0-02-500330-5
A Guidebook to Learning: For a Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom (1986)
We Hold These Truths: Understanding the Ideas and Ideals of the Constitution (1987)
Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1988, edited by Geraldine Van Doren)
Intellect: Mind Over Matter (1990)
Truth in Religion: The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth (1990) ISBN 0-02-064140-0
Haves Without Have-Nots: Essays for the 21st Century on Democracy and Socialism (1991) ISBN 0-02-500561-8
Desires, Right & Wrong: The Ethics of Enough (1991)
A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher At Large (1992)
The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (1992)
Natural Theology, Chance, and God (The Great Ideas Today, 1992)
The Four Dimensions of Philosophy: Metaphysical-Moral-Objective-Categorical (1993)
Art, the Arts, and the Great Ideas (1994)
Adler's Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher's Lexicon (1995)

Edited works

Scholasticism and Politics (1940)

Great Books of the Western World (1952, 52 volumes), 2nd edition 1990, 60 volumes

(1952, 2 volumes), 2nd edition 1990

The Great Ideas Today (1961-1977, 17 volumes), with Robert Hutchins, 1978-1999, 20 volumes

The Negro in American History (1969, 3 volumes), with Charles Van Doren

Gateway to the Great Books (1963, 10 volumes), with Robert Hutchins

The Annals of America (1968, 21 volumes)

Propædia: Outline of Knowledge and Guide to The New Encyclopædia Britannica 15th Edition (1974, 30 volumes)

Great Treasury of Western Thought (1977, with Charles Van Doren)Further Information
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