Education: Fusilier

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At present on leave from his post as professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, he 1) is consultant to Paul Hoffman and his staff of the Ford Foundation; 2) conducts summer seminars at Aspen, Tycoon Walter Paepcke's Athens-in-Colorado, on matters like Freedom and God; 3) leads the "Fat Boys'" Great Books class at Chicago, including such notable converts to culture as Meyer Kestnbaum of Hart Schaffner & Marx, Harold Swift of Swift & Co.; 4) sells the Great Books idea, relentlessly and with success (the Great Books Foundation now has 2,000 groups).

Adler's most notable achievement will be unveiled next month at a black-tie dinner in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria, when Encyclopaedia Britannica will solemnly present to 500 leading U.S. citizens (each of whom paid $500 for it) the long-heralded set of the Great Books of the Western World, edited by Hutchins and Adler. (Probable price of the popular edition, to be published in September: $300.) The set is unquestionably the biggest culture buy anywhere: 54 volumes, 32,000 pages, 25 million words, 5 ft. 1 in. on the bookshelf, 443 works by 74 authors.*

Its most arresting feature was contributed by Mortimer Adler: a two-volume index called Syntopicon,† referring the reader to everything of note the great authors have said about the Great Ideas of Western Civilization (see box). There are, by Adler's count, exactly 102 Great Ideas. A lesser man might have quailed before the problem of making such a reckoning. Not Adler.

Education Racket? "The philosopher," he once remarked, "ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind." Adler has made up his mind—probably one of the best minds at large today—on any number of vital issues. Americans expect no more help from philosophers in practical affairs than from poets, and rather less than from astrologers. Adler believes, however, that the question of right & wrong is practical, and that it is the philosopher's job to help answer it. Adler furthermore holds that plain men & women can and should be philosophers. Says he: "Philosophy is everybody's business."

In one way, Americans have begun to see what he means: there were philosophies behind Adolf Hitler, Alger Hiss and the Chinese Red army in Korea. But they still fail to realize that professional philosophers, like Pragmatist John Dewey, have deeply influenced the lives of millions of Americans who could not tell a pragmatist from a Holy Roller.

The pragmatists created an intellectual universe without fixed truth, where right & wrong swirl through time & space, always dependent on local interpretation and individual desire. To a pragmatist, "ideals" are merely hypotheses, to be forever tested by individual experience and subject to change without notice.