Debating in the Groves of Aspen

During a visit to the University of Chicago in 1934, Gertrude Stein landed in a steamy after-dinner debate with Philosopher Mortimer Adler about the merits of teaching literature in translation. Stein was firmly against it, and Adler defended the proposition fiercely. Suddenly she rose from her chair, marched over to Adler, and rapped him on the head. Said Stein: "I can see that you are the kind of young man who is accustomed to winning arguments."

That he is. Last week Mortimer Adler, now a jaunty 74, author of 26 books, progenitor of the Great Books of the Western World and of the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was relishing another intellectual free-for-all. His opponents were British Philosophers Anthony Quinton and Maurice Cranston, who had been invited to debate Adler on his own turf--the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Moderated by Bill Moyers and billed as a medieval-style "public disputation" on the future of democracy, the affair celebrated the 25th anniversary of Adler's Chicago-based Institute for Philosophical Research.

To kick off the debate, Adler delivered a carefully argued paean to constitutional democracy, lauding it as "the ideally best form of government" because of its commitment to universal suffrage and the common good. "Only democracy," said Adler, "has the justice which comes from granting every man the right to participate in his own government." But Adler predicted that with the inevitable factional disputes between rich and poor, "political democracy will not work unless it is accompanied by economic democracy." And for democracy to survive, war and terrorism must end. Adler's remedy: "A single worldwide community" that would replace all existing international law and alliances.

The London School of Economies' Cranston, 57, a liberal political theorist, was much less sanguine about democracy's capacity to reconcile "the competing, conflicting wills" of its motley electorate. For him, democracy is merely "the least unjust" form of government, in which "the ignorance of the many is mitigated by professional experience of the politicians." Quinton, 52, an analytic philosopher from Oxford, adopted a still more gloomy view, calling government "a necessary evil" that "allows for tyranny by the collectivity over the individual." Quinton also mocked Adler's belief that all want to share in government by voting. "I vote out of a sense of shame," said Quinton, adding that he looked upon the vote as if it were a life jacket on a ferry boat. "I want the right to use it if something happens."

Far Right. It was, of course, a debate no one could win, meant to be more illuminating than persuasive. An audience of 200, largely summer seminarians and institute fellows, had a chance to offer their views. One black charged that "this is a discussion of the concept of nothing"; real democracy, he argued, did not exist anywhere. Some of the auditors criticized all three philosophers for being cautious and too far to the right; others asked whether civil disobedience should be taught in schools (answer: a qualified "sometimes" from Adler).

During the debate, Adler returned to a pet theory: that the good life promised by American democracy will come only when liberal education is truly universal. Said Adler: "We are hypocrites if we continue to think that the equality of citizenship belongs to all, but not the equality of educational opportunity."

Adler's liberal education began at 15 when he discovered Plato while reading John Stuart Mill's Autobiography. In his own autobiography appearing next month, Philosopher at Large (Macmillan; $12.95), a chatty, often charmingly self-deprecating memoir of Adlerian triumphs and misadventures, Adler reports that Mill persuaded him to sample some of Plato's Dialogues.

Soon afterward, the high school dropout made philosophy his vocation.

As an undergraduate at Columbia in the early '20s, Adler became a bulldozer for truth. In class he bombarded John Dewey with long letters pointing out ambiguities and contradictions in his lectures. Dewey benignly suffered Adler for several weeks and then ordered a young assistant to call him off. Adler concedes: "I was an objectionable student, perhaps repulsive." But he later became a popular teacher, first at Columbia, then for 22 years at the University of Chicago, where he and Robert Hutchins set out in 1930 to revolutionize American undergraduate education by teaching the Great Books. While students lionized Adler, senior colleagues attacked him as a brash upstart who advocated a philosophical "return to the Middle Ages."

In one sense, his critics were right, for Adler still describes himself as an Aristotelian. (When he first started his Aspen programs for executives, Adler and a group actually donned robes to get into the spirit of academe.) He relishes dismissing most of philosophy since Thomas Aquinas as being snarled with pseudo problems. Modern philosophy, claims Adler, got off to "a very bad start" when Descartes and Locke committed the "besetting sin of modern thought": they ignored Aristotle.

Many contemporary philosophers would disagree, and that is largely why, as Adler says, "the Establishment for the most part has ignored me." Yet Adler has never needed their imprimatur for priming non-philosophers with the complicated ideas of Western thought and watching them love it. Says he: "Philosophy is everybody's business."

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