LB: Great Ideas.Org- Mortimer Adler on DVD

From the comments:

"We are a not-for-profit educational organization, founded by Mortimer Adler and we are Encyclopaedia Britannica’s exclusive agent for these programs.

We have recently made an exciting discovery--three years after writing the wonderfully expanded third edition of How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren made a series of thirteen 14-minute videos on the art of reading. The videos were produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica. For reasons unknown, sometime after their original publication, these videos were lost and are now available.

Three hours with Mortimer Adler on one DVD.

For those of you who teach, this is great for the classroom.

I cannot over exaggerate how instructive these programs are--we are so sure that you will agree, if you are not completely satisfied, we will refund your donation."

Please go here to see a clip and learn more:

http://www.thegreatideas.org/

"The Great Conversation Revisited"- Critique pt 2

Section Three- Why a Second Edition of Great Books of the Western World and How Does it Differ from the First?

For those bracing for a dry discussion about selection methodology, Adler does not disappoint completely. The 20th century receives some kind of Easter morning reprieve as Adler opens the section by invoking Hutchins’ ecumenical observation that, “the Editors don’t think that the Great Conversation came to an end before the 20th century” [32]. The reasoning, he explains, in 1950 when the first edition was assembled, was that the editors lacked the distance to meaningfully separate the good from the great, if only in terms of eventual influence. By the late 1980s, when the second edition was being created, the new editorial team felt enough of a consensus had been reached regarding writings of the early 20th century to extend the series’ contents up through the end of the 1950s.

After four pages of faintly praising the updated material (including a more genuine enthusiasm for improved translations of material from the first edition), Adler cannot resist one last psychobilly freak-out worthy of reproduction.

"What Jose Ortega y Gasset called ‘the barbarism of specialization’…had its first impact on our culture in the years just before WWII. The books published in the first three decades of this century were, for the most part, written by authors who were born and educated in the 19th century and who had not succumbed to the rampant plague of specialization. Only books written after WWII are likely to have been written by authors who were born and educated in the 20th century, and who, because of the academic posts they occupied, were also more susceptible to the spreading infection.

That is another reason why we set the middle years of the 20th century as the cutoff date for the selection of authors and titles to be included in this set. Unless the barbarism of specialization is somehow transcended, it is unlikely that, in philosophy, the natural and social sciences, and history, truly great books will have been written in the closing decades of this century or will be written in the century to follow." [35]

Section Four- Questions and Replies

Adler opens the final section with a short history of the Great Books movement, beginning at Columbia University in the early 1920s and spreading to other reputable institutions like the University of Chicago where both he and Hutchins taught. By the late 1940s, the Great Books movement began its push out of academia and into the community with the establishment of the Great Book Foundation. Given the anti-anti-establishment bent of the Great Books movement, every success was met by vocal critics with concerns about the efficacy of the liberal arts education model as well as charges of elitism and exclusionary tendencies in the reading list itself. Adler separates the series’ critics into two camps, conveniently tied to the two differing editions of the Great Books collection and separated, thus by the four decades between editions.

The first wave, Adler suggests, are critical, in fact, only of misunderstandings about the Great Books series. It is notable that Adler provides his rebuttal to these critics in the form of a speech he delivered in 1948, a full year before the Great Books of the Western World and the accompanying editorial material were published. One might rightly assume that much of what Adler was responding to were criticisms of the curriculae adopted by various schools that reflected the movement’s core values. Before clarifying what is not true to about the Great Books movement, Adler does succinctly outline that core belief, saying that “our claim, then, for the great books program, conceived as a lifetime undertaking, is that it is…certainly the best way for the individual to acquire understanding and wisdom” [37].

With that done, Adler boils the critical reaction (in 1950) against the Great Books program down to five essential misunderstandings that, he asserts, do not represent the critical or ideological position of its advocates.

1. The Great Books are the only books worth reading.

2. Reading and discussion of the Great Books are all that is required in order to give an adult a complete and well-rounded education.

3. Reading the Great Books, absent of other formative influences, will make better human beings and, therefore, better citizens.

4. No knowledge of current events and ideas are necessary in order to function in modern society.

5. Only ideas from antiquity are worthy of careful consideration.

I find this conciliatory tone surprising considering the vehemence with which both Alder and Hutchins attack the modern education system, composed of the same critics they address and with whom they now share only semantic misunderstandings and no differences. Surely those same critics could respond by saying that their criticisms of the “barbarisms of specialization” are founded on misapprehensions of what specialization stands for? Aren’t all arguments over abstractions to some extent, arguments over semantics and definitions?

If Adler is duplicitous in responding to his first wave of critics, he’s completely dismissive of the second, describing the “intense controversy” that accompanied the publication of the second edition in 1988 as “irrelevant” and waged by critics who “appeared to be uninformed about the discussion that had occurred in the first part of the century.” Nonetheless, he includes the heart of the critical response in passing noting that, “objections were raised to the whole idea of a canonical list of books. The narrow parochial interest in Western European culture, excluding the literature of the Far East, was challenged, as well as sexist and racist prejudices that appeared to ignore or dismiss the writings of authors other than white males—European and American” [36].

While the bulk of these concerns go unanswered, Adler does address the lack of material from the Far East, suggesting that the task of delineating and presenting the landmark contributions of that tradition should fall to those better educated in its intricacies. He goes on to say, though, that “with one or two exceptions the great books in these Far Eastern traditions do not enter into the great conversation that occurred in the literature of the West”[37]. It is tempting to extend the logic of that statement into assuming that Adler meant to suggest that the Far Eastern written tradition was silent on the Great Ideas that make up his Syntopicon but, whether that extension represents Adler’s own beliefs falls into the realm of conjecture and not criticism. He may have intended only that the writers of the Mediterranean/European/American tradition wrote in ignorance of what was happening in the literary traditions of China, India, and the Middle East at the same time. But, considered in context with this quote from Hutchins’ essay that Adler included in an earlier section, that willingness to overlook the Eastern tradition begins to look more like willful ignorance than pragmatic deference to Eastern scholars.

"The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilizations can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race…" [Hutchins, 48-9]

Conclusions about “The Great Conversation Revisited”

There is a marked difference in tone between Robert Hutchins’ “The Great Conversation” and this essay from Mortimer Adler and I was continually led to extra-textual speculation to pinpoint the reasons for this disparity other than just differences of style. Hutchins was writing in a time when the full effect of the changes in education had yet to be fully realized and the generational impact fully measured. Much of what he rails against, he opposes in theory, essentially prophesying about the eventual failures of specialization. His defense is more focused on the liberal arts method than on this specific set of works. Adler, in contrast, is writing in an environment where the effects of specialization were well known and, in most cases, embraced with the zeal of democracy or religion, regardless of the mounting evidence that it was, historically, in many ways deficient. His advocacy for the material presented cannot be faulted for its lack of sincerity or academic rigor but his critical defense is too often dismissive and comes to rest on a slippery either/or slope when contrasted with the modern education system.

I've given Dr. Adler quite a rhetorical work-out here because, ultimately, I recognize the wisdom of what he is telling us even as I question the articulation of his vision. That is the heart of the Great Conversation as each new generation reconsiders the wisdom of its ancestors through the prism of new information and new understanding. Whether or not he found my viewpoint hopelessly tainted by the evils of post-post-modernity, I'd like to believe that Dr. Adler would appreciate that some 90 years after the Great Books movement began, it continues to reach out, inspire and educate.

"The Great Conversation Revisited"- Critique, Pt. 1

“The Great Conversation Revisited” by R.

There are at least two ways that one may look at the books collected into the Great Books of the Western World series. It is possible (and possibly advisable) to consider them as nothing more than attractive and durable set of books that word nerds will no doubt find a use for in the course of their otherwise empty lives. Believe it or not, I’ve actually sat up in bed at 2 AM before and wondered aloud if I had any Aristophanes lying around. So, if your overall anxiety level goes down knowing that you have access to more Montaigne than you know what to do with, the Great Books are definitely your huckleberry. It is my deep suspicion that fewer sets of the GB have been sold to that purpose than say that of, say, ornate bookshelf filler.

Series associate editor, Mortimer J. Adler acknowledges as much in “The Great Conversation Revisited”, his foreword to the second edition of the Great Books collection, but he also goes a great deal further to defend the loftier ideals that went into its compilation. While it may seem odd to begin an exploration of the Great Books and the Conversation they represent with an essay written in response to series’ editor Robert Hutchins’ original defense of the Western canon, “The Great Conversation”, there are pragmatic reasons to do just that. First, while Adler did not pioneer the movement to return the classics to the classroom, it was clearly his initiative that continued to raise the bar on that effort and, in many cases, move it past pedagogical theory into actual practice. Hutchins’ essay, though sweeping in its scope and intensity, spends more time defending the wisdom in obtaining a liberal arts education than it does defending this selection of writing as its representative. Adler, in contrast, is a wonder of evangelistic brevity, meticulous in laying out clearly defined terms for his arguments and then defending them with evidence.

Section One- The Great Books and the Great Ideas

Adler begins his long and winding argument with an analogy, positing that just as there are “goods” (or necessities) of the body (listing food, drink, sleep, clothing, and shelter among their number), so also does the mind require “goods” of its own; information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom. While information and knowledge are widely seen as doubling with each passing moment, few, Adler argues, would say that the world is suffering from an overabundance of wisdom and understanding. Just as removing any one of the goods of the body negates to some extent the efficiency of the others (ie sleeping nude on the ground in the middle of the tundra), so does information/knowledge likewise suffer from a lack of wisdom and understanding as a complement. Put simply, Mortimer Adler believes (and wants you to believe) that the wisdom and understanding in Western culture (in essence, the Great Conversation) had traditionally been and could again be transmitted by the writings contained in this collection.

Before launching into a full-frontal defense of that idea, he lists the criteria that went into selecting the works included and a couple more that were necessarily not included in the process.
These criteria warrant a moment’s consideration as they can as easily serve as at least some of the criteria by which the reader may consider an individual work’s inclusion into the collection as a whole. Adler lists Contemporary Significance as his first criteria, insisting that it must address the concerns common to humanity across the millennia as opposed to the specific concerns of its time. Second, the work must be of adequate profundity and sophistication to warrant not only being read, but being read a number of times in order to extract the fullness of meaning. Last, Great Works must be of extensive relevance to the Great Conversation, whether in addressing several of its core themes or in just a few but to a depth that transforms it into an unforgettable landmark on any journey concerned with understanding a given issue.

Equal consideration should also be given to Adler’s non-criteria as partial clues to the identity of the barbarians he presumes to be massing at the gates of civilization. The influence of a particular work on culture was not considered out of context of its relevance to the Great Conversation. This is one of Adler’s safety hatches for those who would point to a mass of literature from every place in the world that was not Europe or America as worthy of equal consideration. While he acknowledges the possibility that writings from the Far East (and by logical extension, the Near East, the Middle East, Africa, and South America) may be of equal literary merit, he punts the task of indexing exactly how those traditions might relate to the Western canon down the field to future scholars in search of an emerging global human culture. His second non-criteria is that no work is included by virtue of the truth that it supposedly contains. In this sense, he offers the Great Books not as a repository of truth but as a record of the quest to uncover it, acknowledging that “no human work rises to the perfection of being devoid of logical flaws.”

Section Two- The Great Conversation

Adler dedicates the second section of his essay to what Hutchins identifies as the defining characteristic of Western culture, the Great Conversation, and uses the opportunity to articulate and defend the aims of the collection .He presents three editorial additions to the Great Books of the Western World collection as evidence of the Great Conversation’s existence and unique importance in world culture. First, the Syntopicon illustrates that canonical writers are compelled to address the Great Ideas whether by virtue of their common membership in the human race (as Adler would suggest) or participation in a more limited, specifically Western experience. Secondly, he points to the Author-to-Author index as a more visually oriented proof of the influence of tradition that is visible from the earliest Greek dramatic poets up through the 20th century. Finally, the Author-to-Idea index supports Adler’s assertion that “most of the great authors, with the possible exception of a few mathematicians and natural scientists have made significant contribution to the Great Conversation in relation to a large number of great ideas” [30]. I’ll grant that all three features, especially the Syntopicon which represents an enormous amount of information relative to the other two touted, do add to one’s enjoyment of the work. They strike me, however, as less of a proof of an objective phenomenon (ie the Great Conversation) and more the kind of labor of love that dwelling on a particular idea in a number of ways (the liberal arts ideal) is likely to produce.

If the first half of this section is overly pragmatic in its exploration of these editorial contribution, Adler turns didactic in the second. His purpose is two-fold; one, overt and one, implicit. While enunciating the difficulties of folding the 20th century writing into the easy framework otherwise provided by history, Adler cannot resist seizing the opportunity to excoriate 20th century values as intrinsically responsible for this aberrant disjunction with the past. Adler uses his discussion of the Author-to-Idea index to further an argument that the 20th century represents, “a clear break between this century and the twenty-five centuries that precede it in the tradition of Western civilization” [31]. Though he concedes that the 20th century writers, “address themselves to the same set of Great Ideas to which their predecessors contribute,” Adler seems at once irritated and self-impressed that the Syntopicon had to be extensively re-redited to allow for the novelty of 20th century thought and writing. He goes on to describe the timbre of these revisions as necessitated by “the disagreements of the 20th century authors to their predecessors or their departure from the ground covered in early centuries [as well as] the breaking of new ground” [31]. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

This digression (mitigated in the Great Conversation collection by Clifton Fadiman’s “The Contributions of the 20th Century” that is viciously sandwiched in between Adler and Hutchin’s dueling screeds against modernity) is noteworthy for reasons fundamental to a full appreciation of Adler’s purpose. The urgency with which both Adler and Hutchins attack the perceived inadequacies of the 20th century is the organizing impulse behind the Great Books program. They find its education ill-considered; its trend towards hyper-specialization intellectually dangerous and its writing, by and large, inadequate to the legacy it bears as its influence. The comprehensive ideal set by the publication of the Great Books of the Western World series, however, insists that its editors swallow the bitter pill of modernity to prevent charges of ethno- and phallocentrism from settling like a dark cloud over their supposedly definitive presentation of the most important writings in the Western tradition. It is an irreconcilable tension that surfaces over and over again throughout the Great Conversation.