A Celebration of the Contributions of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

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A note from the Archivist

In August of 1994, friends and colleagues of Mortimer Adler gath- ered for a three-day program in celebration of his lifelong contribu- tions. In the winter of 1995 the presentations for the program were published in the final issue of the Aspen Quarterly. Although not a part of the original program, Sidney Hyman, editor of the Aspen quarterly contributed an article. In addition, in his final editorial Sydney Hyman also included material about his with Dr. Adler. Both Mr. Hyman’s article and final editorial are in- cluded.

This publication includes the original agenda for the three-day event. Note that in some cases titles of the articles changed be- tween the of the program and publication. The first presenta- tion by Charles Van Doren was not listed in the program, but since Dr. Van Doren was the first moderator, it is possible that this short piece was given as an introduction. Note that the order of presenta- tions here is given as in the program, not the publication order. For the major presentations formal responders were designated as well as responses from Dr. Adler. The Center has been unable to locate copies of responses of the responders and of Dr. Adler. We do have a copy of Dr. Adler’s remarks presented at the Saturday eve- ning dinner and these have been included.

Many of the papers are quite lengthy and I doubt that they could have been presented in the time allowed while also allowing from the responders, remarks by Dr. Adler, and the inevitable discussion that would have followed. It is possible that the actual presenta- tions were summaries of the papers themselves, which would have allowed the time necessary for the responders, remarks by Dr. Adler and discussion. The Center has in its collection one such summary, that by John Van Doren, which is included just before his complete paper.

Ken Dzugan Senior Fellow and Archivist CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE GREAT

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Contents (interactive)

A note from the Archivist...... 2

Program...... 4

The Triumph of Mortimer Adler – Charles Van Doren...... 7

Mortimer Adler, Cartographer: Mapping the World of - Otto Bird ...... 9

Adler from an ’s Eye - Deal W. Hudson ...... 18

Mortimer Adler Meets - Lord Anthony Quinton...... 30

Adlerian Desire and the Measure of Morality-Russell Hittinger...... 41

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The Program

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE

A Celebration of the Contributions of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

August 19-21,1994 Aspen, Colorado

Agenda

Friday, 19 August

1:00 - 3:00 p.m. Registration at The Aspen Institute, Aspen Meadows

3:00 5:30 p.m. Welcome --- David T. McLaughlin West Seminar Room Chairman of the Board, The Aspen Institute

Moderator: Charles Van Doren

"M.J.A., Cartographer: Mapping the World of Knowledge" Otto Bird, University of Notre Dame

Responders: Lord Quinton, John Van Doren

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Response by Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

"Adler from an Angel's Eye" Deal W. Hudson, Fordham University

Responders: Alex Sanders, Russell Hittinger

Response by Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

6:30 - 7:15 p.m. Cocktails The Courtyard (outside West Seminar Room)

7:15 - 8:30 p.m. Moderator: Charles Van Doren West Seminar Room "Adler Meets God" Lord Quinton, Oxford University

Responder: Ralph Mclnerny

8:30 p.m. Dinner The Aspen Meadows

Saturday, 20 August West Seminar Room

9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Moderator: Charles Van Doren

"Adlerian Desire and the Measure of Moral- ity" Russell Hittinger, The Catholic University of America

Responders: Deal W. Hudson, Pierre DuMaine

Response by Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

": for " Jef- frey Wallin, American Academy for Liberal Education

Responders: Diane Ravitch, Alex Sanders

Response by Dr. Mortimer J. Adler 6

"The Caterpillar King" John Van Doren, Executive Editor, The Great Ideas Today

Responders: Diane Ravitch, James O'Toole

Response by Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

1:00 - 2:15 p.m. Lunch

5:30 - 6:30 p.m. Cocktails hosted by Mortimer and Caroline Adler at the residence of Merrill Ford and Robert Taylor

7:00pm Dinner at the residence of Lowell Lebermann

Moderator: Charles Van Doren

Remarks by Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

Sunday, 21 August West Seminar Room

9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Mortimer Adler Seminar for Graduate Stu- dents Aristotle, Ethics, Book I Aristotle, Politics, Book I

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The Triumph of Mortimer Adler

Charles Van Doren

ortimer Adler was born in December 1902. When I met him M for the first time, in February 1926, he was only 23. I was not so old myself: I think about three days. He philosophized to me as I lay in my mother’s arms, and I was fascinated, my father re- membered.

Actually, Mortimer had become a practicing philosopher long be- fore that. He read John Stuart Mill’s autobiography and discovered Mill had read Plato before he was six—in Greek. “How I ever catch up?” Mortimer wondered. He raced to the library and took out the Dialogues. It is a commonplace that the works of Plato are the beginning of : Plato asks all the questions everyone else has tried to answer ever since. Certainly Mortimer began try- ing to answer them even before finishing the first dialogue. Of course he has always been an impatient man.

His philosophical career may be divided into three parts. The first part, from the age of 15 to the age of 22, was his apprenticeship. He learned an astonishing amount in a few short years and soon surpassed most of his teachers, a fact he did not conceal from them.

The second part began around 1925 and lasted until the middle 1960s—a period of about 40 years. During this time Mortimer 8

tried hard to be accepted as a serious philosopher by the profes- sional—mostly academic—philosophical community. Some of its members, notably the great French neo-Thomists Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, did accept him, recognizing in him an eloquent voice for their program, called nova et vetera—that which is both new and old, the new that is to be found in the old. The old was Aristotle and his great follower, Thomas Aquinas; the new was a social based on the Gospels. But most American and English academics could not see the merit in Mortimer’s attempts to use old tools of thought to better understand and elucidate new (or seemingly new) ethical and political problems. (A few, some of them outcasts like Mortimer himself—for example, Scott Bu- chanan—became close associates and friends.)

Mortimer was provoked: He banged his fist on the table and de- manded to be heard. “I challenge you!” he cried. “In the holy name of we must join together in debate, in !” But he was too young, too brash, too brilliant, and the elders of philosophy turned away, punishing him by showing him their backs, by their silence, by their refusal even to listen. They almost broke his heart.

But they did not. In an act of supreme , Mortimer, now 60 and with his and career in disarray, determined to fight another way. He married Caroline, “first of second causes,” as he called her. He returned to Chicago, always the center of his strength. And he began to produce a long series of books written not for the pro- fessionals, who would not have read them anyway, but for every- body.

“Philosophy is everybody’s business.” That is the Adlerian credo. Everybody is you and I, and it was for us that he wrote those books, starting with the four works that together, I think, are his masterpiece: The Conditions of Philosophy (1965), The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (1967), The Time of Our : The Ethics of Common Sense (1970), and The Common Sense of Politics (1971). At first the volumes appeared every two or three years, then one a year, and finally two a year. Mortimer has not ceased impatient. A Philosophical Dictionary will appear this spring—his last book, or so he says. I would not bet against it not being his last. Like Antaeus he gains strength from the ground on which he stands. We are his ground: As long as we listen, as long as we care, he will go on reminding us what his un- common common sense so clearly tells him, and what we so clearly need to hear.

I am not sure what Mortimer thinks about his successful end run 9

around the defensive line of the academic philosophers. He may harbor a sense of disappointment, although of course he will not admit it, at his failure to capture the attention and regard of men who would like to be thought of as his peers, but are not. In the end this is not important. Mortimer knows what he has done. He has lived according to his credo, in devoting his life to the philosophy —which is all the philosophy that counts—that is everybody’s. The philosophy of human life, of , of the good society. The philosophy that points out the way we must go. The philoso- phy for which our gratitude should know no bounds.

Mortimer Adler, Cartographer: Mapping the World of Knowledge

Otto Bird

mong the many talents of Mortimer Adler one of the most A outstanding is his mastery of the outline. He has confessed his of this literary form—indeed, it might well be called an in- fatuation. One of his earliest books was published in outline form. Entitled What Man Has Made of Man, it consisted of 124 pages of 10

outlines forming the body of the text, followed by 124 pages in discursive prose. Recalling this work 40 years later in his first memoir, Adler wrote that he was “so enamored of the outline style that he felt its would be evident to the reader,” and then admitted that he “could not have been more mistaken” (Philoso- pher at Large, p. 199).

The virtues of the outline form were spelled out in the preface to the earlier book as follows:

The structure of an outline has the of making explicit the of an analysis. It gives the leading propositions due prominence, and exhibits the order and relation of the parts of a complicated argument. But an outline is, strictly, not an argu- ment. It is much more like an analytical index to one. This is its chief disadvantage. . . . on the surface it is dogmatic because, as a teaching instrument, it proceeds by the sequence of asser- tions, few of which it can stop fully to support (Chapter 18).

All of this is true, but only if the outline is a good one made by a person with an analytical, logical able to construct it. And Mortimer is eminently such a person.

Outlining was so much in his blood that it had to seek further ex- pression. And that it did. It resulted in what must be the two most monumental projects of outlining ever accomplished. The late 1940s were devoted to the construction of the Syntopicon, the ana- lytical index and guide to the Great Books of the Western World. As though this were not sufficient, the late 1960s were spent in producing the Propaedia, the knowledge outline of the Encyclo- paedia Britannica which consists of almost 500 pages of outlines. We will investigate these two huge collections of outlines to see how they chart the maps enabling one to find one’s way through the world of knowledge.

An outline is in some respects like a map. Both present analytical and systematic plans of a large area. For this both require some for reducing a larger and more complicated area into a smaller and simpler plan. Mapping the earth demands a way of projecting a curved surface upon that of a plane while at the same time reducing the distances in scale. For this different systems of cartographic projection are available.

So too an outline deals with a large area: the Syntopicon with the whole of the Western intellectual tradition as recorded in a set of books; the Propaedia with the whole of the present state of infor- 11

mation and knowledge as contained in a comprehensive encyclo- pedia. Corresponding to the principle of projection for making a map of the earth, we need of organization and articula- tion that will reveal ways of entry into these vast fields of knowl- edge and guide us through them. The Syntopicon and Propaedia supply us with such guides, plans and maps.

The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon

Such was the title of Volumes 2 and 3 of the first edition of Great Books published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., in 1952. This is the edition to which I refer unless otherwise noted, and the one on which I was privileged to work as an assistant editor. Also, for understanding the Syntopicon as an organization of knowledge the best introduction is the essay, “The Principles and Methods of Syn- topical Construction,” included as Appendix 2 in the earlier edition (3:1219-99).

The field of knowledge to be outlined was that recorded in the set of books consisting of 443 works by 74 authors, beginning with Homer and ending with Freud, in all basic subject : phi- losophy, , , natural and social , , and imaginative literature. The 102 great ideas are the titles of the chapters of the Syntopicon. The ideas as well as the books were selected “to represent the unity and continuity of the tradition of western thought” (3:1220), called by Robert Hutchins “the Great Conversation.” Ideas and books thus interact with each .

Further criteria have to be met for an to be great. Not only must it have received substantial consideration in the tradition of the past. It must also be one that continues to attract attention and to enter into contemporary discussion. Thus it must possess univer- sality in range and scope as well as significance.

Why 102 ideas? How was this number determined? It was reached after some years of indexing the books in the set, analyzing and discussing them by a team of 39 researchers and five senior edi- tors. The conception of the entire project was Mortimer’s, and he took the lead throughout in its execution, both by proposing topics to be indexed and by perfecting the outlines he was continually constructing from contributions received from the indexing staff.

The first list of possible candidates for inclusion consisted of al- most 700 terms. A sample of some 88 terms that came to be dis- carded is given on page 1223 of the syntopical essay. Ultimately by principles of exclusion the 700 were reduced to 102. First, 12

terms that might count as great could be eliminated because they can be considered as synonyms: as “freedom” of “,” “mo- tion” of “change,” “universe” of “world.” Second, certain terms could be paired and brought together under a single chapter, such as the opposites “good and ,” “life and ,” “ and .” But the fundamental criterion for inclusion remained that an idea to be great had to provide a major center or pivot of discus- sion in the Great Books.

The inventory of terms at the end of the Syntopicon has 1,798 en- tries, including not only the terms considered and rejected, but still more. Some of the latter were eliminated not because they were less comprehensive than others, but because they were more so. Thought, for example, calls for consideration under many con- cepts, and the inventory under that entry refers the reader to a number of chapters, such as “Idea,” “Judgment,” “,” “Memory and ,” “Mind,” “Reasoning.”

The work of making the outlines of topics accompanied continu- ally the identifying of the great ideas and the indexing of the books. The result contained 2,987 topics distributed under the 102 great ideas, and these 102 outlines of topics are the points of refer- ence to the discussion of them in the Great Books. They thus locate the central places in the map of the great conversation. In fact, the word “topic” derives from the Greek term meaning place and has come to refer to a place of argument or discussion. One hundred and two ideas and almost 3,000 topics are far too many for us to consider even a few of them here. But the problems and magnitude of construction that is involved will at once strike the reader who, by way of an example, looks at Chapter 37 of the Syntopicon offer- ing an outline of topics on the meaning of idea.

All the chapters of the Syntopicon are preceded by an introductory essay which serves as a guide not only to the outline that follows, but also to the references locating discussion of the various topics in the Great Books. In relation to the outline itself, each introduc- tion amounts to a fleshing out of that skeleton by identifying au- thors who discuss particular topics and citing telling quotations from their works. The introduction thus offers an example of a syn- topical reading, and in the representative case of Chapter 37, the conversation regarding the meaning of idea.

Still more importantly, it also analyzes the controversy about ideas by noting the basic issues and identifying the positions that various authors have taken on them. In fact, they use the word idea in so many different ways that the question arises whether they are at all 13

discussing one and the same subject. If not, no issue is joined, hence there is no genuine controversy, and the unity of the chapter is specious. Ambiguity has to be admitted, but it must be system- atic in the sense that the “various distinct meanings are related ac- cording to some principle” that thereby establishes “a common thread underlying all the twists in meaning” (3:1233). The intro- duction exhibits examples of the many ambiguities of “idea,” but then points out that there is a basic relation, however tenuous, among them. The first is that any consideration of ideas involves a theory of knowledge. The second is that the authors themselves acknowledge their opposition to different theories and meanings by having to face up to the issues on which they differ (2:763-64). The basic or root causes of opposition are then exposed and the position of the major contenders located. The result is a dialectical exposition of the controversy regarding “idea” as well as a syn- topical reading of the discussion of it in the Great Books.

Some revision of the Syntopicon was necessitated in the second edition of the Great Books set, since this included the addition of 60 authors, most of them writers of the first half of the 20th cen- tury. But in the case of Chapter 37 on “idea” the revision was mi- nor: some 8 lines referring to the mathematicians Poincaré, White- head and G. H. Hardy with a quotation from the last (2:589d). In the Syntopicon as a whole the greatest amount of revision was brought about by the inclusion of the 20th-century authors. The most extensive involved the following ideas: and cos- mology, element, , mathematics, mechanics, , time, wealth, and world (“The Great Conversation,” 2:31).

Taking the chapter on mathematics as an example, we find that new terms have been added to two topics (3a and 4a) plus an en- tirely new one numbered 5c, “The Distinction between Pure and Applied Mathematics.” The introduction has been affected accord- ingly by adding references to Hardy (five lines, p. 33, and 17 lines, p. 35); an entire column on p. 36 quoting Poincaré and Hardy on geometry; and an entirely new conclusion amounting to a column noting that the work of Karl Gödel demolished the exaggerated claim of Russell and Whitehead that all of mathematics could be derived from a few logical postulates and rules of inference.

Most alterations had to be made in chapters dealing with scientific ideas, but others were also affected. Thus that on , for example, added new phrases to three topics (2b, 3c and 7) along with a wholly new one numbered 8, reading “equality of condi- tions as the essence of a democratic society: its effect upon the character of the people and its institutions.” This led to revision of 14

the introduction by adding some 23 lines regarding Tocqueville (pp. 240 and 245) and six lines referring to Weber (p. 242).

To have treated all the other 101 ideas as that on idea itself, some of them much more complex, was a tremendous, amazing and ad- mirable achievement. The syntopical introduction and outlines to- gether are the realization of an earlier dream of Mortimer Adler’s. In his first book, entitled Dialectic (1927), he called for the con- struction of a Summa Dialectica that would identify and analyze all the major and basic controversies, note the issues underlying them, and locate the opposing positions along with their agreements and disagreements. Such a work has been done at length for only a few ideas in the books written for the Institute for Philosophical Re- search and most fully only by Mortimer’s own Idea of Freedom. But the Syntopicon itself remains the only work that has ap- proached encompassing that entire world of intellectual contro- versy.

The Propaedia

Warmed up from outlining the intellectual tradition of the West, Mortimer could find no good reason to cease from that invigorat- ing and delightful activity. But where was there a task worthy of his efforts? For one who always outlined an essay before writing it out, what would seem more natural than outlining an encyclopedia before producing it? To do that would call for outlining the whole world of contemporary learning. The opportunity came with the decision to bring out a new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britan- nica and the appointment of Mortimer to direct its editorial com- mittee.

The outlining of the Syntopicon was an obvious preparation for that new task. But the way of proceeding was not immediately ap- parent. That came after Mortimer had been studying the analytical table of contents of several books. As a result I had the privilege of preparing the draft of the first outline of what eventually became the Propaedia: Mortimer asked me to prepare an outline for an ar- ticle that would cover the field of formal . I did so, and Mortimer then concluded that he knew the way to construct a new encyclopedia. One had only to provide outlines of the articles to be commissioned but not yet written.

Thus the procedure for making the Propaedia was the opposite of that for the Syntopicon. There the material to be outlined already existed in the text of the Great Books. Here the material to be out- lined did not yet exist. So too, although both projects required the 15

cooperative efforts of a large team, this one was not only far larger, but also significantly different. Since the encyclopedia was to rep- resent the current state of knowledge in all fields, it was necessary to call into consultation experts and specialists in all the fields to be covered. Only then did it become possible to prepare outlines of what had to be written to cover a given field of knowledge. In short, what had to be constructed was not a table of contents but a table of intents. Once the various articles were written, the outlines could be revised accordingly so as to become in fact an analytical table of contents of an encyclopedia covering the whole world of knowledge.

The Propaedia contains thousands of topics extending over some 500 pages. For such an immense conglomerate to make sense as a whole depends upon the principles according to which it is organ- ized. These are few and simple. The first of these that makes the first cut is the distinction between what we know about the know- able and the means we use in knowing it in the and other disciplines: the distinction between a first- and second-order con- sideration.

First-order considerations make up Parts 1 through 9 of the Propaedia:

• three on the natural world excluding man, covering and energy, the earth, and life on earth; • one devoted to human life; • five on human society and institutions, consisting of human society, , technology, , and the history of man- kind.

The second-order consideration is given in Part 10:

• the branches of knowledge.

Among the various departments of learning treated in this final part there are three that include first- as well as second-order considera- tions: i.e., they deal with the objective content of the disciplines as well as with the and history of the disciplines themselves. These are logic, mathematics and philosophy.

The various outlines that constitute the Propaedia are so many maps or plans of the fields that they cover. Articles on climate, for example, comprise the fifth subdivision of Section, 223 entitled “Weather and Climate,” which, in turn, is the third and final sec- tion under Division II, called “The Earth’s Envelope: Its Atmos- 16

phere and Hydrosphere,” the whole of which falls within Part Two, “The Earth.”

The outlines in the Propaedia present the table of contents to the 681 long articles in the Macropaedia and the tens of thousands in the Micropaedia. As a propaedutic, it is an analytically articulated system. As such it presents one system, one organization. How then can it claim that it is not tendentious in offering and preferring its own organization and neglecting other possibilities?

It is not that because it is neither a sequential nor a hierarchical or- dering of its matters. For although as printed in book form one sec- tion does follow after another in a sequence, the Propaedia need not be read in that way. It can be viewed and understood as a circle of knowledge that is capable of being entered at any point around the circle.

Conceived as a circle divided into 10 segments, it can be rotated so that any one of the 10 can occupy the top position and thus be taken as the most important or at least the one of greatest interest to the reader. Equally well, any one of the 10 parts can be taken to occupy the central position with the other nine parts radiating out from that center. Thus Part Three treating life on earth could be taken as central, so that a reader could begin with a study of that and then proceed to the various other parts after that one.

In one sense Part Ten offers the richest reward when taken as the center. That part contains the history and philosophy of all the sci- ences and disciplines. Hence one can begin with the history and philosophy of a given science and then go on to the knowledge that the science has achieved. For example, Section 10/34 treats the his- tory, nature, scope, methodology and philosophy of the biological sciences, whereas Part Three outlines the results of biological re- search under five divisions as follows:

The Nature and Diversity of Living Things The Molecular Basis of Vital Processes The Structure and Function of Organisms Behavioral Responses of Organisms The Biosphere: The World of Living Things

The introduction to Part Ten, written by Mortimer, is entitled “Knowledge become Self-Conscious.” This brief essay justifies the distinction that separates the branches of knowledge from all the other parts, notes its structure and content, and concludes by stat- ing the three most demanding questions that can be asked about the 17

whole range of disciplines that constitute the world of knowledge.

The first of these is whether the various branches can or should be arranged in a hierarchical order, and if so, how. The second is whether the world of learning forms a harmonious whole or instead is disastrously split into warring factions. Is there a unity of among the disciplines or a multiplicity of inconsistent ? This leads to the third question of whether there is one world or two or more, such as has been maintained in the claim that there are two cultures, one scientific, the other humanistic.

Mortimer closes the Propaedia essay with the suggestion that “the conception of the encyclopedia as a totality, as an organized whole . . . would seem to favor the view that, in the circle of learning, there are no impenetrable barriers to communication or unbridge- able breaks in continuity” (p. 477). Yet in the opening volume of the second edition of the Great Books set, he justifies the exclusion of literature from the Far East on the ground that there is no one intellectual tradition such as there is in the West, but instead there are “four or five quite distinct intellectual and cultural traditions” (“The Great Conversation,” p. 17).

The Syntopicon and Propaedia Compared

Such different claims indicate that there is a significant and pro- found difference between the unity and totality that the Syntopicon and Propaedia represent. The one demands a unity of agreement on a common subject sufficient not only to make for a good con- versation, but also to give rise to genuine argument and contro- versy, whereas the other does not. The Syntopicon is a guide to great controversies; the Propaedia is not. Take the question of truth, for example. The Propaedia contains no major topic on the subject, while the index to the whole encyclopedia has only four main entries, three to philosophical references and one to religion. The Syntopicon, on the other hand, devotes one entire chapter of the 102 to the idea of truth, with an outline of 25 topics, one of which is exclusively concerned with “the comparison of the vari- ous disciplines with respect to truth.” The Syntopicon has a pre- dominant interest in ideas that generate controversy. The Propae- dia does not.

The latter, however, is far richer and more extensive as a guide to the world of information and knowledge. For example, as already noted, the Propaedia contains an extended and detailed analysis of the treatment of climate listed under 15 headings. Yet the Syntopi- con in its inventory of terms refers to only three topics on the sub- 18

ject: those on the influence of climate on human characteristics, on health and disease, and on political institutions. The Propaedia is an immense compendium of information.

The Syntopicon is also a triumph of philosophical analysis in every one of its chapters on the 102 ideas. Each of its outlines of topics reveals and exhibits the structure of a great idea by locating the issues on which there have been in many cases extensive contro- versies. Although the topics themselves as well as the introductory consideration of them are expressed in language that is philosophi- cally neutral, they could not have been discovered and organized except by the exercise of great philosophical ability.

In both range and depth the Syntopicon and Propaedia are cer- tainly the greatest organizations of knowledge that have yet been produced. They are the best by being the most elaborated while remaining the clearest maps that we possess of the great world of thought and learning. Mortimer Adler has eminently proved him- self the master cartographer.

Adler from an Angel’s Eye

Deal W. Hudson

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n the summer of 1992 Mortimer J. Adler gave an Aspen Institute I seminar devoted to his book Ten Philosophical Mistakes (Mac- millan, 1985). At the last of the sessions, Adler admitted, to every- one’s surprise, that he had made a mistake—his book should have included an additional chapter. He had omitted a fundamental mis- take; the 11th philosophical mistake, Adler said, is “angelism.”

This is the kind of talk that gets philosophers in trouble, especially if they have any fondness for the Middle Ages, which Adler most assuredly does. The charge of “angelism” sounds antiquarian, and evidently is, having not been included in the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Or, “angelism” sounds sectarian, as if it only applies to a religious community, holding fast to a three- story religious cosmology, where the gap between the divine and the human is inhabited by a hierarchy of immaterial intelligences.

But as Adler shows us in The and Us (Macmillan, 1982; reprinted in 1994), whether one cares for the Middle Ages or not, whether one believes in angels or not, there is much to be learned about human nature in meditating on scholastic teaching about the angelic nature of “separated substances.” All of which definitely makes Adler what the OED does call an “angelist,” that is, one who holds “peculiar opinions concerning angels.”

What we moderns can discover by contemplating angels, Adler claims, is our failure to grasp the basic unity of human nature, our weakness for an anthropological dualism, and our vulnerability to its consequences. (Adler, in fact, corrected himself later, remarking he would prefer to call this philosophical mistake by the name “dualism.”) The problems of metaphysical dualism are as old as Plato, who first posited two substances making up the mind and body of human . What subsequently became known as an- gelism is impossible without this Platonic assumption that some- how human intelligence and do not depend substantially upon the body. Thus, angelism is betrayed by the attitude that hu- man beings are like the pure, immaterial intelligences of the me- dieval angels except trapped temporarily in their bodies.

Angelism began its visit to modernity when some of its key fig- ures—Descartes, in particular—adopted certain features of the me- dieval teaching on angels to reinforce a sense of individual auton- omy. Far from being of quaint historical interest, the results of this appropriation, from Adler’s perspective, have been enormous - subjectivism and relativism have advanced in epistemology and the philosophy of language, individualism and hedonism in politics and ethics. This is not to say that relativism (and the rest) did not 20

exist before, but that modern angelism offered them fertile ground in which to grow. Legendary and mythic figures like Adam, Faust and Icarus exemplify the extreme effects of such overreaching, of the unwillingness to accept the limits of the human condition. They form an unhappy chorus with the fallen angel Lucifer himself in cautioning us against acting against the ordinances of nature.

Given his philosophical commitment to realism above all, it is not surprising that Adler considers angelism a fundamental philoso- phical mistake. Adler, after all, has been a champion of Aristotle and Aquinas since the 1920s when he began his assault on the pragmatism of Dewey and his disciples at Columbia and then at the University of Chicago. Since then Adler has demonstrated that he knows, better than any living philosopher, the difference be- tween a man and an angel, between man and the other , and “the difference it makes.” The hylomorphic unity of the material body and immaterial intellect in human beings is central to under- standing his philosophy, from ethics to politics, epistemology, education, language, and philosophical theology. The loss of that unity, falling either in the direction of the or the body, has grave philosophical consequences, as witnessed in the history of Western philosophy.

Perhaps Adler put off addressing it explicitly because he thought the issue of angelism had already been settled by his Thomist friends Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Gilson in his 1913 Sorbonne dissertation and in works like The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937), and Maritain in the Three Reformers (1925) and The Dream of Descartes (1932), had thoroughly explored the resemblance of Descartes’ depiction of the human intellect and scholastic treatises on the angels and its effect on subsequent think- ing. By the mid-1930s, the problem of angelism in contemporary culture was a commonplace in Adler’s intellectual circle.

But, it must be said, Adler’s circle was made up of Aristotelians and Thomists, whose legacy was not destined to remain in the mainstream of academic philosophy.

Philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century would turn dra- matically toward the exploration of personal subjectivity and the interpretation of meaning. Logical positivism, linguistic analysis, existentialism and phenomenology would be followed by the vari- ous strains of postmodernism with deconstructive denial of objec- tive truth at its very core. Adler’s response to the major influences behind these movements—Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida— has been near-total rejection. He has nothing to learn from them 21

because, like the rest of modern philosophy, these philosophers have been victims of the “little errors in the beginning” which have lead to the dead end of idealism.1

A philosophy of commonsense realism, Adler insists, following Aristotle and Aquinas, must affirm that all knowledge begins with sense experience. All the activities of the intellect—abstraction, judgment, reflection—depend upon the senses and cannot be cir- cumvented angelically by the intuition of “clear and distinct ideas.” As explained in Adler’s Intellect: Mind Over Matter (Macmillan, 1990; reprinted in 1994), such a denial of the body and the role of the senses in knowledge undermines not only the unity of human nature but also the very possibility of objectivity in knowledge and freedom in morality.

Adler himself devoted one of his best books to the idea of human nature: The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967; reprinted by Fordham University Press in 1993).2 The main thrust of this work, however, is against the “animalists,” not the angelists. Adler’s critique of animalism is a predictable corollary of angelism as a philosophical mistake. He never makes the connection, but it seems to follow that a mistake at one extreme eventually spawns a mistake at the other.

This book, however, defends the immateriality of the human intel- lect against the claims of evolutionists who say man is only differ- ent in degree, not in kind, from the animals. Part of the problem, Adler argues, is that scientists have not been completely honest about their methodology and their presuppositions.

Whether the philosopher or the scientist has great claim on a par- ticular subject depends on the kind of questions asked. Mixed questions, such as those of human nature, require the cooperation of science and philosophy.3 In order to know human nature it is not possible for each of us to simply look within ourselves— intro- spective knowledge may tell us something about an individual’s

1 See his address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association on the occasion of his receiving the Aquinas Medal, “Little Errors in the Beginning,” The Thomist XXXVIII, January 1974, pp. 27-48.

2 The new edition contains a new introduction by the present author.

3 On the nature of the “mixed question” see Adler’s The Conditions of Philoso- phy: Its Checkered Past, Its Present Disorder, and Its Future Promise. New York: Atheneum, 1965, pp. 200-227.

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mood or passing thoughts but nothing about his nature—nothing, that is, deserving of good philosophy or science.

If all knowledge begins with sense experience, then the actual be- havior of human beings must be observed and analyzed. And, if human nature is going to be compared with that of other animals, the investigator, who does not have access to the introspective re- ports of apes, must make the same observations of one species as he does of the other.

Philosophy makes it possible for human nature to be studied coop- eratively with science, not vice versa. Philosophy is capable of cre- ating a theoretical framework, such as the distinction between de- gree and kind, for organizing and interpreting the evidence gath- ered by the empirical methods of the scientists, and establishing the criteria to be satisfied for a demonstrated conclusion. Adler shows how this frame-work is missing in Darwin’s work; his mate- rialist assumptions about human nature and its origin ensure a de- cisive conclusion about the unbroken continuity of human nature with the of other animals. Darwin, therefore, was unwilling at the outset to recognize evidence contrary to his original hy- pothesis.

Adler’s treatment of Darwin and the researchers reveals the need of philosophical accountability in the sciences which claim to give us knowledge about human nature. Toward this end, he shows how it is possible to weigh together the claims to truth made by both philosophers and scientists in spite of the fact that both make claims to provide knowledge and not simply opinion, and both base their truth claims on appeals to experience. The contradiction between claims is only apparent; the real issue is how each disci- pline encounters and cognizes experience itself, how closely each kind of reasoning can approach the nature of the thing under con- sideration. Science uses an investigative method and philosophy does not—a scientist measures and observes with instruments in the light of a hypothesis, while philosophers start from ordinary experience.4

But if scientists assume either a difference in degree or a superficial difference in kind between human and nonhuman animals, they will inevitably affirm a continuity among animals’ natures and corrobo- rate the phylogenetic unity regarded almost as an article of faith by biologists. This is the faith which leads Darwin to posit the required

4 See Adler’s The Four Dimensions of Philosophy: Metaphysical, Moral, Objec- tive, Categorical. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

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as-yet-unknown intermediaries in his evolutionary theory.

Against the animalists Adler insists that a difference in kind is de- monstrable because nonhuman animals, or computers, are incapa- ble of duplicating the operations of the human intellect. Thus, hu- mans cannot be said to differ only in degree, meaning they merely possess more of a certain characteristic than other animals. Hu- mans differ in kind because they possess one characteristic that other animals totally lack—conceptual thinking. But is this differ- ence in kind radical or superficial? A superficial difference in kind means that conceptual thinking, not observed in nonhuman ani- mals, could be exhibited by these animals if they possessed, say, greater brain size. If, however, a radical difference in kind exists, then conceptual thinking cannot be possessed, potentially or to any degree, by other animals.

The ability to think conceptually, Adler argues, is explained not by brain size but by the presence of an immaterial power, which alone can account for the way intellectuality transcends the determina- tions of the sensible. This is not to say that the intellect operates without sensible input, but to say that its three characteristic opera- tions take from sensation far more than is “seen” in the percept. Abstraction of quiddities from sensible data, judgments of exis- tence or nonexistence of these quiddities, further reflection on judgments—each of these operations provides knowledge that is not supplied by perception, that is, by the presence of the sensible singular, alone.

Thus, the specific difference of the human species arises from the power of human intellect to operate in ways impossible for animals which possess only perceptual, not conceptual, thought. Nonhuman animals are capable of forming rudimentary generalizations based upon perceptual experience. But thinking in and through concepts provides intellect the ability to recognize that individual things are of a certain kind and to understand what that kind of thing is. And even more importantly, concepts allow the human mind to reflect upon these objects of thought while they are out of sight, so to speak, not being perceived, and even when they are intrinsically imperceptible.5

It is evident from this description how human intelligence is both like and unlike that of an angel. Each possesses immaterial con- cepts that allow them to consider what is not perceptually present,

5 Mortimer J. Adler, Intellect: Mind Over Matter. New York: Macmillan, 1990, p. 35.

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but whereas angels receive them directly from the mind of God human beings must abstract them from sensible experience. The perceptual generalizations common to animal intelligence never reach sufficient degree of abstraction to consider the nature of things they experience. It is not surprising, then, that philosophical angels, like Descartes, would insist upon on an unproportionate certitude in ideas, while those tending in the animalist direction would lean toward increased skepticism and nominalism.

In fact, what one sees in Adler’s treatment of the history of phi- losophy is a battle being fought on these two interconnected fronts, on one side against the elevation of human nature toward the angel, and on the other the descent toward the beast.6 Adler sketches that history in The Angels and Us when he describes the conflict be- tween three possible meta-physical options: the extreme immateri- alism of Descartes and Plato, the extreme materialism of the atom- ists and Hobbes, and the moderate materialism, or the formal mate- rialism, of Aristotle and Aquinas.7 Between the way of the angel and the way of the animal, Adler represents a via media of con- crete humanism.

The problem of angelism lurks behind two of the major problems Adler finds in the history of Western philosophy: (1) the tempta- tion to elevate philosophical knowledge to the unquestioned cer- tainty of episteme rather than testable doxa, and (2) the modern tendency toward individual system-building rather than the phi- losophical cooperation exemplified in Aristotle and Aquinas.8

In both cases the philosopher assumes an angelic posture, receiving his knowledge directly and intuitively from the source of truth itself, without need for careful observation or the weighing and sifting of previous opinions and arguments. When the truth is already known with certainty, there is no need to test one’s knowledge either against experience or against the opinions of others. One’s personal

6 In addition to Ten Philosophical Mistakes, the following Adler works should be consulted: What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology. New York: Frederick Ungar Publish- ing Co., 1937; The Conditions of Philosophy; The Four Dimensions of Philoso- phy; and most recently, “A Procedural Approach to the History of Philosophy,” The Aspen Institute Quarterly, Summer 1994, pp. 7-40.

7 Mortimer J. Adler, The Angels and Us. New York: Macmillan, 1982, pp. 147- 51.

8 See “A Procedural Approach to the History of Philosophy,” pp. 9-10.

25 philosophical system has already accounted for all there is to know.

It should be observed that Adler’s Institute for Philosophical Re- search founded in 1952 dedicated itself to righting both of these philosophical wrongs. But Adler’s own contentiousness may have at obscured, to his enemies, at least, his commitment to the fundamental open-endedness of the philosophical conversation.

Adler’s third major concern in his procedural appraisal of the his- tory of philosophy is the relationship of philosophy to other disci- plines, particularly mathematics, science and religion. Here, as Adler has often said, he is carrying out the project announced by in 1932 by Jacques Maritain in his To Distinguish to Unite: Or, The Degrees of Knowledge.9 The first fruits of Adler’s reading came quickly: In 1937 he published his Thomistic critique of psycho- analysis in What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Conse- quences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology. Published in the form of an outline with extensive and brilliant footnotes, this book contains the kernel of Adler’s later thinking in many areas. Here we find his defense of Aristotelian epistemology, and of the immaterial human intellect, his critique of Platonic and Cartesian dualism, and his awareness of the consequences of that dualism on the sciences and especially psychology. Modern psychology, as

9 It was his reading of To Distinguish to Unite: Or, The Degrees of Knowledge (translated by Gerard Phelan, New York: Scribner’s, 1959), first published in 1932, that showed him how to wed his conception of philosophical knowledge to the empirical sciences. Particularly important were Maritain’s distinctions between perinoetic, dianoetic and ananoetic knowledge (pp. 202-16). Adler wrote as early as 1937, “I discern in Maritain’s Les Degres de Savior the out- lines, at least, of a synthesis of science, philosophy and theology which will do for us what St. Thomas did for philosophy and theology in the middle ages. In that synthesis, philosophical will be enriched. The understanding of science will make for an improved Thomism, as the understanding of theology enabled St. Thomas to improve upon Aristotle. Whether or not Maritain has accomplished this or merely forecasts it, he seems to me the only contemporary who has deeply sensed the movement of history and the point at which we stand. More than that, he has divined the principle of intellectual progress. It is a maxim which can be used as the title for the whole historical drama: distinguer pour unir.” What Man Has Made of Man, p. 242. Adler and Maritain were close friends for many years; he edited a book of Maritain’s essays entitled Scholasti- cism and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1940) with a number of essays ger- mane to this topic, especially “Science and Philosophy.” Adler gives an account of his “neo-Thomist” phase and his for calling himself an “enlightened Aristotelian” in Philosopher at Large, pp. 296-317. A tribute to Adler by Marit- ain can be found in Maritain’s introduction to Problem for Thomists: The Prob- lem of Species. For comparisons between Adler and modern Thomists on the topic of freedom and related issues, see Freedom in the Modern World: Jacques Maritain, Yves R. Simon, Mortimer J. Adler. Michael D. Torre, editor, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.

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exemplified in psychoanalysis, is mired in its Cartesian premises, seeking through the dead-end method of introspection to solve the mind-body problem.10

In the past 60 years the investigative sciences, perhaps with the exception of , have lost some of their philosophical hubris. On this count, Adler is optimistic about the future of philosophy— the exercise of philosophy has been distinguished from both relig- ion and the positive sciences in a way they were not in previous epochs.11 His own philosophical theology as found in How to Think About God (Macmillan, 1979; reprinted in 1992) illustrates his concern for the order of knowledge, by refusing any help from the light of revelation, whether intentional or not. Adler goes so far as to say that he could no longer write a book such as this for pa- gans, since he is now a baptized Christian. Adler’s insistence on the purity of philosophical exercise is admirable, but is it extreme? I shall return to this question when I comment on Adler’s rejection of philosophy as a way of life.

No doubt angelism and animalism also account, in large part, for most of the 10 philosophical mistakes Adler describes in his book of that title. Regarding the issue of consciousness and its objects, for Adler, our ideas are produced by abstraction from sense experi- ence; they are not infused directly into the intellect the way God infused ideas into the mind of an angel. The Cartesian legacy, once stripped of its anchor in the veracity of God, spread radical doubt about the relationship of ideas to the extramental objects perceived through the senses. The bridge of intentionality linking the inner world of thought and outer world of things, which depends not only on the immaterial union of the knower and the known but also on the testimony of the senses, is lost. We become “each of us locked up in the private world of his or her own subjective experi- ence.”12

Adler shows how the dynamic unity of the intellect and the senses produces ideas which are not objects of our consciousness themselves but are rather that by which objects are known. Ideas, it might be said, are windows, not pictures. When Descartes invoked the angel to pro- vide greater certainty for knowledge he unknowingly took a fatal step

10 What Man Has Made of Man, pp. 40-44. This text will soon be reprinted by Transaction Books with a new introduction.

11 “A Procedural Approach to the History of Philosophy,” p. 32.

12 Ten Philosophical Mistakes, p. 23.

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toward making each mind the final measure of its own experience.

This development of what Adler calls “suicidal psychologizing” between Descartes and Locke has led to what Adler calls the “sui- cidal epistemologizing” of modern philosophy in general. First- order disciplines have been replaced by second-order learning: as first philosophy has been replaced by epistemol- ogy. No longer do philosophers inquire into the truth and error of what is already known but rather seek to establish the possibility of knowing itself.

Aristotle long ago made fun of such extreme skepticism when he remarked in the Metaphysics that even the man who denies having any knowledge of the town of Megara and its whereabouts will be able to get there if he must (1008b12-19). This narrow focus on epistemology has inevitably led to the retreat of philosophy from the public arena and to its growing irrelevance. Epistemology should be posterior to metaphysics and all first-order inquiries; it has been allowed to swallow up philosophy and sound its retreat to the world of the knower.13

This dualism has created a deceptive account of the relation-ship between the intellect and the senses. Their artificial separation lead to the resurgence of materialism and to chaos in the philosophy of language, since without real relationship between intellect and ob- ject the role of the formal sign as meaning is destroyed and nomi- nalism the inevitable result. Thus it is doubly ironic that to Hobbes, perhaps the first true animalist, the notion of an angel was mean- ingless. Like the positivists who followed later, Hobbes reduced the designative reference of name words to some one mode of ex- isting things—material existence. The empirical sciences of ob- servable phenomena would eventually be regarded by most as the sole province of truth and genuine knowledge.

Given such epistemological restrictions, the outcome of angelism and animalism for envisioning the purpose of human action is dis- astrous. Especially for the animalist, the idea of right desire gov- erning human action in accord with common human nature and basic human needs must be rejected, since the foundational knowl- edge required to make such claims is not available. Moral values, as a result, must be entirely rationalized, that is, considered either without any relation to human desire, as in Kant, or uncritically identified with any desire, as in Spinoza. Human happiness, as a

13 The Conditions of Philosophy, p. 265.

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result, either becomes irrelevant to morality or sensualized into positive feeling-states and contentment. The common good is an- other victim of the pursuit of individual gratification at all costs, moral or otherwise. And finally, the materialist view insists that our very freedom of choice is an illusion, since the will, like other human powers, is simply part of the deterministic system of cause and effect—there is no immaterial power able to transcend mate- rial conditions.

The idea of a common human nature has been lost to the animalist, in part because we doubt our ability to know natures at all, but also because we no longer recognize what is clearly before our eyes — the distinctiveness of our intellectual powers. No longer flirting with the angel, we have embraced the animal. We need not have allowed the theory of evolution to back us into this corner, since, as Adler claims, it explains everything but man. Evolution cannot account for the distinctive difference of man, because an immate- rial power, like the intellect, cannot be explained by a material cause.

The angelistic denial of the body has manifested itself in politics as the denial of our natural civility, of the body politic, as it were. Advocates of the so-called state of nature and the social contract attempted to explain the origin of politics apart from the natural sociality exemplified in the life of the and the small com- munity. Our good, our happiness, naturally depends upon our communal life. Note that according to medieval teaching the fall of Lucifer led to the fall into eternal unhappiness of countless other angels who were part of his natural community and under his in- fluence.

Such a comment easily leads us back to Adler’s insistence on the necessity of philosophical cooperation and conversation. And here I raise the question of whether or not Adler himself has been brushed by an angel’s wing. There is so much in Adler’s account of the history of philosophy to applaud that it may seem pedantic to differ. The small bone I must pick with Adler concerns his comments on the relation between religion, morality and philoso- phy. When he congratulates contemporary philosophy on its free- dom from religious influences he comments that philosophy is “no more a way of life” than science.14 In contrasting the life of a reli- gious believer with that of a philosopher he argues that whereas a religious person will attempt to bring his life into conformity with

14 “A Procedural Approach to the History of Philosophy,” pp. 13-14

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his beliefs, the philosopher does not necessarily feel any compunc- tion to do so for the sake of his work.

It seems to me that Adler has stretched his distinction past the breaking point. No doubt the figure of the martyred Socrates comes to mind as at least one philosopher who felt strongly about meeting the measure of his teaching. And certainly the pagan phi- losophers of antiquity considered the life of moral virtue as neces- sary to the life of contemplation and theorizing. How can the mind, they ask, pursue the task of reflection while being disturbed by passions? And are we going to ignore the implication, so clearly spelled out by Aquinas, among others, that the good which appears to a man be determined to some extent by his appetites and atti- tudes? The findings of the philosopher, therefore, particularly in practical matters of ethics and politics, do not go unaffected by his way of life.

In fact, I think Adler is not so much wrong about this as he is in- consistent. By his own testimony he would be unable to write his book about God for pagans. When asked why, he replies that it is not that he would be unable to expunge deliberately all of the re- vealed data from his argument, but rather that as a believer he would be helped “unawares.” I would argue that Adler’s point is relevant not only to religious belief but also to a philosopher’s moral character. Ancient philosophers were trained in virtue for the sake of their philosophical vision. To pretend that philosophy, par- ticularly practical philosophy, is an excellence of the mind unaf- fected by the presence or absence of moral virtue is too reminis- cent of the Enlightenment rationalism that Adler has spent his life- time resisting. And, after all, the philosopher who insists upon conversation and cooperation also encourages a way of life, a set of manners to govern our thinking.

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Mortimer Adler Meets God

Lord Anthony Quinton

Concerning Metaphysics

ortimer Adler and I have been friends for a number of years, M but those years are quite a small fraction of the gloriously unrolling panorama of Mortimer’s life. More important is the fact that we are very different sorts of philosopher. He will not, I hope, be offended by being described as an Aristotelian theist. In those sort of terms I could be described as an analytic materialist. We are not, however, diametrically opposed. We both believe that there are philosophical truths, to be arrived at by rational means. More specifically, we both believe that metaphysics, the attempt to arrive at some knowledge of the nature of the world as a whole, is a le- gitimate undertaking.

A great virtue of Mortimer’s, on which I am relying here, is his unswerving dedication to rationality. It comes out very clearly in his manner of writing. He takes the utmost to be lucid and to be what I shall call logically explicit. He writes in the plainest lan- guage, uses few technical terms, and carefully defines them and any ordinary words he is using in any but the most obviously col- loquial sense. By referring to his logical explicitness I draw atten- 31

tion to the way in which he sets out the exact machinery of his ar- gumentation. His writing is free from suggestion, allusion, ellipsis. Everything is above board, spread out before you on Mortimer’s expository table. In How to Think About God (henceforward HTG) there is only one small intrusion of questionable at an im- portant stage of the argument. But here, as generally in his work, he is a true disciple of his masters, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

An interesting point about Mortimer’s published work is that only a comparatively small part of it is devoted to metaphysics—in his eyes, I think, as in mine, the queen of the sciences. His career as a published philosopher is now 67 years long, starting in 1927 with his Dialectic and a couple of articles. He places the start of his ca- reer as a philosopher, published or not, back 10 years to his first reading of Plato’s Euthyphro. The crucial date, as I see it, is 1921 when he received a copy of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a present from a Professor Woodbridge. (It is not quite clear whether Profes- sor Woodbridge actually gave Mortimer the book or merely in- scribed it for him, in the absence of the original author.) Most of his writing has been in what may be called the field of human (rather than cosmic, let alone divine) philosophy: in ethics, in poli- tics and social philosophy, in logic and method, and the philosophy of mind. But no one can be an Aristotelian, let alone one of a Thomist inflection like Mortimer, without metaphysics—a general conception of the world and of the place of human beings in it— looming in the background.

Aristotle, as students of philosophy soon discover, did not call his book Metaphysics; that was done by the editor, who meant by it simply “the books that come after the Physics.” As someone has pointed out, that is as much of a title as Collected Works, Volume 7. At any rate, what Aristotle described himself as doing was “first philosophy” or, a little more surprisingly, “theology.” First phi- losophy he went on to define as the study of “being qua being.” Some have taken that to mean being in itself or pure being. Morti- mer, following the scholastic tradition, takes it to be the study of absolute being or whatever does not owe its being to anything else—in other words, God. Although he would not restrict meta- physics to the study of God any more than Aristotle did in practice, he would still see it as the prime ingredient of the subject.

Aquinas on the Existence of God

Aquinas, the most devotedly Aristotelian of medieval philoso- phers, aimed to establish as much of Christian doctrine by reason alone as was possible. As central as anything to his work were his 32

proofs of the existence of God. He rejected the proof of God pro- posed by St. Anselm, commonly called, by those who have occa- sion to call it anything at all, the ontological proof. It concludes from the not unreasonable of God as that than which nothing more perfect can be conceived or thought of—that God must, by definition, exist. If he did not, something more perfect could be conceived, namely an otherwise identical thing that did exist. Aquinas regarded this as a piece of Platonic dialectical trick- ery and Mortimer follows him in doing so. But he thinks that it has a point. It does not prove God’s existence but it unfolds what is involved in the notion of God, or, at any rate, in the monotheistic notion of a unique supreme being, God with a capital G.

What Aquinas proposes in its place are his Five Ways. Most of these are variants of the infinite regress arguments by which Aris- totle proved the existence of his rather unusual God: the unmoved mover who passively causes all other movement by inspiring other things to strive toward his self-enclosed perfection. In the same spirit, but with a different result, Aquinas argues that the evident fact of movement in the world has to be started by some prime mover. A similar regressive argument concludes to the existence of a first cause. These arguments have an uncomfortably self- undermining flavor. Starting from the premises that everything that moves must be moved by something else or that every event must have a cause, they infer that, since an infinite series of movements or causal transactions is impossible, there must be something that moves other things, but is not itself moved, or that there is a cause that is not itself caused. The apparent contradiction is eluded by saying that the terminus of the regress moves or causes itself.

Mortimer rejects these famous arguments. The general principles about movement and causation on which they rely, in particular the assumption common to both of them that there cannot be an infi- nite series of movements or events, is not, he holds, demonstrable. Reason cannot prove that the world, the spatio-temporal order which he calls the cosmos, has not always existed, but came into existence some finite length of time ago in the past. That the world had always existed was a view of Aristotle’s which Aquinas had to correct to bring his system into line with the Christian doctrine of creation. To avoid a questionable assumption Mortimer follows Aristotle in supposing that the world has always existed.

Adler on Aquinas

In Mortimer’s view the best traditional argument for God’s exis- tence is Aquinas’s “third way.” That derives the existence of God 33

as a necessary being from the fact of the contingent existence of the cosmos and its constituents. Its official name brings this out; it is the argument a contingentia mundi, from the contingency of the world. A contingent being is one which can possibly not exist. The argument in its traditional form, as Mortimer presents it, is that a contingent being must be kept or preserved in existence at every moment at which it exists by a cause which exists at each of those moments, and that sustaining or preserving cause cannot be a con- tingent being.

The aspect of this argument (to Mortimer, the best available) which is deficient is the premise that a contingent being must have a coexisting cause of its continuing existence at every moment of its duration. He brings against it a generalized version of the prin- ciple of inertia, the Newtonian which states that a body contin- ues in the same state of rest or motion unless some force is im- pressed on it from outside. Individual things endure until some natural cause comes along to destroy them. For those who like that sort of thing, Mortimer’s doctrine here is reminiscent of Spinoza’s theory of nisus, the impulse of everything in the world to hang on to its existence.

I am not myself persuaded of the truth of the premise that Morti- mer rejects, although not exactly for the reason he gives. I am even less attracted by the premise he does accept, that a contingent be- ing cannot be sustained or preserved in existence by a contingent being. I shall come back to that later. For the moment one more bit of terminology needs to be introduced. This is the distinction be- tween what Mortimer calls the radical contingency of the cosmos and the permanent raw material of which it is composed, along with the superficial contingency of the complex, impermanent things made up of that raw material. Complex things come into being and pass out of it in the course of the history of the cosmos. But nothing is absolutely annihilated; it just decomposes into its simple constituents which are then available for composition into something else of a complex and destructible order. One comment is appropriate at this point. Is not the contingency of complex things more radical and less superficial than that of the permanent, naturally indestructible simples out of which they are made? Mortimer rather quietly affirms, in accordance with scholastic tra- dition, that what is contingent, defined as what is capable of non- existence, at some time or other does not exist. Now, ab esse ad posse valet consequentia, but not the other way around. What actu- ally is is certainly possible. But what is possible does not ever have to be, have to become actual.

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The only version of the cosmological argument acceptable to Mortimer derives the existence of God not from the contingent ex- istence of ordinary, complex individual things but from that of the “radically” contingent cosmos of which they are parts. Their con- tinued existence can be explained by the generalized inertia princi- ple—things just trundle along until something comes along to wreck them. But the radically contingent existence of the cosmos requires a supernatural explanation. Therefore, God exists, since the cosmos certainly does, although it does not have to exist—it is contingent.

Some interesting consequences are developed from this conclusion and I shall come to them in due course. But it is now my task to turn critic. When actors meet they inundate each other with insin- cere praise (“You were wonderful, darling”), dogs sniff each other out with varying degrees of indelicacy, traveling salesmen ex- change disgraceful stories. In their turn philosophers argue. Dis- pute is the life, even the lifeblood, of the subject. I just hope that Mortimer would feel defrauded if, at this point, having set out the essence of his reasoning, I were to say, “Well, that’s it, God’s exis- tence is proved at last.”

My Criticism of Adler’s Construct

My criticism will be to a considerable extent ad hominem, seeking to deduce conclusions unwelcome to Mortimer from his premises, whether I accept them or not. That is a questionable procedure only when the critic does not himself accept the premises, so I shall sig- nal clearly when that is taking place.

First of all, I would like to challenge the assumption that the con- tinued existence of a contingent being cannot be explained by an- other contingent being or beings. It seems to me that we do a great deal of rationally acceptable explaining of continued existence in this way. Why does this cathedral endure and not collapse into a heap of stone blocks? Because, in the first instance, of the flying buttresses that were added in the 14th century and, beyond that, as a necessary condition without which the flying buttresses would not have been any use, because of the solidity of the stone blocks, the close-packed lattice arrangement of the atoms in the molecules of which the blocks are composed. Many things, perhaps most, or even all, ordinary complex things disintegrate, go out of existence. Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Ou presque tout, anyway. Ani- mistically, we tend to think of going on existing as an increasingly laborious effort, as if inanimate objects aged in the way we and animals do. Mortimer expresses this at one poetic moment when he 35

says of contingent beings that “they tremble on the verge of non- existence.” That is the piece of mild rhetoric I mentioned earlier. It suggests that ordinary things are all like card houses or soap bub- bles or souffles, all likely to collapse at short notice into loose heaps of cards, small pools of soapy water or a kind of custard. But it is, surely, much more usual for things just to go on existing, unless something special happens to destroy them: a fire, an earth- quake, the roof falling in.

In the heyday of linguistic philosophy, the 1950s, its adherents would have scoffed at the idea that the continued existence of things needed any explanation. What alone required it was some- thing unusual, in particular going out of existence. They accepted something like Mortimer’s generalized principle of inertia. There are, I think, two things wrong with that. First of all, as my exam- ples of card houses, soap bubbles and souffles show, going out of existence soon after coming into it, and without any very striking external influence being involved, is in some cases the normal, ex- pectable occurrence. Generalized inertia is unequally distributed. Chunks of granite and diamonds have a lot of it; soap bubbles have very little. Things in general, like us, live in a dangerous world. They are seldom in a protected environment, safe from the depre- dations of potential destroyers. But some are a great deal tougher than others. That is something that ought to be, and in fact is, sus- ceptible to explanation. So generalized inertia is, at best, only a very partial explanation of the continued existence of things.

The second weakness of the theory that only the unusual calls for explanation is that it is of a somewhat coarsely practical nature. In everyday life we may seek only for explanation of the surprising, since we want to know how to avoid surprises. But that is not the point of view of science. The scientist looks for explanations of the ordinary and usual as well. Why do stones fall when released from the hand? Why do clouds discharge rain? Why do people age, in- stead of just getting older, like Mortimer?

Our present problem—the continuation in existence of some things rather than others—is that of why some things resist the varied buffeting they undergo more effectively than other things do. The short answer to this is that it is because of their solidity, which turns out to be a matter of the way in which the molecules of which they are composed are arranged, both internally and in the way they are compounded. It is a structural, rather than straightfor- wardly causal, explanation, but it is none the worse for that. It is not an “ultimate” explanation, in the sense that it closes off all fur- ther inquiry. It comes to an end in what might be called brute facts 36 about molecular structure. But it has the merit of locating the commonsensically obvious variety in the capacity of things to con- tinue in existence in the general conception of the world provided by physics.

So far I have been considering the question of continued natural or material existence in general terms. It might be thought to have little to do with Mortimer, except to the extent that I have given reasons for differing with him over the explanatory power of his generalized principle of inertia. He thinks that, because of that principle, there is no problem about the continued existence of or- dinary, complex physical things. Where there is a problem, he be- lieves, is with the cosmos, the totality of those physical things.

The ad Hominem

At this point I move toward the ad hominem. Mortimer holds that physical things, the constituents of the cosmos, are of two kinds: complexes and simples. All coming-to-be and passing-away in the cosmos is for him a matter of rearrangement. A complex thing comes into existence when some set of simples comes to be ar- ranged in a certain way and goes out of existence when that com- plex-constituting arrangement breaks down. But the simples are permanent, they do not come and go.

Now I do not believe in his principle of inertia. Nor am I con- vinced of the truth of the principle that all natural change is a mat- ter of the rearrangement of naturally indestructible simple objects. Scientific authority is my basis for thinking that the conservation of matter has been replaced by the conservation of energy. More to the point, I do not see that it follows from Mortimer’s assumption, for the purposes of argument, that the cosmos has no beginning and has always existed, that the same complete endurance has been a feature of any of its constituents, especially of any of its object- like constituents. Why should not the great pool of energy congeal here and there and from time to time into fundamental particles, some very long-lived perhaps, others the pathetic ephemera gener- ated in linear accelerators, but none as long-lived as the cosmos itself? Clubs, after all, can live longer than any of their members.

I would like to examine Mortimer’s doctrine of the permanent cosmos and its permanent simple constituents a little more closely, in the ad hominem light of his own contentions. In the first place, there is really no distinction between them. The cosmos is, at all times, identical with the totality of its simple constituents. It is not identical with its complex constituents, since they come and go and 37

at any time some simples may not be arranged as parts of a com- plex. Mortimer’s cosmos continues to exist for as long as its simple components do. For either to go out of existence is for the other to do so as well.

There are two crucial points to be made at this point. Mortimer maintains that the cosmos, and its simple constituents, exist at all times. Simples, unlike complexes, cannot be naturally annihilated. It surely follows that they, and the cosmos whose existence is a logically necessary consequence of their existence, are fully ca- tered for within his scheme of ideas by the generalized principle of inertia. If that principle can sustain destructible complex things for a while, can it not even more reliably preserve the indestructible simples and the cosmos they compose? Despite Mortimer’s be- stowal of the epithets “radical” and “superficial,” it is surely the simples and the cosmos whose contingency is superficial. They have a much firmer hold on existence than complexes do. Far from trembling on the edge of non-existence, they thumb their noses at it, confident of their natural indestructibility.

The second point is that, as Mortimer describes them, the cosmos and its simple constituents are not really contingent at all. Contin- gent is a technical term, when it does not mean a group of soldiers. What is contingent, in the primary meaning of the term, is what is possibly so and also possibly not so. A contingent existence, there- fore, is something which possibly exists but also possibly does not exist. In that sense the cosmos, and all its constituents, simple or complex, are contingent. But Mortimer also says that whatever may not exist, possibly does not exist, and at some time actually does not exist. In that interpretation of contingency, only com- plexes are really contingent. The cosmos and its constituent sim- ples exist at all times and thus have necessary existence, as does God.

To say that something has necessary existence, according to Mortimer, is not, as I suppose most contemporary philosophers would assume, to say that the proposition that it exists is a neces- sary truth, one that it would be self-contradictory to deny. What it positively does mean is that it exists at all times. And that is true, in his view, of the cosmos and the simples that make it up. I con- clude that, on Mortimer’s assumptions, the cosmos and its eternal parts have their existence better accounted for by the generalized principle of inertia than anything else and, secondly, that since they have necessary, that is to say eternal, existence, they do not need to have their continued existence accounted for, since they are not truly contingent anyway. 38

The Main Argument contra Adler

But my main general argument against Mortimer is that although continued existence can be explained, and not only when it is un- usual or unexpected, it will be in terms of the structure of the exist- ing thing in question and will always aim to show how the thing is preserved by its structure from the potentially destructive influence of the world around it.

I want to turn now to the inferences Mortimer draws from his the- sis that there exists, and has always existed, something that pre- serves the cosmos and its parts in existence. Let me quote his cru- cial passage: “If the cosmos needs an efficient cause of its continu- ing existence to prevent its annihilation,” and he has argued that it does, “then that cause must be a supernatural being, supernatural in its action, and one the existence of which is uncaused, in other words, the supreme being, or God” (HTG 137). I am not going to challenge his claim that the cause of the continued existence is su- pernatural. My concern now is with the premise that cosmos has a supernatural cause of its continued existence to the conclusion that cause is (1) uncaused, (2) the supreme being and (3) God. As re- gards (1) the uncausedness of the great preservative cause, it is not clear to me why it should itself be uncaused. It would be disap- pointing if it were not since that would seem to put us back on an infinitely regressive treadmill of reasoning. But it does not appear to follow from the premise that it is the supernatural cause of the continued existence of the cosmos that it is uncaused. Even if it were uncaused, would it follow that it was THE Supreme Being? It would certainly be enormously powerful, as the eternal preserver of the existence of the cosmos. But that is not to say that it is su- premely intelligent, to take the most salient example of the time dimensions of supremacy of the Supreme Being. Nothing in the argument so far shows that it discharges its supportive role freely.

Mortimer is very well aware that his reasonings do not supply those who accept them with a God along traditional lines. It does not plainly follow from those reasonings that the God whose exis- tence they aim to support is good or, more specifically, benevo- lently disposed toward us. But I wonder if he takes the caution em- bodied in that admission far enough. He argues that the preserver of the cosmos must be, in an appropriately analogical sense, living and intelligent, because what is living and intelligent is more pow- erful than anything that is not. Is that inference coercive? Is any human being as powerful, in the natural terms that are relevant here, as a volcano or a comet, hurtling toward a heavenly body? 39

It could be objected that I am being too captious here. After all, Mortimer does not claim to have proved the existence of God, only to have provided reasonable grounds for believing in it. He does that because he thinks the proposition that the cosmos is radically contingent and needs an efficient cause of its continued existence “cannot be affirmed with certitude” (HTG 149). In the same mod- erate spirit he acknowledges that the cosmos-preserver whose exis- tence he has established is only the remote, abstract “God of the philosophers,” not the God of the ordinary religious believer.

But in these closing pages of his book he does make a large and questionable leap of thought. Satisfied that he has given reasonable grounds for believing in the existence of an efficient cause of the continued existence of the cosmos, he at once supposes that he has proved the existence of God, of something with all the characteris- tics included in the standard notion of God: being that than which nothing greater can be thought of, being omnipotent and omnis- cient. No doubt bringing it about that the cosmos continues to exist is quite a feat, but it surely falls a long way short of establishing that the being that does this is God, the being that is supreme in all respects. I am not questioning the inference from the premise that God, the supreme being exists, to the conclusion that something is omnipotent and omniscient, and that being is, analogically, a per- son. What I question is the assumption that Mortimer makes in passing when he writes, “anything less than an omnipotent being could not make something out of nothing, or prevent something that exists from being reduced to absolute nothingness (HTG 166).

I do not for a moment imagine that Mortimer will be gravely dis- turbed by the questions I have raised. Reading him closely one has to be impressed by the inventiveness and ingenuity with which he protects himself against possible objections. For example, he is far too wary to infer from the immaterial nature of his God that he therefore is or has a mind. That is derived from God’s intrinsic su- premacy together with the superiority of persons to mere things. Some might reject that view of the superiority of persons as an- thropomorphism. It is, at any rate, a piece of anthropomorphism we anthropoids find it difficult to discard.

Although the idea that the continued existence of things needs some general explanation from outside the cosmos is hard to un- dermine persuasively—whether one finds it acceptable or not is almost a matter of metaphysical taste—I think I have presented Mortimer with an internal difficulty which needs to be dealt with. Why should the cosmos alone need an external preserver? Admit- 40

tedly it is contingent in just the same way as the eternal simple items of which Mortimer takes it to be composed. If their contin- ued existence is due to the generalized principle of inertia (which is, as far as I can see, something Mortimer neither affirms nor de- nies, but he should agree with it), then why should that not also be true of the cosmos they compose and which is indeed identical with the totality of them?

The Winnowed Residue

The doctrines put forward in How to Think About God are very much Mortimer’s, a carefully winnowed residue of a major intel- lectual tradition. The argument to God from continued existence is not new. Descartes offers a version of it in his third Meditation:

It is clear when one considers the nature of time, that just the same power and agency is needed to preserve any object at the various moments of its duration as would be needed to create it anew if it did not yet exist.

Descartes applies the principle only to the explanation of his own existence as a thinking being since, at that stage of the argument, it is all that he is sure of. The novelty of Mortimer’s approach is to apply it to the material world or cosmos as a whole without apply- ing it to the components of the cosmos and without combining it with a parallel argument to an initial creator.

I now await with interest and some trepidation Mortimer’s emer- gence from his corner of the ring, conscious of the large number of interesting issues I have not been able to take up, but in the hope that I have given due attention to the heart of Mortimer’s argu- ment.

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Adlerian Desire and the Measure of Morality

Russell Hittinger

n Desires Right & Wrong, Mortimer Adler argues that “desiring I aright” is the primary concern of the moral life, for desire is the proper object of moral praise and blame.1 Does this mean that we praise or blame an agent merely for having a desire? No. As Adler explains, some desires spring immediately from human nature, and therefore represent authentic “needs.” We do not, for example, morally praise or blame a person for desiring food, drink, knowl- edge or friends. To use the older scholastic phrase, these desires are secundum naturam (according to nature). As such, they are al- ways “right” because they indicate real rather than merely apparent goods. These are goods to which we are adapted by nature, and which agents know and pursue “naturally.”

According to the Aristotelian tradition that inspires Adler’s phi- losophy, we must distinguish between feelings, capacities and

1 “It is desiring aright that is primary. All the rest follows from that.” Mortimer J. Adler, Desires Right & Wrong. New York: Macmillan, 1991, p. 8.

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states. The fact that we have the capacity for certain feelings is natural. Moral judgments are not made about the capacity or feel- ing, but about the state or disposition of the person with regard to the feelings.

We can be afraid, for example, or be confident, or have appe- tites, or get angry, or feel pity, in general have pleasure or pain . . . but having these feelings at the right times, about the right things, toward the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the intermediate and best condition, and this is proper to virtue.2

Similarly, when Adler speaks of “desiring aright,” he means those desires which owe their existence, at least in part, to the person’s own intentions, choices and actions.3 “In the sphere of our de- sires,” Adler maintains, “the distinction between right and wrong is applicable only to our wants.”4 Thus, we blame a person not for desiring food and drink, but rather for being intemperate. Intem- perance denotes the habitual disposition of an agent to “want” something that is not in accord with his nature. Wanting is ad- judged wrong when one desires an apparent good that prevents or seriously impedes the attainment of real good we need.5

As Adler makes clear, the primacy of right desire is either outright rejected or demoted by modern schools of “ethics.” By “ethics,” modern philosophers usually do not mean the rectitude of appetite and inclination, but rather the rightness of choice according to a

2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.6.1106b20.

3 Adler’s point is that moral praise and blame are predicated of “wants,” which may or may not be right; that is, “wants” which may or may not be in accord with what is truly our well-being. “The only wants that are intrinsically right desires for real goods are the wants identical with our needs. When we actually want what we naturally need, then our wants are right desires. But they are not acquired as all other wants are. They come into existence by an act of will - an act of the intellectual appetite, after rational deliberation, discipline, and deci- sion to want what we ought to desire.” Desires Right & Wrong, p. 28. When we praise or blame, we take note of the conformity or lack of conformity between the good (that one really needs) and the desire (the wanting).

4 Desires Right & Wrong, p. 28.

5 Id., p. 31. Adler notes that we desire rightly when we want some innocuous apparent good; that is, a good that we do not naturally need, and which poses no impediment to the pursuit and achievement of real goods. However, some in- nocuous goods, such as money or fame, can be wrongly desired when they are desired only for their own sake. Id., p. 38.

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rule. To be sure, the fact that a human agent is lustful or greedy or envious bespeaks certain psychological “facts”—qualities which we might find agreeable or disagreeable—but they do not disclose states of character which are judged moral or immoral. Moral praise and blame are predicated only of choices in relation to a rule of reason which is formal and which is derived independent of natural ends and desires. By and large, modern moral philosophy envisages “ethics” as a set of puzzles for decision making.

Immanuel Kant, who is at once the most influential and notorious rule-based ethician, held that a person’s inclination designates nothing whatsoever of the moral worth of an action. In Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant proposed that when the person acts “without any inclination at all, but solely from duty—then for the first time his action has genuine moral worth.”6 For Kant, “duty” is the conformity of the will to a formal, universalizable imperative. Only a will determined by such a rule, and never a will conformed to the path traced out by inclination, can be said to be morally good. To perform an act because of desire’s conformity with the object is not to act in a way that can be morally praised.7

This restriction of “ethics” to choice in conformance to a rule is not just characteristic of Kantianism. Utilitarianism adopts a similar approach to ethics. For a utilitarian like Mill, “ethics” consists chiefly, if not exclusively, in the choice to maximize the greatest happiness—not just for oneself, but the greatest amount of happi- ness altogether. True enough, Mill and other utilitarians differ from Kant in their willingness to consult the actual desires of men.8 In the final account, however, the utilitarian holds that the morally right action or policy is determined by the rule of utility. In other words, we do not morally appraise the inherent properties of de- sires, but rather estimate the consequences of a decision with re- spect to some aggregate of happiness.

6 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, James W. Elling- ton, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981, 1:398:11. In fact, where duty is willed against a prevailing inclination, there we most clearly grasp the nature of morals. To use a Dickensonian figure, the Scrooge who has no Christmas spirit, whose desires are cold and unsympathetic with regard to his fellow man, shows more clearly than anyone the primacy of duty when he chooses to do the right thing. When one performs his duty contrary to inclination, the purity of moral obliga- tion is seen in all of its glory.

7 Of course, the act is not necessarily morally blameworthy either. The point is that it bears no moral predicates whatsoever. Desire is amoral.

8 Desires Right & Wrong, p. 158.

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Drawing upon Aristotle, Mortimer Adler rejects the reduction of ethics to formalism. The “habitual intentions or choices of our will,” he maintains, reflect the moral properties of action. There- fore, although a particular act might well be “correct” in relation to a rule, that act does not necessarily merit moral praise unless it is done from the right habit of desire. In one of the most arresting remarks in Desires Right & Wrong, Adler maintains that “one can be forgiven for a wrong action, but never for a wrong habitual de- sire, such as greed, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.”9

A Test Case

In order to test the Adlerian thesis that desiring “aright is primary,” let us consider the following example. A married professional woman finds herself sexually attracted to a married man with whom she works. This attraction is not a matter of occasional rev- erie. It is nourished in the imagination and appetite over time. Eventually, she deliberates about how she might seduce the man. She does not just have a sexual desire (which is natural); nor does she just have a passing desire to have sex with this particular man. Rather, she has enacted this desire through phases of intention, de- liberation and judgment (about the means to the end).

At the moment of choice she brings herself up short. She finds her- self in search of an “ethical” rule to govern the choice. Let’s sup- pose that she reflects on her college survey course on philosophical ethics, recalling the Kantian dictum that one must always will ac- cording to that maxim or rule that could be willed universally. She admits to herself that she wouldn’t want her husband to cheat.10 She also recalls the utilitarian precept that one must always act to maximize happiness for everyone. Admittedly, this rule would seem to give her more leeway in the choice. But, after reflecting on the bad consequences of losing her marriage, and the bad conse- quences for the marriage of the man she wants to seduce, and after considering the possibility of contracting a venereal disease, she concludes that the principle of utility probably forbids her choice.

9 Desires Right & Wrong, p. 9.

10 . . . although it would be interesting to consider how Kant would handle the woman’s belief that it is good for married spouses to have a bit of recreational sex on the side, in which case the choice to commit the adulterous act could be universalized. See Adler’s criticism of the empty formalism in Kant’s notion of the Golden Rule, Desires Right & Wrong, p. 91.

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The net result is that she chooses not to seduce the man. Although no external act is chosen, she is as desirous of sexual congress as she was before she made the choice.

Now, in order to bring this example back to our original question about the moral properties of action, let’s consider the following coda to the story. The woman goes home and says to her husband: “Honey, you would be real proud of me. I have wanted for months to seduce Mr. X at work. I actually plotted out the means to this end. But I refused to choose the act. I did my duty according to an ethical rule.”

Provided that we are dealing here with a normal person who is not entirely corrupted by ethical theories, the husband will not praise her. Of course, he might be relieved that she did not make the “wrong” choice. But he will be profoundly disturbed by her report. For despite the fact that the particular choice was “right,” or at least not “wrong,” he is more liable to be interested in the moral character of her habitual “wants.” In short, he suspects that the rightness of the choice does not fully account for what needs to be “right.”

Is the husband’s interest in his wife’s character correct? From the moral point of view, is he on the right track when he focuses upon the wife’s state of character rather than the individual act? Accord- ing to Kant, the husband would be wrong to conclude that his wife was morally blameworthy. The husband has no legitimate moral expectation that the wife have the right desires, but only that she respect herself and others according to the rule of duty. Indeed, the fact that her choice ran completely against the grain of her deepest desires indicates the true moral worth of the choice. According to utilitarians, the husband would have to admit that if the calculus of happiness favored his wife’s affair, then he would have to praise the act (whatever discomfort and pain it caused to him personally).

I submit that any ethical theory that cannot explain why the hus- band was right to blame his wife is a theory that is out of accord with reality—that is, it is out of accord with what reasonable peo- ple do all of the time when they make moral assessments. Various “theories” of ethics notwithstanding, persons praise and blame other agents not merely in the light of whether a choice conformed to an extrinsic rule, but according to the kind of desire that ought to be present in the agent.

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Some Questions

Adler emphasizes reasonably enough that a single act can be blamed in matters of (e.g., the single act of murder): “When we pass from the sphere of private to that of social life, from purely self-regarding action to action that affects other individuals or the organized community, the standards of approval or disap- proval are somewhat different. Here it is possible for a single act to be absolutely wrong, if it infringes on the rights of another man in such a way that it irremediably deprives him of something he needs in order to make a good life for himself.”11

In this respect, Adler is surely correct to insist that the analysis of single acts is crucial to matters of justice. However in the sphere of private life Adler maintains that “no particular act can be judged absolutely right or wrong, absolutely good or bad.”12 He contends that in the private sphere, we must look at particular acts in the light of whether they incline or dispose the person in “the achievement of his ultimate end . . . in the long run of his life as a whole.”13

Our earlier example of the lusting wife perhaps confuses the spheres of private life and justice. Unlike the case of someone ha- bitually disposed to gluttony (which on the face of it seems to fall into the private sphere), the issue of adultery arguably falls into the category of justice, where individual acts can be judged absolutely good or bad.14 But it is interesting nonetheless that Adler’s main point about character and disposition still holds in the case I sketched about the lusting wife. Although the woman did the right thing in the particular act (she did not do anything unjust), the deeper and more interesting question of morality concerns the rightness of her desire. To paraphrase Adler, the husband might forgive and forget an individual act of adultery, but the wife’s ha- bitual desire to cheat is quite another matter. The habitual desire to

11 Mortimer Adler, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970, p. 197.

12 Mortimer Adler, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970, p. 197.

13 Id.

14 As Aristotle said, adultery is an act that admits of no “mean”; which is to say that adultery is something that cannot be done well or ill. It cannot be done at all. Nicomachean Ethics 2.6.1107a15.

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act unjustly remains a significant datum for moral appraisal.

By way of summary so far, we can propose that we legitimately expect other persons to have right desires. We expect other agents not merely to make “right” choices when such occasions of choice present themselves, but also to be “right” persons: viz. to be this kind of person rather than that kind of person.

Perhaps we need to ask where we should draw the line between private and public virtues and vices. Can we legitimately expect our fellows to have right desires, even in those matters which are, in one respect or another, merely private? Let’s say over matters of material wealth, sexual self-restraint, drugs, or even prayer? I say “legitimately expect,” not necessarily in the manner of a legal ex- pectation. For the sake of argument, let us admit that the fact that someone develops a bad character is not necessarily an issue of crime or torts. It is an ancient principle of Western law that human positive law should not enter into the interior “rightness” of de- sire.15 The legal doctrine of mens rea (guilt of the mind) usually concerns an external act and the agent’s intention to perform it. At criminal law, the defendant cannot be convicted merely because he is alleged to have had a wrong desire.16

At least in our legal culture, there are any number of bad habits which are not justiciable issues. As Adler observes, “There is cur- rently much talk about the sexual revolution—the shift from pro- hibitive restrictions to almost unlimited permissiveness. This shift is on solid moral grounds, as far as social prohibitions, coercively imposed by the community, are concerned. The community has no grounds whatsoever for prohibiting or censuring simple fornica- tion, or other forms of sexual behavior that were once regarded as perverse or unnatural.”17 The person of moral virtue, who habitu- ally aims at what is really his own good, will judge the particular act, not in isolation, but in the light of the ultimate end. Thus, Adler concludes, “it is never a single act of fornication that is to be

15 Of course, Aristotle and the classical tradition would view positive law as indirectly fostering certain interior dispositions. A law that prohibits a wicked act does not make the agent good, but by directing the external action the law can remove further opportunity to build up the immoral disposition.

16 I take it that although a state of character has moral significance, it cannot directly be an object of law. Of course, indirectly such states are taken into ac- count, such as in probation and parole decisions, or in custody cases.

17 Desires Right & Wrong, p. 127.

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morally condemned, but rather the habitual fornicator who is dis- posed to seek sexual pleasure on all occasions and without limit, thus displacing other real goods in the economy of his time and energies.”18 So, private acts of this sort are not usually justiciable in the legal and political sense, because there is no way to impose a rule in advance. They simply are not subject to law in the same way as acts of murder, fraud or treason.19

For the sake of argument, let us assume that Adler is correct. Some kinds of acts are not inherently amenable to law. Even so, the goodness or badness of a person’s character is not divided (in ordo rerum) between private and public virtues and vices. It is one agent who acts. Private intemperance is not unrelated to public justice.20 Considered only in itself, gluttony is not a matter of justice. In- deed, it would be a rather private vice. But in a society ravaged by famine and scarce resources, gluttony could be an important con- cern in the sphere of justice. So, the way an individual might judge the particular act in the light of his ultimate end is not necessarily the way that society will judge the particular act.21 Wanton sexual excess, greed, gluttony—indeed, virtually every excess of desire in the area of pleasure—can have terrible consequences for a society. Many of the most pressing public issues in our polity are related to seemingly private vices. At the current rate, for example, the ma-

18 Id., p. 128.

19 Adler notes that “right desire consists in desiring what everyone ought to de- sire. But what should every human being desire? That which is really good for all of them in accordance with their common human nature.” Desires Right & Wrong, p. 27. But the fact that we can judge certain kinds of desire to be out of accord with human nature does not necessarily mean that they ought to become matters of law. Gluttony, for instance, is not ordinarily something reached by law, even though it is out of accord with what we ought to desire in the way of eating.

20 “[A] man cannot be genuinely prudent without also being at the same time genuinely temperate, courageous, and just.” Desires Right & Wrong, p. 63.

21 St. Thomas, for example, says in one place that simple fornication is usually to be left unpunished by human positive law (II-II, q. 69.2 ad 1). But, should such acts cause grave social harm, the reason for bringing them under law is not drawn from any necessary cause-effect relation between an individual act and the common good, but rather from the general tendency of such acts to cause social harm: “Nor does it matter if a man having knowledge of a woman by for- nication, make sufficient provision for the upbringing of the child: because a matter that comes under the determination of the law is judged according to what happens in general, and not according to what may happen in a particular case” (II-II, q. 154.2).

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jority of children born in the United States will be illegitimate by the year 2012. Today, it already approaches 70 percent in the black community.

Liberalism has tended to treat dogmatically the distinction between private and public. Within a purely private sphere, the good of lib- erty is thought to be unlimited—in fact, rights are claimed to oc- cupy precisely such a sphere. No moral evaluation of private states of character can be enforced at the level of law or public policy. Adler, however, claims that liberty cannot be rightly desired if it is desired without any limitation. How much liberty of action is rightly desired? Adler answers: “Individuals ought to desire the liberty to do as they please only if they can exercise that freedom without injuring others and without depriving others of their free- dom to do as they please. Human beings should have no more freedom than they can use justly in obedience to just law, civil or moral, and in relation to the good of other human beings. Only when it is thus limited is the circumstantial freedom of self- realization rightly desired.”22

How wide is the sphere denominated by the phrase “and in relation to the good of other human beings”? It seems to me that this ques- tion cannot be answered dogmatically. Some kinds of vice (e.g., gluttony, or sexual titillation having no purpose other than self- pleasuring) are ordinarily private and self-regarding. They may be morally blameworthy, but are not necessarily objects of public in- terest. Other acts of vice (e.g., murder) are necessarily public, be- cause they al-ways involve unjust harm to others.

But there is a wide range of vices which can fall somewhere in be- tween purely self-regarding and public. Hence, it is difficult to give an apodictic precept regarding (1) how much liberty can be rightly desired, and (2) how much liberty can be rightly restricted for the public good. Given that there are some actions which are necessar- ily unjust, perhaps we ought to ask whether there is such a thing as a purely self-regarding desire or action. By “purely,” I mean that we can confidently and universally state that such an action or de- sire should never fall over into the public sphere of justice.

Is it not part of jurisprudentia to ascertain when and how otherwise private vices become amenable to the interests of public policy? Would it not also be part of jurisprudentia to ascertain which states of character ought to be cultivated and supported by the public? In

22 Desires Right & Wrong, p. 69.

50 short, can the ethics of right desire, with its commonsense virtue of avoiding dogmatism in morals, reconcile itself with the public dogma of liberalism?

PUBLISHER & EDITOR MAX WEISMANN EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MARIE E. COTTER

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE GREAT IDEAS

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