ON JUNE 28, MORTIMER J. ADLER, propagandist for the reading of great books, indexer extraordinaire, and the world’s highest-salaried philosopher, died at the age of ninety-eight. I worked for Mortimer, as we all called him, in the late 1960s. After a year-long stint as the director of an anti-poverty program in Little Rock, Arkansas, I had acquired, through the good offices of Harry Ashmore, a job as something called “senior editor” at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., in Chicago. As with every other job I have ever had, I was not so much eager for this job as I was to escape the job I then held. (White flags were shooting up everywhere in what was unhappily called “The War on Poverty.”) So I was hired, along with ten or twelve others, to design a vast, genuinely radical revision of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The pay was high, the comedy turned out to be wild, and the job put me back in Chicago, city of my birth. Apologies to Diderot, D’Alembert, & Co., but the making of encyclopedias has never seemed to me of much interest. I felt no more affinity for cross-referencing than I did for cross-dressing. Etymologically buried within the word “encyclopedia” is the notion that all knowledge is a great, linked circle. Not at all my idea of a good time: altogether too intertwined, vast, grandiose. But it was something to do until I felt the need to escape this job, too, which four years later I did. I was hired not by Mortimer Adler, but by a man named Warren Preece, a former journalist who had been executive secretary at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, then a very slow-moving and luxuriously run think tank in Santa Barbara, California, which was said handsomely to illustrate nothing so much as the Leisure of the Theory Class. Things at Britannica, Inc., at the outset certainly couldn’t have been more leisurely or theoretical. We were asked to write papers suggesting themes around which the new Encyclopaedia Britannica might best be organized. I wrote one on “struggle” as a possible theme—a paper that, if I have any luck at all, will long ago have been shredded, lost, or disintegrated. An entire week, sometimes two, would go by without having anything to do. Meanwhile, the unterwerkers, the subject editors and the picture editors, working in the hard gravel of fact on which any good reference work depends, kept things going on Britannica, doing the real work of running an encyclopedia. After a year or so of this high-level dithering, Mortimer Adler was brought in to organize the new set. His energy and stamina were greater than those of anyone I have ever known. I have seen him lecture—browbeat is closer to it—a room of specialists on each of their own subjects for ten hours, do a two-hour call-in radio show interview afterwards, return home to work on a book (he liked to turn out one a year), and, I should not have been in the least shocked to learn, end the day by making vigorous love to his thirty-odd-years-younger wife, and at last fall asleep doubtless while attempting to draw a bead on some tangled epistemological problem. After a tumultuous career as a teacher at the University of Chicago, where he had offended everyone but the janitorial staff, Adler departed to form Great Books Clubs and to publish, under the auspices of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., a set of fifty-four volumes called, collectively, The Great Books of the Western World, with two thick index volumes he christened the “Syntopicon,” which must constitute the world’s largest and most difficult to use index of ideas. Through lucubrations too elaborate and boring to go into here, Adler decided that there are 102 great ideas—running alphabetically from Angel to World—and was able to hire a staff of unemployed intellectual workers to plow through the fifty-four volumes, constituting roughly 32,000 pages, to discover 163,000 referents in them to the 102 great ideas. The project took eight years and roughly a million dollars, back in the 1950s, when a million dollars really was a million dollars. Nobody, apparently, was around within Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., with sufficient authority to tell Adler that, far from being a great idea, the Syntopicon didn’t even qualify as a dopey notion. After the books’ publication, the intellectual journalist Dwight Macdonald didn’t mind doing so, and in a fine devastation he amusingly dubbed the entire project “The Book of the Millennium Club.” After making the crucial point that the Syntopicon failed to distinguish between major and minor references, Macdonald called it “one of the most expensive toy railroads any philosopher was ever given to play with.” Mortimer was sixty-five when I first encountered him, and looked more like fifty. Stocky, perhaps five foot six, rosy rather than ruddy of complexion, jowly, broad chested, short legged, expensively dressed, he was built, as they used to say of a certain kind of automobile of the era, to hold the road. He had a slight lisp, notable when saying the word “perspicacious,” which he said a lot. A racing mind caused him to stammer, especially in argument, where he preferred to kill off opponents quickly. A broadsword not a rapier man, he once debated Bertrand Russell on the subject of the right ends of education, and after Adler spoke, Russell began his rejoinder by saying: “I greatly admire Dr. Adler’s rugged simplicity.” People who heard the debate judged that Mortimer won but had sustained so many rhetorical lacerations that the victory wasn’t worth it. Sitting in a room around an immense conference table, we senior editors, now that Mortimer was in charge, were put to the task of designing what our chief called a “topical” table of contents, a device that, once up and running, would organize the subject matter of the new Britannica with a logic and efficiency of extraordinary…well, perspicacity. World knowledge was neatly divided up into ten parts, and each of the editors was to design outlines for these parts, or parts of the parts, that would form Adler’s table of contents. From these extended outlines, the design of the article in Britannica would be dictated. The larger aim was to supply readers of the new encyclopedia with no mere source of information but the means to a liberal education. Two members of Mortimer’s old Columbia University connection, Charlie Van Doren and Clifton Fadiman, joined the group. Fadiman easily won the prize for the most pretentious outlines. (Seeing Fadiman and Adler together, I used to think: two Sanchos Panza and no Don Quixote in sight.) I seem to remember Fadiman’s composing for his outline on popular culture a rubric about the origin of the movies that ran: “The beginning of cinema: the curious confluence of an emerging technology and a surgent ethnic group.” After reading this, I passed along a note to the editor sitting next to me that read, “I think he means that the Jews got there first.” Mortimer claimed to be a proponent of arriving at positions through reasoned discussion—he was on record approving “intellectually well-mannered disputation”—but somehow things didn’t quite work out that way. The combination of deadlines and his impatience quickly forced him into intellectual bullying. He did not suffer subtlety gladly. To hold his brief attention, one had to develop to a high power the art of quick blunt statement. He also erected a number of distinctions—”first-intentional and second-intentional knowledge” was a notorious one—that served as barbed wire to keep everyone at bay. “I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right,” wrote Paul Valéry, who wouldn’t have done at all well in our meetings, and to whom Adler wouldn’t have listened in any case. I recall a scruffy sub-editor who was invited in on the day we discussed psychology, his specialty. Tieless, he put his feet up on the table and announced, “The main thing here is that you don’t want to pigeonhole this material.” But pigeonholing, feathers and guano all over the joint, was of course t
he whole intent and meaning of our job. At the break, Mortimer said that he never wanted to see this man at another of our meetings, and he was banished from the project. Never big on civility, Mortimer was an imperialist of the ego. The best, often the only, way to keep his interest was to talk to him about himself. Even then he would abandon you in mid-sentence if a more important person entered the room. He would tromp over people who disagreed with him, especially if they were employees, while lavishing sycophantic attention on the very rich or on people he needed at the moment. Mortimer often enraged me, until I came to view him, I believe rightly, as an essentially comic character—not an idiot but a clown-savant. The comedy, as old as Aristophanes, was that of the inept philosopher: the man with his eyes on the heavens who, missing everything in front of him, falls into the mud. His physical ineptitude was considerable. All mechanical objects deranged him. He was famous as a non-swimmer, failing to get his bachelor’s degree at Columbia because he couldn’t pass the then-compulsory swimming requirement, where he also dropped out of gym classes; and was excused, owing to a want of coordination, from the student army training corps. You have to imagine a Diogenes whose lamp is unlit not to make a philosophical point but because he doesn’t know how to light it. Mortimer’s ineptitude carried on well into his adulthood. In one story, his wife wished to hang a small painting, and, there being no hammer in their Chicago Gold Coast apartment near the Drake Hotel, she sent him out to buy one. Since there were no hardware stores on posh Michigan Avenue nearby, he went directly to Dunhill’s where, mirabile dictu, no hammers being available, he brought back a gold-plated shower head which he used to hammer in the nail. A friend of mine who worked for him recalls a love letter Mortimer wrote that contained the sentence: “I love you with all the passions attendant thereto.” Mortimer didn’t have much luck with women. In the first volume of his autobiography, Philosopher at Large (1977), he claims to have married his first wife because both had had their hearts broken by earlier relationships and provides no other reason for what he portrays as a loveless marriage beyond his avowed immaturity. The marriage dragged on for thirty-three years, at the end of which Adler called in, from a hotel in San Francisco, that he wasn’t coming home again. In the middle of this marriage, he fell in love with a secretary at the University of Chicago, and his ardent pursuit of her nearly caused his dismissal from the university for behavior regarded, as he puts it, as “intolerable.” Between his first and second marriage, Adler became engaged to a woman who, with her boyfriend, had been hatching a plot which called for insuring him into the stratosphere and then, with the aid of her boyfriend, shaking him down and possibly bumping him off. Adler’s friends had her followed by a detective, and when the plot was revealed, he didn’t at first want to believe it, then spent months of depression trying to get over it. The world was not too much with our philosopher, but frequently too much for him. Adler apparently didn’t care all that much about money, as long as he had enough of it to go absolutely first class, which he always did. “I must confess I have the propensities of a sybarite,” he wrote in Philosopher at Large, adding in his second volume of autobiography, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, “Get over the folly of thinking that there is any conflict between high living and high thinking: Asceticism is for the birds.” Impossible to imagine him traveling coach. In Chicago he lunched at the Tavern Club, bought his cigars—along with his hardware—at Dunhill’s. At Britannica, he hired roomfuls of people for jobs that later turned out to be quite unnecessary. He resembled that Hollywood director who was given an unlimited budget and exceeded it, and he came close to sinking Britannica, Inc. He and Robert Hutchins were America’s first six-figure intellectuals. Hutchins and Adler were, in fact, an intellectual Abbott and Costello act, the one tall, elegant, suave to the highest power, the other short, nervous, bumptious without peer. I once saw Adler present no fewer than eleven reasons to “Bob,” as he called him, for adapting a certain policy for the new Britannica, at the end of which Hutchins, removing his pipe from his sensuous lips, replied, “I do not consider that an adequate statement of the alternatives,” promptly reinserting the pipe in his mouth, leaving Adler in a condition of pure speechless stammer. Adler referred to his meeting in 1927 with Hutchins, who was then at twenty-eight acting dean of the Yale Law School, as changing “the whole course of my life.” It changed Hutchins’s quite as much. When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago in 1929 at the age of thirty, he took Adler along with him. From the outset Adler practiced a form of intellectual tactlessness that made him enemies throughout the university. He let it be known that he thought the philosophy department a bunch of clucks. He wrote papers demeaning social science’s pretensions to being legitimate learning, when social science was what the University of Chicago was most famous for. “I continued to challenge my colleagues instead of trying to persuade them,” he wrote. Confident of his possession of the truth, he always took out his trusty blunderbuss and fired away. “I can see that you are the kind of young man who is accustomed to winning arguments,” Gertrude Stein said to him one night during a visit to Chicago. Winning arguments but, Miss Stein might have added, losing battles. Hutchins allowed that Adler did much to educate him, chiefly through introducing him to the great-books curriculum that he had acquired in John Erskine’s General Honors Seminar at Columbia in the early 1920s. But Adler also did much to complicate Hutchins’s life as president of the University of Chicago by alienating large segments of the faculty. Adler could get an argument to the shouting stage quicker than a World Federation wrestler. The fight at the University of Chicago over what constitutes the right curriculum for undergraduates—which Adler even forty years later falsely characterized as the “controversy over facts and ideas, and intellectualism and anti-intellectualism”—need never have reached the level of furor it did had Hutchins conducted it on his own and not allowed Mortimer to serve as his point man. One of Hutchins’s great weaknesses was absolute loyalty to the wrong people. Edward Shils, who was on the scene at the University of Chicago during these years, described the relation of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler by saying that “at least Prince Hal had the good sense, once he became king, to get rid of Falstaff.” I do not know of any genuine contribution that Mortimer Adler made to serious philosophy, though before he went into big-time indexing he was thought a serious Thomist. He also in several of his books insisted on the continuing relevance of ancient philosophers to modern problems, questions, and issues, chief among them Aristotle and St. Thomas. (“Should auld Aquinas be forgot,” Hutchins used to joke.) Like a gila monster, who is said never to let go, he was a persistent attacker of pragmatism, from his days in John Dewey’s lectures to the end of his life. Sidney Hook once told me that it was proof of Dewey’s honorableness that not even Mortimer Adler could drive him into anti-Semitism. Perhaps Adler’s major contribution has been in spreading the gospel of the great books. Hutchins and Adler, along with Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr, took over the dying St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where in 1937 they established an undergraduate program based exclusively on great books, with works on ancient and modern mathematics and science added; less intensive programs went into operation for a limited portion of the student body at the University of Notre Dame and at St. Mary’s College in California. I was mys
elf the recipient of a partial great-books education at the University of Chicago, which Hutchins was able to install after the smog of controversy had cleared. Mine was assuredly better than a bad-books education, such as is nowadays offered at almost every school in the land, but education, I have come to conclude, is mostly luck in finding good teachers. I myself never found any at Chicago. (They were there in the persons of Frank Knight, Edward Shils, Joseph Schwab, and a few others, but I didn’t search them out.) What I did discover at Chicago was an atmosphere where erudition was taken seriously. Because all the books taught were first class—no textbooks were allowed, no concessions were made to the second-rate for political reasons, and one was graded not by one’s teachers but by a college examiner—I gradually learned on my own the important writers and eternal issues, and where to go if one wished to stay with the unending work in progress called one’s education. Adler remained a lifelong advocate for the great books. Through an outfit called the Great Books Foundation, he helped set up seminars in many of the major cities of America, and himself taught in certain such seminars for decades—particularly the Aspen Institute, where, as I like to think, he ruined the holidays of many a corporation executive by forcing him to read John Locke. I have met a few people who have sat in these seminars for several years; they seem greatly to have enjoyed it. What is less clear is what they get out of it. After years of reading Plato, they seem no closer to escaping the cave than the rest of us. “Participants in the Aspen experience,” Adler wrote, “were awakened to a realization that, in the scale of values, the Platonic triad of the true, the good, and the beautiful takes precedence over the Machiavellian triad of money, fame, and power.” The least cynical of men, Adler probably actually believed this. In a self-congratulatory mode, Adler spoke of himself getting more and more out of repeated rereadings of his Great Books, finding, as he put it, “a growth of understanding and insight” within himself. Yet insight and understanding are precisely the two qualities most absent from Mortimer Adler’s character. Throughout Philosopher at Large, Adler abjures any interest in human personality or behavior. “If I had as much interest in human beings as I do in human thought, this [his autobiography] would be a different story….Throughout my life it has been human thought to which I have reacted with the kind of concern that others have for human beings. I have given hurt sometimes because of this, and sometimes I have suffered it.” Adler is asking here not to be judged by his life but by his works. “An interest in human beings is one thing; an interest in thought another; and one should not be allowed to get in the way of the other,” he wrote as a young man in an attack on Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. Yet, despite Adler’s admonitions, would anyone doubt it matters that Nietzsche went mad or that Socrates accepted his unjust death with serenity? In Adler’s case, his own lack of interest in human beings and their idiosyncrasies destroys much of what passes for his philosophy, especially his educational philosophy. Adler’s ignorance of human psychology—of human nature tout court—led him to believe that everyone is educable. In his extreme egotism, he believed that, in his work on the Syntopicon and in revising Encyclopaedia Britannica, he had supplied the tools for the perfection of humanity. “The two sets of books together,” he wrote in A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, “covered the waterfront; neither alone sufficed.” He apparently went to his death with no notion that, in the Syntopicon, he merely created something useless—and with no idea that in his work on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ripping it up every which way, allowing a maniacal Lego-set structure to distort content and make information more difficult to find, he had a major hand in helping to destroy something excellent. When I was working for Britannica, he called me one morning, and in much perturbation asked if I thought novels could contain ideas. An amazing question, really, from the great impresario of The Great Books of the Western World. Style was simply unavailable to him; he had an active dislike of it, believing that in a thinker such as Santayana it covered up lack of substance. His own writing has a deep dryness—there, I believe, by deliberation. The last time we spoke, he told me that his newest book contained ten typos, and he sent me a copy with a note asking if I could find them. But to do that I would, of course, have had to read the book, which was not something I felt could be done. Mortimer’s was a powerful and lucid yet coarse and deeply vulgar mind. His must have been an astonishingly high IQ, but his brain functioned in him like a bicep: a large and showy thing with which one cannot finally do all that much but menace and beat down other people. He took logic, upon which he prided himself, all the way out. When he gave the lectures that resulted in the book he called The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, he argued that it was the power of “propositional speech” and conceptual thought that distinguished human beings from all other animals. If dolphins could utter coherent sentences, I asked him after one of these lectures, would this make them human? “Yes, absolutely,” he replied, without a trace of irony. I don’t know where Mortimer Adler might be just now, but I like to think he is being lectured to interminably by a very severe and humorless dolphin with an IQ much higher than his own. Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
