PHILOSOPHIZING ON THE PAST
Sisk, John P.
B O O K S fill II I l fill llllllllllllllll I I Ill lllllll II II l fill I llllllllllll l l l PHILOSOPHIZING ON THE PAST JOHN P. SISK Philosopher at Large: An l n t e U e e t u a l...
...The truth of this statement is amply borne out in his book, with the result that some readers will be put off by Adler's refusal to write the sort of true confession they expect from an autobiographer of eminence...
...His second and apparently very happy marriage, to a woman thirty-four years his junior, gets scarcely more space...
...the phenomenally successful How To Read a Book...
...as a young psychology teacher at Columbia he manages to antagonize the philosophy department in which he would have preferred to teach...
...Certainly it would be impossible for anyone to entertain such a vision seriously without Adler's "obsession with putting and keeping things in order"--without what he identifies as his analerotic compulsion to catalogue, index and outline...
...his contentiousness makes him a great bother to teachers he does not agree with, particularly John Dewey and Irwin Edman...
...His first marriage, begun carelessly and in secret, lasted thirty-three years, but it remains on tha periphery of the book...
...The awareness of this defect leads him to wonder whether his autobiographical efforts at self-characterization and selfunderstanding will suffer...
...How to Read a Book was written in seventeen days out of an urgent need to get the thousand dollars necessary to renew the lease on his comfortable apartment...
...James W. Sanders has written the first scholarly history of Chicago's parochial schools...
...Adler's brand of at-largeness has put him into more or less close relationship with such luminaries as Mark Van Doren, I. I. Rabi, Clifton Fadiman, John Dewey, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, Walter Lippmann, Saul Bellow, Jacques Maritaln, Etienne Gilson, Robert and Maude Hutchins, Franz Alexander, Bertrand Russell, Clare Booth Luce, Will Hays, Richard McKeon, Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Bart...
...Several of the social histories of the public schools--here, Sanders cites The Culture Factory by Stanley Schultz, The One Best System by David Tyack, The Irony of Early School Reform by Michael Katz, and a few others--portray them as agents of social control...
...His four children (two adopted) make the briefest of appearances...
...Yet, he does point to the obvious...
...The incipient event in this story is Adler's faking of John Erskine's General Honors course at Columbia, a conversion experience from which there was never any falling away, and with which most of the major events in his life have a connection: his own teaching in the General Honors program...
...Realizing it, with whatever fortunate combination of high living and high thinking, would be another matter...
...If I had as much interest in human beings as I do in human thought, this would be a different story," he writes, and then confesses: "I have given hurt sometimes because of this, and sometimes I have suffered it...
...grants and the first generation...
...Indeed, if any of his old enemies read this book (fortunately, he has outlived most of them) they are likely to assess it morosely as a demonstration of how to make philosophy pay off...
...Things happen to a philosopher who is as often at-odds as he is at-large...
...Macy Co...
...Disobedience of the principal's orders leads to his dropping out of high school, and failure to attend gym classes ("a distraction from more important concerns") keeps him from getting his college degree...
...There, he finds, the experience was radically different--or, at least, it was in Chicago, where the parochial schools were open to the particular currents of class and culture and aspiration...
...As he concludes: To the established, creation of the "one best system" followed logically from a belief in the one best way of life...
...In a sense, the most important charaeters here are the Great Books themselves, and the form of autobiography is employed to write the biography of the Great Books movement in which Adler has-played such a vital role...
...I should add that i~ has thirty-two pages of photographs and that it is, as one would expect, superbly indexed...
...if he had decided to write a more conventional autobiography there would have been no lack of material...
...at the latter institution, working with Hutchins to reform the curriculum, his temperamental disabilities lead him to challenge his colleagues when he should have been attempting t o persuade them...
...the Syntopicon of the Great Books...
...Apart from the question whether a selfdenying unity of effort of this sort is desirable, it would require something like the Aquinas-inspired Summa Dialectica, which as a young man he dreamed of writing...
...As these studies try to show, the schools were used to knock off the rough edges of class and culture that were found on the children of immi...
...But this does not keep the record of his efforts from being thoroughly entertaining...
...The fact is that Adler's protracted emotional immaturity coupled with his "youthful exuberance and wild imprudence" guaranteed anything but an unSome of my contemporaries, including close friends, have been strongly a~ected by current crises and disorders and even frustrated by their intractability...
...his present marriage...
...Given this strict (and esthetically admirable) attention to theme, the striking thing is the extent to which the book remains a very human and at times very moving story...
...He is no more likely to be successful than his beloved Aristotle or that anti-Aristotelian polymath and master-outliner, Peter Ramus, whom Adler so often reminds one of...
...B O O K S fill II I l fill llllllllllllllll I I Ill lllllll II II l fill I llllllllllll l l l PHILOSOPHIZING ON THE PAST JOHN P. SISK Philosopher at Large: An l n t e U e e t u a l Autobtographg MORTIMER J. ADLER Macmillan, $12.95 About one-third of the way through this book Mortimer Adler recounts his discovery, made in the process of trying to write a biography of William James, that he lacked the necessary interest in the living as distinguished from the philosophizing man...
...A tempestuous three-year love affair with his secretary that brings him to the verge of divorce and dismissal from the University of Chicago is covered in one sentence...
...John's College...
...his overcharged rhetoric in defense of world government after World War I I gets him into trouble with the John Birch Society and J. Edgar Hoover...
...His profitable fouryear stint as ghost writer for Will Hays is additionally attractive because he is furnished with a luxurious apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers...
...the foundation of the Institute for Philosophical Research...
...To use the current ]argon, many of my contemporaries have su~ered alienation, future shock, an identity crisis, loss of faith, or a shift in values...
...We have to take pretty much on faith, for instance, that for two years he devoted more time and energy to his first love affair than to his teaching at Columbia...
...Sanders doesn't dispute this wing of the literature...
...his long relationship with Hutchins, begun when the latter was the boy-wonder Dean of the Yale Law School...
...My life in the last thirty years or so," he writes, "has tended to confirm the view that high living is not necessarily incompatible with high thinking...
...Another factor in the eventfulness of Adler's life has been his sybaritical inclinations...
...his meeting New from 0RBIS EDUCATION FOR JUSTICE: PEDAGOGICAL PRINCIPLES by Brian Wren To take effective action against injustice---famine abroad, hunger at home, white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa, the gulf between rich and poor--we must be educated for justice...
...Yet, in all honesty, I must confess that I have not found life rhore di~icult, more complicated, more dehumanized, more uncomfortable, more fearful...
...Uniform schooling was to impart uniform skills and uniform hopes and consequently, as this analysis would hold, the Americanized child of the city schools was in fact a standardized child, ready to move smoothly into the industrial work force...
...The Education o f an Urban M i n o r i t y : Catholics i n Chicago, 1833.1965 JAMES W. SANDERS Ox/ord University Press, $13.95 RALPH WHITEHEAD, JR...
...his dislike of experimental psychology irritates psychologists as much as his dislike of factoriented education irritates scientists...
...Ultimately, too, Adler's long commitment to the Great Books is related to his vision of a grand cooperative of philosophers, who, he is convinced, badly need a dialectical clarification of basic terms if truth is to be advanced...
...his move to Chicago after Hutchins had nagged him into completing his long-delayed dissertation (he wrote it in twenty hours after conducting an experiment in physiological psychology that reads now like a burlesque anticipation of Masters and Johnson...
...the establishment of the Great Books program at St...
...Nor is the book sufficiently anecdotal for devotees of personality journalism...
...Namely, this work doesn't go far enough, since roughly a quarter of the children in the major cities of the Northeast were sent to the Catholic schools...
...But Catholic 14 October 1977:662...
...Philosopher At Large eventful life...
...It offers a suggestive account of how the schools acquired their character, particularly in the years after World War I. I t also seeks an interesting place for itself in the literature of the city schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries...
...his championship of the Great Books makes him enemies at Columbia and later at Chicago...
...as a counselor at a boy's camp all hell breaks loose after he preaches a callow anarchism...
...Inevitably, some of these people get more attention than others--the Hutchinses, Barr, Buchanan and Van Doren in particularmbut even they~ are kept subordinate to ~he intellectual adventure...
...As a matter of fact, he seems eager to accept it, as far as it goes, even if it takes up barely any evidence of what was going on in Chicago's public schools...
...the production of the three-layered fifteenth edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica...
...his involvement with the executive seminars at Aspen...
...I never developed the virtue of temperance or thrift," he confesses...
...his excited discovery of Aquinas at just the right time for him to become a force in the revival of interest in Thomism...
...However diHicult it may be to lead a good human life at any time, I doubt that it is any more di~icult tO make a good life for one's self today than it was at any earlier moment in human history...
...He Commonweal: 661 even toys with the idea of abandoning the relative austerities of academic life to become philosopher-in-residence for the R.H...
...Brian Wren works out the basic principles for such education in this book Paper $4.95 Other related titles: EDUCATION FOR JUSTICE edited by Thomas P. Fenton Resource Manual $7.95 Participant Workbook $3.95 THE GOSPEL OF PEACE AND JUSTICE Catholic Social Teaching Since Pope John by Joseph Gremillion Cloth $15.95, Paper $8.95 Write for 118-title catalog ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, NY 10545 with Van Doren, with whom he was paired as a seminar leader...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 21
