New year
Happy new year.
I have been on vacation for a while. I had my best-ever NetHack game (killed by an Archon on the Elemental Plane of Air, with the Amulet), saw several friends, and bought a 54-volume set of the Great Books of the Western World. (This is an early edition. Britannica now sells the expanded 60-volume set for $1,195 new -- or slightly more than the cost of a whole OED.)
The Great Books series was the brainchild of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, whose careers have been discussed extensively by Martin Gardner. (Among other things, they are the subjects of "The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins", reprinted in The Night is Large". Gardner supplements the story in "The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins" by reporting in From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley, Jr. that Mortimer Adler converted to Catholicism in 1999 after years of what might be called flirtation, or perhaps better intellectual struggle. He admitted that he was a theist sometime before that and, as Gardner notes, even earlier claimed that Catholicism was true but without proclaiming himself a Catholic.) Hutchins died in 1977 and Adler in 2001 (after the publication of The Night is Large).
Sometimes it seems like everybody has a reason to dislike Hutchins and Adler (or at least their projects and their ideas). I can think of at least half a dozen reasons people might have problems with them.
Gardner is unhappy with the central place Adler gave to Thomas Aquinas and with Hutchins's refusal to study contemporary science or philosophy. (Aquinas gets both volumes 19 and 20 of the Great Books of the Western World, an honor accorded only to him, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Gibbon. Galileo -- like Copernicus and Kepler -- has to share a single volume with two other authors, and Newton has to share with one other. No theological work by anyone from the Jewish or Muslim traditions is included, unless you count Spinoza, which I wouldn't. There is a brief sort-of apology in the first volume for the omission of Muslims, but none for the omission of, for example, the Talmud. Even if it took Adler until 1999, you can sort of see where he was going, as Gardner certainly did. Gardner wonders whether it could be "that behind the Hutchins-Adler rhetoric for the Great Books was an unstated motive [and] the motive, especially in Adler's mind, was not so much to introduce students to the great ideas as it was to introduce them to the great Roman Catholic ideas". This is not to suggest that the Great Books series suppresses critics of these ideas: for example, it prominently features Marx, Darwin, and Freud, occasional bogeymen of some religious conservative traditions.)
William F. Buckley, Jr., wondered why Gardner cares so much about other people's religious beliefs. Many Gardner essays, and the entire quasiautobiographical Flight of Peter Fromm (which includes some more Hutchins & Adler material) deal with Gardner's religious beliefs, other people's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of Gardner's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of other people's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of the negation of Gardner's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of the negation of other people's religious beliefs, what can be inferred from famous people's writings about their religious beliefs, and what various famous people would think of various pieces of possible evidence against their religious or other metaphysical beliefs. In fact Gardner is part of a rare group in the U.S. that actively engages in nonevangelical religious polemic. He defends this activity, among other things, in a passage in "The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins" where he quotes approvingly from G. K. Chesterton:
But there are some people, nevertheless -- and I am one of them -- who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.
The religious views of Hutchins and Adler and the question of whether those views empowered or handicapped them (and the vast numbers of people who came under their intellectual influence) turned into a major controversy. You might say that many people have seen it as "the most practical and important thing" about both men. The New York Times obituary on Adler refers slightly obliquely to the question of whether he was philosophically backward or inflexible (for sticking to the straight Aristotelian-Thomist line against modernism and postmodernism alike), and none other than William F. Buckley, Jr. (!), criticizes that same obituary for failing to mention that Adler ended his life as a Roman Catholic.
I'm grateful to Hutchins and Adler for putting together the Great Books of the Western World, and I'm extremely excited to own the set.
