The Plastic Nietzsche, Part VII: The Final Entry In My Serial Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior Entries: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and Part VI.

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Walter Kaufmann is a key figure in American Nietzsche. Other reviewers have taken note, and I concur that Ratner-Rosenhagen's analysis of that translator and promoter of Nietzsche's thought deserves praise. In this final entry of my series I return to him in order to reflect on a brief but noteworthy section of the book. That section goes to the paradoxical core of why Nietzsche is both valuable and problematic for philosophers and deep thinkers of all stripes. Along with the Interlude, this portion of the book also helps explain his relevance to the thinking realms of a democratic culture. Taken together these two parts of the book constitute the heart and soul of American Nietzsche.

Several immigrant and émigré Nietzsches existed in American thought before Kaufmann's work became prominent. Ratner-Rosenhagen provides rudimentary outlines of versions celebrated by Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, and especially Theodor Adorno (pp. 226-233). But it was Kaufmann's Nietzsche that would capture the imagination of American thinkers. In Ratner-Rosenhagen's hands, Kaufmann's Nietzsche is the Enlightenment's "problem thinker" and "serious philosopher" who expressed himself---and this is key---in aphorisms. Nietzsche becomes the philosopher who had lost his "faith in mankind" and some "optimism" but "still shared the Enlightenment belief in man." To Kaufmann the latter expressed itself in a "reasoned philosophy of 'self-perfection'" that reconciled the sometimes contradictory claims of Nietzsche's aphorisms (p. 234). The Interlude demonstrated how Nietzsche connected to readers in a democracy, but his aphorisms explain the accessible, democratic nature of his philosophy. The "aphoristic style," then, is both the problem and the key to understanding Nietzsche the philosopher.

But what are "aphorisms"? According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, they are "concise statement[s] of a principle" or "terse formulation[s] of a truth or sentiment," an "adage." The following entry from the Concise Encyclopedia is located on that same webpage. Aphorisms are (bolds mine): "Terse formulation of any generally accepted truth or sentiment conveyed in a pithy, memorable statement. The term was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, a long series of propositions concerning disease and the art of healing. Aphorisms were used especially in dealing with subjects for which principles and methodology developed relatively late, including art, agriculture, medicine, jurisprudence, and politics, but in the modern era they have usually been vehicles of wit and pithy wisdom. Celebrated modern aphorists include Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde."

The term 'aphorism' arises seven times in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in entries for "Francis Bacon," "Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy," "Spinoza's Physical Theory," "Metaphor," etc. The most substantive treatment is in the entry on "Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy." Here are some excerpts (bolds mine):

- "This form is not terribly common in the medieval period. Two works worthy of mention are Al-Farabi's political aphorisms and a text attributed to Hermes Trimegistus...called The Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers. This text consists of twenty-four definitions of God...Al-Farabi's work, known as 'Selected Aphorisms' gets this title from its opening lines, in which Al-Farabi says the work consists of selected aphorisms from the ancients (Plato and Aristotle) 'concerning that by which cities ought to be governed and made prosperous...' (Butterworth, 2001, 5-6)."
- "The aphoristic form seems to raise some of the same questions about possible esoteric motivations as does the allegorical form. In the case of The Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers the form seems to derive from the inaccessibility of the divine nature to human intellection."
- "In genre some medieval works fall somewhere between aphorism and axiom, most significantly works connected to the important and influential Liber de causis. The Liber circulated as a work of Aristotle under the title Liber Aristotelis de expositione bonitatis purae until the 13th century when Thomas Aquinas found its source in Proclus's Elements of Theology....The work seems to present its principles as axioms, but the principles and their explanation/derivation is not really demonstrative and the principles themselves are highly abstract Neoplatonic metaphysical principles that are sometimes as paradoxical as they are self-evident." 

So when you read Nietzsche you find an ancient form of philosophy where axioms, or adages, are expressed with brevity, or conciseness. But the form also raises questions about "esoteric motivations" and the demonstrability of the given aphorism. The form makes the principle presented feel like Biblical wisdom, but the principle may also feel self-evident, paradoxical, or just inscrutable upon further exploration. The aphorism presents Nietzsche and his philosophy as both trustworthy and mysterious. This likely buttressed the feelings of those already attracted to Nietzsche's exoticism. The thing to remember, however, is that Nietzsche's form derived from a long, if troublesome, tradition in philosophy.

Returning to American Nietzsche, in her discussion of Kaufmann's re-presentation of Nietzsche's works Ratner-Rosenhagen makes an important observation. While Nietzsche disdained writers who put style over substance---"literary decadence" he called it---his own philosophical writings were based on "lightning strike" aphorisms and what appear to be "flashes of insight" (p. 234). So not only were his aphorisms a potential problem as a philosophical presentation, but Nietzsche contradicted himself in relation to his own style. The crafty Kaufmann, however, used Nietzsche's own criticism "to inoculate" the latter "against the very charge" of "literary decadence" (pp. 234-235). In the following extended passage, Ratner-Rosenhagen uses Kaufmann's own 1950 work, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, to shed light on Kaufmann's maneuvers (bolds mine):

Kaufmann defended Nietzsche's use of aphorism by arguing that it was the necessary means for him to radically revise both the mode and the purpose of philosophical inquiry. He argued that aphorisms were crucial to Nietzsche's pluralistic project, for they let him come at the question of life from as many different angles as possible. In addition, [Kaufmann] argued that Nietzsche's aphorisms served as thought experiments, provisional hypotheses to test new visions of the good life in a contingent universe. He characterized both Nietzsche's theory of knowledge and the form he used to express it by introducing the terms experimental and existential. By this, Kaufmann meant that questions about truth, beliefs, and nature are valuable only insofar as they are relevant to one's way of life. For Nietzsche, philosophy is [in Kaufmann's words] 'not a finished and impersonal system, but a passionate quest for knowledge, an unceasing series of courageous experiments.' ...For Kaufmann, Nietzsche's existentialism is best understood when we consider him to be a 'problem-thinker', not a 'system-thinker', and that his use of aphorism was his way of 'living through each problem.' By insisting that aphorism is not an abandonment but a realization of the serious inquiry into the problems of living...Kaufmann connected the dots: 'Life does indeed reside in the whole of Nietzsche's thinking and writing, and there is a unity which is obscured, but not obliterated, by the apparent discontinuity of his experimentalism.' (pp. 235-236).

This passage raises many tough, perhaps unanswerable, questions: What did Kaufmann mean exactly by "the question of life"? Is the phrase "pluralistic project" anachronistic (i.e. presentist) in relation to Nietzsche---a relic of Kaufmann's own thought project? Is Kaufmann's existential vision of Nietzsche also anachronistic, or are the unifying threads real? At what point does a Nietzschean "thought experiment" turn into a verifiable, demonstrable axiom to contributes to a new vision of the good? When does it become a Nico-Nietzschean Ethic, if you will? To Kaufmann it never will. Based on Kaufmann's description of Nietzsche as the uber-practitioner of an "experimental...philosophy of life" (p. 236), was Nietzsche more of a non-systematic, anti-formal proto-pragmatist than proto-existentialist?* Do aphorisms crush logic while exemplifying an alternate reality-based rationality?

Despite the seriousness of these questions, if one can set them aside temporarily, the appeal of aphorisms is obvious. They are an accessible, democratic way of philosophizing. They provide people not trained in formal philosophy with an entry point into the game of "serious inquiry into the problems of living." Aphorisms enable one to be antifoundational and anti-systematic without being anti-philosophical. Nietzsche's aphorisms allowed his thought to be inserted in different contexts and different times. Even if Kaufmann used Nietzsche's thought in ways that fit the former's existentialist program, Nietzsche himself also allowed for it. His "lightning strikes" could be inserted in many contexts. And because Nietzsche was concerned with the alienation of modernity, as well as with the historicism of moral and ethical systems, his aphorisms have been relevant to twentieth-century problems. The "aphoristic style" enabled plasticity, a variety of American Nietzsches.

Aphorisms are often provocations. Provocations inspire different thinking, diversity in thought: agreement can wait. There is, of course, much more to philosophy than mere provocation. But an appreciation of aphoristic provocation helps in understanding why Nietzsche has appealed to twentieth-century Americans. Democratic culture seeks to both foster and reconcile provocations. The Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis captures a great part of that process. But that beginning point, the thesis, is almost always a provocation---either accidentally or purposefully. The enlightened autonomous difference maker is almost always going to provoke her/his friends and colleagues. And this is what made "Kaufmann's Nietzsche...an indispensable seer, critic, and educator" to his readers (p. 261).

This presentation of Nietzsche has its limitions. Ratner-Rosenhagen points this out in her own critique of Kaufmann's Nietzsche. The pursuit of a provocative, "Dionysian," authentic self-hood was, in Nietzsche, accompanied by a "repeated emphasis on the warring instincts" (p. 261). Kaufmann's Nietzsche was monistic, ahistorical, and apolitical, which contradicted Nietzsche's own emphasis on historical rootedness. Kaufmann emphasized "Nietzsche's intellectual self-sovereignty" above the rest of the thinker's themes (p. 261). Kaufmann's Nietzsche sold, at least among thoughtful Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. But it undersold Nietzsche's complexity and contradictions. The provocative, aphoristic Ubermensch---a Nietzsche confused with the partial explication of his philosophy---captured the imaginations among the fearful. This was the seductive, roguish Nietzsche I met at the University of Missouri in the early 1990s.

Indeed, as I reassess the three Nietzsches I knew before reading this book---the Crusade, Rogue, and Academic Nietzsches---I see fully how and why these iterations came into being. My misapprehensions and misunderstandings have been corrected and contextualized. More importantly, I now know why I encountered them. I would now go as far as to assert that all academics, and all those who care about the humanities, should develop a deeper understanding of Nietzsche's plasticity, permanent relevance, and philosophical assertions. There is a reason why Nietzsche remains canonical.

As for American Nietzsche's place in the canon of American history, it would be premature to say anything authoritative. But I will most certainly hazard a highly enthusiastic limited affirmation: Ratner-Rosenhagen has authored an indispensable work of cultural and intellectual history.  It is also eminently readable. Up to this point I have not praised her writing style, but this is a lyrical, stylish work. She's not a Louis Menand nor Jackson Lears, but that is no insult. Lears' Rebirth of a Nation is one of the most literary cultural-intellectual histories I've read in years. Comparatively, I am still pleased to have spent so much time with American Nietzsche. If your knowledge of Nietsche heretofore is superficial, after reading American Nietzsche you'll know as much as---nay probably more than---the Nietzsche poseurs and Evangelical critics. You'll also fully understand the enthusiasm of late twentieth-century academics. Finally, if you let her, Ratner-Rosenhagen will show you something important about Nietzsche's place in the American intellectual tradition---about how Nietzsche inspired problem thinkers in a pluralistic democracy.

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*Ratner-Rosenhagen asserts that if there were strong parallels between pragmatism and Nietzschean socio-cultural criticism, it was Nietzsche who provided an "animating image of the good life" in a way that "instrumentalism alone" could not. She continued: "The notions of provisional truth and situational ethics were useful strategies for dealing with the mechanics of living, but what they [Nietzscheans] desired above all else was a 'prophetic vision' of human existence that was both inspirational and terrifying, sublime and haunting" (p. 189).

The Plastic Nietzsche, Part VI: A Serial Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior Entries: Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

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Ratner-Rosenhagen's unnumbered chapter, the "Interlude" is, in my view, pivotal to understanding American Nietzsche. Even as a standalone entry it deserves high praise. Although reviewers of American Nietzsche have noted the Interlude's subject matter---Nietzsche's common American readers---in their commentaries, the former mostly focus on the book's recognizable intellectuals. None concentrate on the virtues of the Interlude itself. This is a shame. The chapter is most unusual, unique perhaps, in the historiography of intellectual history. How? It is rooted in---and made possible by---American fan letters from the Nietzsche Archive. The Interlude covers the 1910s and 1920s chronologically, and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche is a key actor as both curator of Nietzsche's memory and keeper of fan mail.

The chapter serves as a kind of emotional history of the philosopher's ideas. The pitch of emotion is such that one could say that a sacramental vision of Nietzsche provides a grammar for the chapter. Through Förster-Nietzsche's scrupulous records we obtain a vision of readers' longings, of readers' ideas about ideas, of the range of readers' moral worlds, of Nietzsche as a celebrity, and of reader concerns about American modernity. Through the efforts of his fans, Nietzsche was, in Ratner-Rosenhagen's words, "a product of collaborative meaning-making between text and reader, text and context" (p. 199). His fans created the mythical Nietzsche. They sought relics of the man, particularly via his signature. His ideas and his person "possessed" the reader. The sacramental vision is apparent when Ratner-Rosenhagen argues that "virtually all letter writers confessed how their encounter with Nietzsche's philosophy either emboldened or chastened them, liberated them from old falsehoods,or saddled them with new moral responsibilities" (p. 203). The book also documents "religious devotion" to Nietzsche through their pilgrimages to the Nietzsche Archive and visits with Förster-Nietzsche (p. 209).

But the Interlude is crucial to Ratner-Rosenhagen's story, as I see it, in that it also unlocks and underscores a key topic in the book: democracy. In entries one and five of my ongoing review, I emphasized that American Nietzsche's importance derived, in large part, from how it helps us rethink democracy. The Interlude goes to this point. Its last section, titled "Pathos of Distance from Democratic Culture," the author begins by addressing the borders of that culture. She asserts that the two-way flow of ideas between Germany and the United States, via Nietzsche, demonstrates "the value of breaking down static concepts such as 'foreign thought,' 'organic ideas,' 'German theories,' and 'American worldviews'." The fan letters help "tell a bigger story about how the transnational traffic of Nietzsche's image and ideas helped puncture and rebuild, traverse and reconstitute intellectual borders" (p. 211).


Ratner-Rosenhagen then dives into a nuanced discussion of translation issues before returning to readers' desires and their cultural context. She argues that readers obtained from Nietzsche a "German pathos of distance." His philosophy helped readers "shield themselves from the crude, anti-intellectual mob mentality of American life" (p. 215). Ratner-Rosenhagen adds: "Just as we see variants of hero worship among professional intellectuals, so too do we see fears of American anti-intellectualism deeply burrowed into the imagination of general readers, who wrote to the archives" (p. 215). The author cites some particular letters as representative examples: two from Jennie Hintz (pp. 193-196), composed in 1913, and another from Theodore Van Derlyn (p. 215), composed in 1915. It is no coincidence that Ratner-Rosenhagen uses the Hintz and Van Derlyn letters to open and close the chapter, respectively.

Ratner-Rosenhagen lets us hear their voices through extended quotes precisely because those voices reflect crucial points from the author. Hintz's admiration for Nietzsche derived from a close reading of his works and H.L. Mencken, presumably The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her letter documented not only her devotion to Nietzsche's person and empathy for his past frailties, but her sense that Nietzsche had captured the alienation present in modern American life. Hintz had felt disconnected from modern life until Nietzsche's provocations shook her from her slumbers. She wrote Förster-Nietzsche because Hintz wanted help obtaining and distributing Nietzsche's works (in German, ironically---unless she only hoped to help fellow German immigrants). Through these works Americans would aspire to their highest selves.

Van Derlyn wrote Förster-Nietzsche to inform her that he was working on a manuscript about Nietzsche's work. Van Derlyn sought to "critique the mediocrity of man in the masses," to criticize "democratic" man in order to fight "the poverty of modern American cultural life" (p. 215). Like Matthew Arnold around fifty years earlier, who had critiqued the philistine men of business, Van Derlyn would use Nietzsche to work against America's monied plutocracy. To Van Derlyn this new ersatz American aristocracy was, unfortunately, "the recognized standard of...American society"; they were "the 'ultra-fashionable set'...[with] no sense, ...no soul, no reason, no character, nothing, except a peacock-like egocentricity, and above all, money, lots of money" (p. 215). Between the democratic man and the faux aristocrats, American culture---its democratic culture---was diseased. And Nietzsche, for Hintz and Van Derlyn, was the cure. Nietzsche, in Ratner-Rosenhagen's words, was "the timeless savior of modern humanity and a timely critic of a world out of kilter" (p. 215).

Other reviewers have noted the problem of democracy in relation to America's Nietzsche. For reader-admirers like Hintz and Van Derlyn, Nietzsche was, as Roger Bellin aptly argued, "deployed simultaneously in the service of antiauthoritarianism and a new 'democratic' aristocracy." As Thomas Meaney noted, however, this tactic was difficult for intellectuals. He wrote (italics mine): "For Rorty, for instance, the challenge Nietzsche posed for a democratic culture could be solved by simply signing on to everything he says about the self but quarantining the rest of his unpalatable anti-democratic pronouncements."

Alexander Star summed up the general reader's problem with a question: "How [would Nietzsche's admirers] separate his intoxicating attacks on convention from his disgust with democracy and its herd of citizens?" Posnock too addresses this problematic point when he underscores relationship between Nietzsche and radical left criticism of the American way of life: "Radical leftists—anarchists, socialists and feminists—were early enthusiasts...who found in Nietzsche’s contempt for religion and democracy a way to rouse the masses from obedience to Christian ideals of submission and democratic fictions of a free market." There's no way, in sum, to discuss the American Nietzsche without confronting the problems and perils of the idea behind the American project: democracy. This is what Ratner-Rosenhagen asks of us in this chapter, and it is a signal contribution of her project exploring the reception of Nietzsche in the United States.

The Interlude also underscores the plasticity of Nietzsche followers. As the author repeatedly proved and observed, readers "made and remade Nietzsche in their own image" (p. 216). They made him a "personalist companion, secular saint, or cultural critic," as their needs required. These readers were not, moreover, molded by Nietzsche, but rather were "active participants who collaborated with Nietzsche." In this process of making and unmaking, American citizen readers "reconstitute[d] national, political, and cultural distinctions" between America and Germany. This is the essence of transnationalism in relation to larger Western figures and ideas.

That this process, and this chapter and its themes, were critically important to Ratner-Rosenhagen is evident in the Interlude's final paragraph. Here she interjects her own voice in support of using these letters to extrapolate Nietzsche's broader significance "in the making of modern American thought." Here is her statement: "My belief is that [these letters speak] to the ways in which a variety of Americans both took part in and resisted the implications of transnational intellectual exchanges. ...Nietzsche [made]...the designation of 'average' no longer meaningful to his readers as a term of self-description. ...He showed them a pathos of distance from everyday values---whether of the church, the marketplace, or the civics lesson---that helped them sharpen their sense of distinction in themselves, enabling them to feel their own particularity." In Nietzsche they found "a philosophy that harmonized thinking and doing"; he was their "guide to becoming" (p. 217). Plasticity had to be inherent in his thought to guide a diverse group of people---a group whose diversity is fully evident in other chapters, even if those other chapters focus more on America's intellectual elite rather than the common reader.

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The seventh and final installment of this serial review will appear next week. - TL

"Almost Always Polemical": Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part II)

In my last post here on common sense in American history, I promised to connect the serious intellectual foundations of common sense with the philosophy of Mortimer J. Adler and his mid-twentieth-century community of discourse. In today's post I will show _why_ Adler moved in the direction of using and promoting common sense as an antidote for 1960s political troubles in the United States. This involves a short study of his motivations for writing two different (but related) books, as well as a look, counter-intuitively, at their reception. In next week's third and last post on this topic, I will discuss and analyze _how_ Adler articulated, defined, and applied the idea of common sense in both books. In other words, I hope to arrive at an explanation of his "common sense liberalism."

By the late 1960s Adler [right] had spent many years trying to bridge the gap between philosophy as an abstract study of argument and distinctions, and philosophy as a usable, accessible entity that could aid society in overcoming its troubles. My argument is that he engaged in that endeavor as a means to help foster and refine a democratic culture. This is a theoretical structure, with a longer history, I use to make long-term sense of Adler's work. Yet the idea of a democratic culture is never explicitly discussed by him in his writings. I don't want to get into all of the details of my theoretical structure here, but will at least offer a brief sketch of how it relates to common sense.

I use democratic culture as a shorthand for a non-authoritarian culture ('culture' as understood in the Geertzian tradition) that promotes equal and just citizenship (i.e. human rights at a minimum), as well as a shared public ethics, arrived at through free consensual means. It is a culture that---working properly---supports, permeates, and promotes democracy in political and social structures. A democratic culture the engages the body politic would ideally sustain and enable democratic states. To get there, however, some degree of common experience and sense are necessary in allowing for communication, shared understandings, and consensus building. The existence of a democratic culture implies some degree (thick or thin?) of common sensibilities among the body politic.

In the 1969-1970 period, Adler offered up a theory of ethics, or moral philosophy, that he hoped would help foster a democratic culture. He wanted to help those navigating the intellectual, social, and political turmoil of the Sixties. In this period of crisis and contradiction, he wrote two books aimed at readers seeking to reconcile the emergent ethic of personal liberation (or satisfaction or expression) with a social ethic that respected equality and justice. In so doing, he hoped to protect liberalism---the mixed-economy welfare state, as progressively improved in existing institutions over the twentieth-century---from the plans of revolutionaries and anarchic youthful radicals. Adler sought a third way between the reactionary politics of the left and right.

What were Adler's credentials for doing this? Why would people attend to his prescriptions?

In the Sixties Adler had added to a reputation built during the prior three decades. A biographical brief is in order. Adler became a public figure in the early 1940s due to the popularity of his super bestselling How to Read a Book (1940), which advocated, ideally, for a liberal education for all as a cure for ills of anti-intellectualism and mindless ideology in democracies. Practically it advocated for great books discussion groups for adults. Adler also wrote on education reform in conjunction with his charismatic, popular friend Robert Hutchins. After a retreat into philosophical work in the 1950s, when he worked extensively on The Idea of Freedom with his Institute for Philosophical Research, Adler re-emerged in the 1960s writing for both academic and popular audiences. He wrote popular and semi-scholarly books on philosophical topics and education. Articles by Adler, on the same topics and others (esp. the great books), appeared in magazines, including Playboy. He made an appearance in 1962 as a lecturer before select members of the Kennedy administration. By the end of the decade Adler had also convinced Britannica to engage in an extensive rewrite of the Encyclopedia Britannica (think Propaedia, Micropaedia, and Macropaedia---the 15th edition of the set, or Britannica 3). By 1970, then, Adler was a well-known, well-respected, and established public intellectual.

Despite his name recognition and propensity to write on relevant topics, Adler was not at all an activist in the mold of those outlined by Kevin Mattson in Intellectuals in Action (2002). The closest Adler came in his career to being activist "liberal" intellectual was during late 1940s and 1950s, when he gave numerous speeches in support of world federal government. Even so, he never contributed any of those writings, for example, to left-leaning publications like Alfred Bingham's Common Sense magazine. By the late 1960s Adler was living a quiet life in Chicago. He worked heavily for Britannica, spent his summers in Aspen, lectured at the University of Chicago (via the "Britannica Lectures" subsidized by William Benton), raised a family with his new wife Caroline, and fostered various intellectual projects through his Institute for Philosophical Research. In other words, his activism was restricted to reading, writing, philosophizing, avoiding paper cuts, and wrestling with his young children (no small feat for a man who was 67 in 1970).

Despite his then sedate, practical commitments, Adler clearly stayed on top of the news. He was painfully aware of the injustices of the decade. References to well-known problems of the Sixties are all over his 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense and, to a lesser extent, his 1971 book The Common Sense of Politics (hereafter TOL and CSP).[1] Both grew out of his Britannica Lectures; TOL from those given in 1969, and CSP in 1970. The text and notes of the former convey knowledge of its intellectual, political, and social context. In TOL Adler makes mention of the generation gap, military drafts, angst, the popularity of existentialism, the atomic age, the New Left, civil disobedience, free love, the sexual revolution, and the problem of playboys.

In both books Adler cites relevant, contemporary thinkers and figures, established and otherwise, such as Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Irving Kristol, David Riesman, Christopher Jencks, Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Justice Abraham Fortas, and even Allan Bloom. Mention of these people and contextual factors does not imply a full understanding of all that they represent, but both books relay enough signals about contemporary society to give the reader some confidence of the Adler's relevance.

Without yet delving into Adler's philosophy of common sense, as offered and utilized in TOL and CSP, I will at least introduce Adler's goals in both books. The "Preface" to TOL, written in October 1969, explains the purpose of the book and its relation to CSP (bolds mine):

In [TOL], ethics and politics are treated as related branches of moral philosophy; but the present book deals with the shape of the good society [i.e. politics] only to the extent that it bears on the external conditions required for the pursuit of happiness to give every individual the opportunity he should have to make a really good life for himself. It does not address itself primarily or directly to questions about the nature of the state, the necessity of government, the realization through political means of the fullest possible measures of liberty, equality, and peace, and the progressive development of the constitution that makes democracy the only perfectly just form of government. I plan to devote the next series of...Britannica Lectures to these basic questions of political philosophy, which I hope subsequently to publish as...The Common Sense of Politics (p. xiv).

And here is what Adler added in CSP (bolds mine):

[TOL and CSP] dovetail as reciprocally interdependent parts of a single whole---moral philosophy, of which the part that is ethics deals with the problems of the good life, and the part that is politics deals with the problems of the good society. Distinct in substance by virtue of the quite different problems with which they deal, they are alike in method and approach: both offer themselves as philosophical refinements of common-sense wisdom, and both are normative rather than descriptive---both attempt to prescribe ideals that ought to be pursued and the steps that ought to be taken toward their realization (p. xxiii).

Now that Adler's topics and goals for each book are stated, and I've hopefully intrigued you on their contents in relation to common sense, I am instead going to take a potentially strange narrative step. At this point we can learn something more about _why_ the two books were written by looking at their reception---at what happened after publication. This tactic is legitimated, in part, because Adler himself offered an opinion on the potential reception of CSP in its "Preface." Here is is prediction (bolds mine):

If the political theory here set forth is rejected, as I think it will be, by both the old right and the new left, that will confirm my judgment of its soundness. To the professed or unwitting anarchist of the new left, its controlling principles will appear to bespeak reactionary conservatism. To the reactionary conservative of the old right [or paleoconservatives], the ideal of the classless establishment that it projects will appear to be revolutionary, and may even evoke such epithets as 'anarchistic' or communistic.' That is, perhaps, as it should be, for the doctrine of this book is both conservative and revolutionary (p. xxiv)

Put another way, Adler's normative and prescriptive common sense liberalism leads one to maintain mid-century institutions; so it's conservative relative to New Left. But Adler's plans in TOL and CSP also maintain the progressive ideal of endless governmental refinement (practical and pragmatic, though Adler would've rejected the latter philosophical label). In CSP, then, Adler articulates a philosophy that reinforces slow, patient institutional change, or reform, and rejects any revolutionary philosophy that would destroy or deregulate existing institutions. As such, you can see why he made his prediction.

Truth be told, however, these books provoked little response---in spite of Adler's sometimes reactionary tone with regard to New Left and countercultural excesses. Indeed, both books seem to have either gone unread or been swallowed up in the events of the period. Based on the mid-1990s reprints and introductions from intellectuals, the books were clearly not forgotten. And contemporary reviews of both books were either relatively sparse, or positive in a perfunctory fashion. Two exceptions, both for CSP, come from recognizable names. The aforementioned Alfred Bingham, a moderate Democrat by the early 1970s, praised Adler's call for a world community while recognizing that the book targeted "student anarchists." One-time William F. Buckley-protege-come-liberal journalist Gary Wills dismissed CSP as having "minatory usefulness."[2]

Excepting the then-left-wing convert Wills, most reactions to Adler's common-sense liberalism were tepid. Why? I think there are four reasons for this---the last and most important being actually related to his philosophy of common sense. And all four reasons speak somewhat to why Adler wrote the books.

First, the non-revolutionary program, or at best targeted radical program (in education---an explanation of this is coming in my next post), outlined in both books excited neither left nor right-wing intellectual-activists of the day. His rational program for reform missed the emotional notes of the New Left and emerging New Right. Adler wrote both TOL and CSP precisely to counteract what he perceived as shrill, sometimes irrational calls for cultural, social, and political revolution.

Second, readers on the left and right perhaps felt Adler's philosophy did not adequately account for, or address, liberalism's failings in relation to justice, liberty, and equality. Adler did address the fact that justice had to rule over equality and liberty to create (CSP, p. xiv-xv, 122). In this way Adler foreshadowed, in a much-less detailed way, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.[3] But Adler was writing, in the eyes of some, to celebrate the very institutions responsible for oppression. He was, to a certain set of readers, avoiding hard truths about injustice and inequality in American society. Adler was able to write both books because he was not presently on the receiving end of social, cultural, and political injustices.

Third, Adler wrote as a public intellectual ensconced in "the Establishment." This is of course related to my second point. Though Adler titled his 1977 autobiography Philosopher at Large, he was only just free the University of Chicago (by association) at that point; he remained employed by Britannica through the 1970s. Adler's Institute for Philosophical Research, despite being unconnected with the academy, functioned more as a personal research group than an effective marketing tool for his work. Even so, Adler's connections to the Establishment---meaning the Aspen Institute, Britannica, and the University of Chicago---allowed him to be the patient advocate of change he was in both TOL and CSP. For his part, in CSP Adler wrote objectively about "the [dyslogistic] Establishment" as if he were not in some way a part of it (p. xxv, 161-162, 235n9).

Finally, neither Adler's philosophy of common sense nor his expression of it held much appeal for intellectuals, academic or otherwise. As such, he had to write these books, in a particular tone, to find an audience for his solutions to the era's problems. There are two reasons for this lack of intellectual appeal, one essential and the other historical. It is essential to being an intellectual, of her habits and tendencies, that she will either heavily caveat or reject common sense as an explanatory trope for phenomena. Intellectuals look for and see complexity, which by definition is not necessary to common sense explanations---which seek simplicity first (simplicity being easier to share).

The historical-contextual reason is that philosophers in the period about which I am writing were deeply engaged in either analytic philosophy or structuralist/poststructuralist language theories. In either case, practitioners in both arenas were generally employed by the academy and wrote for each other. The findings of those language theorists, however, explicitly weakened--or even denied---the possibility of anchors between the sign, signifier, and "reality"; this clearly lessened the possibility of shared senses of experience.[4]

At this point in his career, Adler's connections to the academy were also waning. He maintained contacts with Thomistic philosophers at Catholic institutions; they did not reject the "common sense realism" Adler had developed in relation to Arthur Lovejoy and Jacques Maritain.[5] In addition, Adler's explicit claim on Aristotle as influential, though Adler was in fact neo-Aristotelian in his extensions and applications, narrowed his potential for influence in an academy that valued up-to-date, novel thinking. These factors kept Adler's common-sense philosophy, as well as his liberalism, from obtaining significant traffic with academic intellectuals.

As a minor digression, or counterpoint, in relation to Adler's historical appeal, I should say that he was not completely ignored by philosophers. Despite his eclectic and apparently anachronistic influences, as well as a lack of trusted philosophical credentials (though it came from Columbia University, Adler's PhD was in psychology), several noteworthy twentieth-century philosophers and intellectuals saw Adler as a significant legitimate force---or at least an intriguing thinker and philosopher. Examples include Paul Weiss [right], Charles Hartshorne, Anthony Quinton, Arthur Lovejoy, Jacques Maritain, Vergilius Ferm, and even an oppositional figure, Morris R. Cohen.[6] Despite their respect, or even admiration, these figures were not a part of Adler's immediate community of discourse in the writing of TOL and CSP. That group was composed of significant, but less eminent, thinkers like Clifton Fadiman, Arthur Rubin, Otto Bird, Robert Hutchins, Charles Van Doren, and John Van Doren. Maritain and Hutchins (to whom CSP is dedicated), while still friends with Adler as of the early 1970s, were not active participants in the discourse that formed these books.

To finish off this last point about Adler's philosophy of common sense, a word must be said about his expression of that philosophy in the context of his philosophical biography. His lack of appeal to intellectuals and academics in the 1980s and onward went beyond mere philosophical eclecticism. It was in the period discussed in this post, the Sixties and Seventies that is, that he began a slow shift to writing for non-academic audiences. Though Adler had long maintained that philosophy should be "everybody's business" (since the late 1940s), he only explicitly abandoned academics as an audience in the late Seventies. That said, TOL and CSP feature lengthy discursive notes, as well as notes using contemporary literature and Great Books authors beyond just Aristotle. And the prose in both books is neither overly simplistic nor in the jargon of a specialist. Like his old-school philosophical influences, Adler's accessibility likely made his books less-than-useful to academic scholars seeking to obtain cultural capital for advancement and peer recognition. Adler expressed his philosophy of common sense in a way that he hoped would appeal to the common person.

Having now covered _why_ Adler moved in the direction of common sense, or common sense realism, in my next (and final) post I will discuss _how_ he did it---the nuts, bolts, and concrete merits of his philosophy as presented in TOL and CSP. Stay tuned! I promise to lead you on no further. - TL

---------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Here are the full citations of the editions of TOL and CSP used in this post: (a) The Common Sense of Politics, with an Introduction by John Van Doren (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1971; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996); (b) The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, with an Introduction by Deal W. Hudson (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996)

[2] Alfred M. Bingham, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, Saturday Review 54 (May 8, 1971): 30; Gary Wills, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, The New York Times Book Review (May 8, 1971): 27; John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 158, 272-73, 322, 325-26; Gary Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), chapter two passim; Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 176.

[3] As far as I know, Adler's only encounter with Rawls, in writing, was in the former's 1981 book, Six Great Ideas (NY: Macmillan). Here are the relevant passages (p.188). I've never heard of Rawls being tweaked for defining down justice as "solely...fairness." Can anyone verify that for me? Adler also called A Theory of Justice "a widely discussed and overpraised book." Bennie Crockett's dissertation (full citation below) attempts, in a few spots, to address Adler's work in relation to Rawls.

[4] J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Simon & Schuster/Twayne Publishers, 1996), 16-22; Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 246-47.

[5] Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 238-246; Bennie R. Crockett, ‘Mortimer Adler: An Analysis and Critique of His Eclectic Epistemology’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wales, 2000), 9-11, 51n153, 83, 85; Tim Lacy, "The Lovejovian Roots of Adler's Philosophy of History," Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (January 2010): 124-127.

[6] Crockett, 9n6; Adler, Second Look, 238n5.

"Almost Always Polemical": Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part II)

In my last post here on common sense in American history, I promised to connect the serious intellectual foundations of common sense with the philosophy of Mortimer J. Adler and his mid-twentieth-century community of discourse. In today's post I will show _why_ Adler moved in the direction of using and promoting common sense as an antidote for 1960s political troubles in the United States. This involves a short study of his motivations for writing two different (but related) books, as well as a look, counter-intuitively, at their reception. In next week's third and last post on this topic, I will discuss and analyze _how_ Adler articulated, defined, and applied the idea of common sense in both books. In other words, I hope to arrive at an explanation of his "common sense liberalism."

By the late 1960s Adler [right] had spent many years trying to bridge the gap between philosophy as an abstract study of argument and distinctions, and philosophy as a usable, accessible entity that could aid society in overcoming its troubles. My argument is that he engaged in that endeavor as a means to help foster and refine a democratic culture. This is a theoretical structure, with a longer history, I use to make long-term sense of Adler's work. Yet the idea of a democratic culture is never explicitly discussed by him in his writings. I don't want to get into all of the details of my theoretical structure here, but will at least offer a brief sketch of how it relates to common sense.

I use democratic culture as a shorthand for a non-authoritarian culture ('culture' as understood in the Geertzian tradition) that promotes equal and just citizenship (i.e. human rights at a minimum), as well as a shared public ethics, arrived at through free consensual means. It is a culture that---working properly---supports, permeates, and promotes democracy in political and social structures. A democratic culture the engages the body politic would ideally sustain and enable democratic states. To get there, however, some degree of common experience and sense are necessary in allowing for communication, shared understandings, and consensus building. The existence of a democratic culture implies some degree (thick or thin?) of common sensibilities among the body politic.

In the 1969-1970 period, Adler offered up a theory of ethics, or moral philosophy, that he hoped would help foster a democratic culture. He wanted to help those navigating the intellectual, social, and political turmoil of the Sixties. In this period of crisis and contradiction, he wrote two books aimed at readers seeking to reconcile the emergent ethic of personal liberation (or satisfaction or expression) with a social ethic that respected equality and justice. In so doing, he hoped to protect liberalism---the mixed-economy welfare state, as progressively improved in existing institutions over the twentieth-century---from the plans of revolutionaries and anarchic youthful radicals. Adler sought a third way between the reactionary politics of the left and right.

What were Adler's credentials for doing this? Why would people attend to his prescriptions?

In the Sixties Adler had added to a reputation built during the prior three decades. A biographical brief is in order. Adler became a public figure in the early 1940s due to the popularity of his super bestselling How to Read a Book (1940), which advocated, ideally, for a liberal education for all as a cure for ills of anti-intellectualism and mindless ideology in democracies. Practically it advocated for great books discussion groups for adults. Adler also wrote on education reform in conjunction with his charismatic, popular friend Robert Hutchins. After a retreat into philosophical work in the 1950s, when he worked extensively on The Idea of Freedom with his Institute for Philosophical Research, Adler re-emerged in the 1960s writing for both academic and popular audiences. He wrote popular and semi-scholarly books on philosophical topics and education. Articles by Adler, on the same topics and others (esp. the great books), appeared in magazines, including Playboy. He made an appearance in 1962 as a lecturer before select members of the Kennedy administration. By the end of the decade Adler had also convinced Britannica to engage in an extensive rewrite of the Encyclopedia Britannica (think Propaedia, Micropaedia, and Macropaedia---the 15th edition of the set, or Britannica 3). By 1970, then, Adler was a well-known, well-respected, and established public intellectual.

Despite his name recognition and propensity to write on relevant topics, Adler was not at all an activist in the mold of those outlined by Kevin Mattson in Intellectuals in Action (2002). The closest Adler came in his career to being activist "liberal" intellectual was during late 1940s and 1950s, when he gave numerous speeches in support of world federal government. Even so, he never contributed any of those writings, for example, to left-leaning publications like Alfred Bingham's Common Sense magazine. By the late 1960s Adler was living a quiet life in Chicago. He worked heavily for Britannica, spent his summers in Aspen, lectured at the University of Chicago (via the "Britannica Lectures" subsidized by William Benton), raised a family with his new wife Caroline, and fostered various intellectual projects through his Institute for Philosophical Research. In other words, his activism was restricted to reading, writing, philosophizing, avoiding paper cuts, and wrestling with his young children (no small feat for a man who was 67 in 1970).

Despite his then sedate, practical commitments, Adler clearly stayed on top of the news. He was painfully aware of the injustices of the decade. References to well-known problems of the Sixties are all over his 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense and, to a lesser extent, his 1971 book The Common Sense of Politics (hereafter TOL and CSP).[1] Both grew out of his Britannica Lectures; TOL from those given in 1969, and CSP in 1970. The text and notes of the former convey knowledge of its intellectual, political, and social context. In TOL Adler makes mention of the generation gap, military drafts, angst, the popularity of existentialism, the atomic age, the New Left, civil disobedience, free love, the sexual revolution, and the problem of playboys.

In both books Adler cites relevant, contemporary thinkers and figures, established and otherwise, such as Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Irving Kristol, David Riesman, Christopher Jencks, Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Justice Abraham Fortas, and even Allan Bloom. Mention of these people and contextual factors does not imply a full understanding of all that they represent, but both books relay enough signals about contemporary society to give the reader some confidence of the Adler's relevance.

Without yet delving into Adler's philosophy of common sense, as offered and utilized in TOL and CSP, I will at least introduce Adler's goals in both books. The "Preface" to TOL, written in October 1969, explains the purpose of the book and its relation to CSP (bolds mine):

In [TOL], ethics and politics are treated as related branches of moral philosophy; but the present book deals with the shape of the good society [i.e. politics] only to the extent that it bears on the external conditions required for the pursuit of happiness to give every individual the opportunity he should have to make a really good life for himself. It does not address itself primarily or directly to questions about the nature of the state, the necessity of government, the realization through political means of the fullest possible measures of liberty, equality, and peace, and the progressive development of the constitution that makes democracy the only perfectly just form of government. I plan to devote the next series of...Britannica Lectures to these basic questions of political philosophy, which I hope subsequently to publish as...The Common Sense of Politics (p. xiv).

And here is what Adler added in CSP (bolds mine):

[TOL and CSP] dovetail as reciprocally interdependent parts of a single whole---moral philosophy, of which the part that is ethics deals with the problems of the good life, and the part that is politics deals with the problems of the good society. Distinct in substance by virtue of the quite different problems with which they deal, they are alike in method and approach: both offer themselves as philosophical refinements of common-sense wisdom, and both are normative rather than descriptive---both attempt to prescribe ideals that ought to be pursued and the steps that ought to be taken toward their realization (p. xxiii).

Now that Adler's topics and goals for each book are stated, and I've hopefully intrigued you on their contents in relation to common sense, I am instead going to take a potentially strange narrative step. At this point we can learn something more about _why_ the two books were written by looking at their reception---at what happened after publication. This tactic is legitimated, in part, because Adler himself offered an opinion on the potential reception of CSP in its "Preface." Here is is prediction (bolds mine):

If the political theory here set forth is rejected, as I think it will be, by both the old right and the new left, that will confirm my judgment of its soundness. To the professed or unwitting anarchist of the new left, its controlling principles will appear to bespeak reactionary conservatism. To the reactionary conservative of the old right [or paleoconservatives], the ideal of the classless establishment that it projects will appear to be revolutionary, and may even evoke such epithets as 'anarchistic' or communistic.' That is, perhaps, as it should be, for the doctrine of this book is both conservative and revolutionary (p. xxiv)

Put another way, Adler's normative and prescriptive common sense liberalism leads one to maintain mid-century institutions; so it's conservative relative to New Left. But Adler's plans in TOL and CSP also maintain the progressive ideal of endless governmental refinement (practical and pragmatic, though Adler would've rejected the latter philosophical label). In CSP, then, Adler articulates a philosophy that reinforces slow, patient institutional change, or reform, and rejects any revolutionary philosophy that would destroy or deregulate existing institutions. As such, you can see why he made his prediction.

Truth be told, however, these books provoked little response---in spite of Adler's sometimes reactionary tone with regard to New Left and countercultural excesses. Indeed, both books seem to have either gone unread or been swallowed up in the events of the period. Based on the mid-1990s reprints and introductions from intellectuals, the books were clearly not forgotten. And contemporary reviews of both books were either relatively sparse, or positive in a perfunctory fashion. Two exceptions, both for CSP, come from recognizable names. The aforementioned Alfred Bingham, a moderate Democrat by the early 1970s, praised Adler's call for a world community while recognizing that the book targeted "student anarchists." One-time William F. Buckley-protege-come-liberal journalist Gary Wills dismissed CSP as having "minatory usefulness."[2]

Excepting the then-left-wing convert Wills, most reactions to Adler's common-sense liberalism were tepid. Why? I think there are four reasons for this---the last and most important being actually related to his philosophy of common sense. And all four reasons speak somewhat to why Adler wrote the books.

First, the non-revolutionary program, or at best targeted radical program (in education---an explanation of this is coming in my next post), outlined in both books excited neither left nor right-wing intellectual-activists of the day. His rational program for reform missed the emotional notes of the New Left and emerging New Right. Adler wrote both TOL and CSP precisely to counteract what he perceived as shrill, sometimes irrational calls for cultural, social, and political revolution.

Second, readers on the left and right perhaps felt Adler's philosophy did not adequately account for, or address, liberalism's failings in relation to justice, liberty, and equality. Adler did address the fact that justice had to rule over equality and liberty to create (CSP, p. xiv-xv, 122). In this way Adler foreshadowed, in a much-less detailed way, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.[3] But Adler was writing, in the eyes of some, to celebrate the very institutions responsible for oppression. He was, to a certain set of readers, avoiding hard truths about injustice and inequality in American society. Adler was able to write both books because he was not presently on the receiving end of social, cultural, and political injustices.

Third, Adler wrote as a public intellectual ensconced in "the Establishment." This is of course related to my second point. Though Adler titled his 1977 autobiography Philosopher at Large, he was only just free the University of Chicago (by association) at that point; he remained employed by Britannica through the 1970s. Adler's Institute for Philosophical Research, despite being unconnected with the academy, functioned more as a personal research group than an effective marketing tool for his work. Even so, Adler's connections to the Establishment---meaning the Aspen Institute, Britannica, and the University of Chicago---allowed him to be the patient advocate of change he was in both TOL and CSP. For his part, in CSP Adler wrote objectively about "the [dyslogistic] Establishment" as if he were not in some way a part of it (p. xxv, 161-162, 235n9).

Finally, neither Adler's philosophy of common sense nor his expression of it held much appeal for intellectuals, academic or otherwise. As such, he had to write these books, in a particular tone, to find an audience for his solutions to the era's problems. There are two reasons for this lack of intellectual appeal, one essential and the other historical. It is essential to being an intellectual, of her habits and tendencies, that she will either heavily caveat or reject common sense as an explanatory trope for phenomena. Intellectuals look for and see complexity, which by definition is not necessary to common sense explanations---which seek simplicity first (simplicity being easier to share).

The historical-contextual reason is that philosophers in the period about which I am writing were deeply engaged in either analytic philosophy or structuralist/poststructuralist language theories. In either case, practitioners in both arenas were generally employed by the academy and wrote for each other. The findings of those language theorists, however, explicitly weakened--or even denied---the possibility of anchors between the sign, signifier, and "reality"; this clearly lessened the possibility of shared senses of experience.[4]

At this point in his career, Adler's connections to the academy were also waning. He maintained contacts with Thomistic philosophers at Catholic institutions; they did not reject the "common sense realism" Adler had developed in relation to Arthur Lovejoy and Jacques Maritain.[5] In addition, Adler's explicit claim on Aristotle as influential, though Adler was in fact neo-Aristotelian in his extensions and applications, narrowed his potential for influence in an academy that valued up-to-date, novel thinking. These factors kept Adler's common-sense philosophy, as well as his liberalism, from obtaining significant traffic with academic intellectuals.

As a minor digression, or counterpoint, in relation to Adler's historical appeal, I should say that he was not completely ignored by philosophers. Despite his eclectic and apparently anachronistic influences, as well as a lack of trusted philosophical credentials (though it came from Columbia University, Adler's PhD was in psychology), several noteworthy twentieth-century philosophers and intellectuals saw Adler as a significant legitimate force---or at least an intriguing thinker and philosopher. Examples include Paul Weiss [right], Charles Hartshorne, Anthony Quinton, Arthur Lovejoy, Jacques Maritain, Vergilius Ferm, and even an oppositional figure, Morris R. Cohen.[6] Despite their respect, or even admiration, these figures were not a part of Adler's immediate community of discourse in the writing of TOL and CSP. That group was composed of significant, but less eminent, thinkers like Clifton Fadiman, Arthur Rubin, Otto Bird, Robert Hutchins, Charles Van Doren, and John Van Doren. Maritain and Hutchins (to whom CSP is dedicated), while still friends with Adler as of the early 1970s, were not active participants in the discourse that formed these books.

To finish off this last point about Adler's philosophy of common sense, a word must be said about his expression of that philosophy in the context of his philosophical biography. His lack of appeal to intellectuals and academics in the 1980s and onward went beyond mere philosophical eclecticism. It was in the period discussed in this post, the Sixties and Seventies that is, that he began a slow shift to writing for non-academic audiences. Though Adler had long maintained that philosophy should be "everybody's business" (since the late 1940s), he only explicitly abandoned academics as an audience in the late Seventies. That said, TOL and CSP feature lengthy discursive notes, as well as notes using contemporary literature and Great Books authors beyond just Aristotle. And the prose in both books is neither overly simplistic nor in the jargon of a specialist. Like his old-school philosophical influences, Adler's accessibility likely made his books less-than-useful to academic scholars seeking to obtain cultural capital for advancement and peer recognition. Adler expressed his philosophy of common sense in a way that he hoped would appeal to the common person.

Having now covered _why_ Adler moved in the direction of common sense, or common sense realism, in my next (and final) post I will discuss _how_ he did it---the nuts, bolts, and concrete merits of his philosophy as presented in TOL and CSP. Stay tuned! I promise to lead you on no further. - TL

---------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Here are the full citations of the editions of TOL and CSP used in this post: (a) The Common Sense of Politics, with an Introduction by John Van Doren (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1971; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996); (b) The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, with an Introduction by Deal W. Hudson (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996)

[2] Alfred M. Bingham, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, Saturday Review 54 (May 8, 1971): 30; Gary Wills, review of The Common Sense of Politics, by Mortimer J. Adler, The New York Times Book Review (May 8, 1971): 27; John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 158, 272-73, 322, 325-26; Gary Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), chapter two passim; Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 176.

[3] As far as I know, Adler's only encounter with Rawls, in writing, was in the former's 1981 book, Six Great Ideas (NY: Macmillan). Here are the relevant passages (p.188). I've never heard of Rawls being tweaked for defining down justice as "solely...fairness." Can anyone verify that for me? Adler also called A Theory of Justice "a widely discussed and overpraised book." Bennie Crockett's dissertation (full citation below) attempts, in a few spots, to address Adler's work in relation to Rawls.

[4] J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Simon & Schuster/Twayne Publishers, 1996), 16-22; Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 246-47.

[5] Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 238-246; Bennie R. Crockett, ‘Mortimer Adler: An Analysis and Critique of His Eclectic Epistemology’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wales, 2000), 9-11, 51n153, 83, 85; Tim Lacy, "The Lovejovian Roots of Adler's Philosophy of History," Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (January 2010): 124-127.

[6] Crockett, 9n6; Adler, Second Look, 238n5.

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]