|
 ortimer
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.
|
