A Great Idea at the Time by Alex Beam

Author:Alex Beam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Mortimer Adler lived on eleven more years, in progressively failing health, until his death in 2001. He continued to teach seminars to the business “bozos,” as he called them behind their backs, at the Aspen Institute. Since the early 1980s, he had been promoting an elementary school version of the Great Books, called the Paideia Proposal (paideia means “education” in Greek), that had pretty much run out of gas by the time of his death. For much of his life, up until 1995, he published or edited a book a year. Like Hutchins’s, some of Adler’s later efforts flirted with absurdity. He published an Aquinas-like “proof” that God created the cosmos. He took to calling latter-day philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein “ignoramuses,” scoring their insufficient appreciation of Aristotle.

Although he had converted to Catholicism shortly before his death, Adler’s memorial service took place at the high Episcopal church he frequented while living in Chicago, St. Chrysostom’s on the Gold Coast. His friend Max Weissman read the Twenty-Third Psalm. Adler’s first son Mark also read, and Mark Van Doren’s son Charles delivered the last of three eulogies. Charles, a former lecturer at Columbia, does not like to talk about the quiz show scandal that effectively ended his life in polite society, but he mentioned it at Adler’s service: “And then there came the time when I fell down, face down in the mud, and he picked me up, brushed me off, and gave me a job.”

Adler did give Van Doren a behind-the-scenes job at Britannica, after his best friend’s son had suffered national disgrace. “He saved Charlie’s life,” Sydney Hyman says. “Everyone knows that.” “He was very loyal to people,” Charles’s brother John recalled. “He had all sorts of philosopher pals on some sort of retainer to Britannica. But people were not loyal to him.”

Adler never had an academic job after he left the University of Chicago in 1946. He was generally unwelcome on American campuses, with the possible exception of St. John’s, and lived off his Britannica work, occasional grants for “philosophical” inquiry, his Aspen seminars, and his frantic publishing schedule. “You won’t find his name in a dictionary of philosophers,” John Van Doren continued. “There is not a single mention of him in the most recently published Dictionary of 20th Century American Philosophy. He doesn’t exist. I think it’s a great pity.” “He made people believe that they could think seriously about ideas outside the university academic structure,” says Howard Zeiderman, a tutor at St. John’s. “He did something that was terrifically important, because there is a hunger in this country on the part of people who want to think. For better or worse, he tried to address that.”

Like Hutchins at the end of his life, Adler, too, judged himself harshly. Charles Van Doren told me about one of the last conversations he had with Adler, who was speaking by telephone from his retirement home in San Mateo, California: “He said: ‘You know, Charles, everything that I’ve done has been forgotten. My life has been a failure.

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