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The Mortimer J. Adler Archive |
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by Mortimer J.
Adler
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Index:
These two words are used in the everyday speech of almost everyone, but not with the philosophical significance they should have. When, speaking or writing philosophically, we declare that something is objective, we are saying that it is the same for all individuals. That being so, it is public, not private. It can be a common object about which two or more individuals may engage in conversation, agree or disagree, and dispute with each other. But when we declare that something is subjective, we are saying that it is different for you, for me and for many other individuals. It belongs in the realm of the private. It is not a public matter that can be discussed with the aim of arriving at a shared understanding of it. In the twentieth century, the statement that all value judgments are subjective means, in effect, that value judgments -- about what is good or bad, right or wrong -- are matters of personal prejudice or private opinion. They are not objectively true or false, and so moral philosophy is dismissed as being noncognitive. Our judgments of matter of fact are genuine knowledge, but not our value judgments.
For a truth to be self-evident it must be beyond the shadow of a doubt. It must be undeniable simply because its opposite is impossible for us to think. If right desire is desiring what we ought to desire, and if we ought to desire only that which is really good for us and nothing else, then we have found the one controlling self evident principle of all ethical reasoning -- the one indispensable categorical imperative. That self-evident principle can be stated as follows: we ought to desire everything that is really good for us. One may ask why this is self-evident; the answer is that something is self-evident if its opposite is unthinkable. It is unthinkable that we ought to desire anything that is really bad for us; and it is equally unthinkable that we ought not to desire everything that is really good for us. The meanings of the crucial words "ought" and "really good" co-implicate each other, as do the words "part" and "whole" when we say that the whole is greater than any of its parts is a self-evident truth. Given this self-evident prescriptive principle, and given the facts of human nature that tell us what we naturally need, we can reason our way to a whole series of prescriptive truths, all categorical. Kant was wrong in thinking that practical reason itself can formulate a meaningful categorical imperative, without any consideration of the facts of human nature. It is human nature, not human reason, that provides us with the foundations of a sound ethics.
Dear Dr. Adler, Is worldly success necessary for happiness? In our society we tend to estimate other people in terms of success, and we usually measure that by the amount of material wealth they have been able to accumulate. But I wonder if we aren't setting up a false idol. Is human happiness really measurable in terms of material success? E. D. Dr. Adler responds: In my previous discussions of happiness, I pointed out that it consists in a life made perfect by the possession of all good things -- all the things that human beings need in order to lead fully satisfactory lives. The material goods of wealth are included among these good things, as well as moral and intellectual goods. But, as every one knows, you can have too much of certain good things, and that is why wealth raises a particularly difficult moral problem. In its most general meaning, success consists in the attainment of any goal, purpose, or desire. If we achieve some measure of the happiness we strive for, we are successful. But, as you point out, many people today think of success almost exclusively in terms of accumulating worldly goods. When the notion of success is limited to this, success is not the same as happiness, for material goods cannot by them selves make a man happy. In fact, they may "prevent" him from being successful in the pursuit of happiness. The ancient as well as the modern world was well acquainted with the view that material wealth was the be-all and end-all for man. But philosophers such as Aristotle observe that this is a very narrow and distorted view of human life. He sets up a scale of goods in which wealth occupies the "lowest" rank, ministering to the needs of the body and subordinate to the goods of the mind and of character. Aristotle's evaluation of wealth roughly corresponds to the popular saying that money is not important unless you don't have any. You need certain material things in order to keep alive, and since you must keep alive in order to lead a good life, a certain amount of material goods is indispensable. But since living well goes way beyond merely keeping alive, material goods alone cannot make a life worth living. Aristotle makes an important distinction between two kinds of wealth-getting. The first kind is familiar to any housewife. It is the process of acquiring enough wealth to maintain a family in decent style, that is, with a reasonable supply of the means of subsistence and the comforts and conveniences of life. The other kind of wealth-getting seeks to accumulate money for money's sake. Some persons, Aristotle observes, think that their sole object in life is "to increase their money without limit . . . The origin of this disposition in men is that they are intent upon living only, and not upon living well." Such men, Aristotle maintains, may succeed in be coming as rich as Croesus, but like Croesus they may end their lives wondering why wise men like Solon do not look upon them as happy. Plato, like Aristotle, holds that the man who "shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth" will end up miserable. "To be good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time," Plato thinks, is impossible. This is certainly the view of the Gospel verse which says that a rich man has as hard a time getting into the Kingdom of Heaven as a camel through a needle's eye. But such remarks must not be interpreted as meaning that material possessions are wrong in themselves. What is wrong is to make wealth the be-all and end-all of life -- to become possessed by one's possessions. The Bible inveighs not so much against wealth as against the covetousness and greed that it arouses in men. The prophets and the Psalms vividly depict the moral blindness which often accompanies the possession of great wealth. But it is St. Paul who makes the essential point quite clear. St. Paul does not say that money is the root of all evil. He says that it is the "love" of money which leads men to their moral destruction. Obsession with material success leads to spiritual failure.
Some time toward the beginning of the summer of 1926, Mark Van Doren asked me to review the recently published "The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant, one of the then current "popularizations of knowledge," which kept company with H. G. Wells's "Outline of History", Hendrik Van Loon's "Story of Mankind", and Lewis Browne's "This Believing World". Chapters of Durant's book had been previously published by Haldeman-Julius in little paperback blue books that sold for ten cents a copy. Collected in one hardback volume, they were now being offered to the public by Simon and Schuster for five dollars. Through the haze of my indifference to externals, I was aware that Durant's "Story of Philosophy" was being lavishly praised by reviewers. An advertisement in the "New York Times" of August 22, 1926, announced that this "run away best-seller" had gone through nine printings in less than three months. It quoted extravagant encomiums from Heywood Broun, Henry Hazlitt, and Stuart Sherman, and included John Dewey's statement that in this "thoroughly scholarly, thoroughly useful, human and readable" book, "Dr. Durant has humanized rather than merely popularized the story of philosophy." I was irked by all of this, but not enough to move off dead center. What did it was a telephone call from Mark Van Doren at the beginning of September which reached me in Kip Fadiman's apartment, where I spent many days aimlessly frittering away time. Mark said that he wanted my review of Durant as quickly as possible, and set a deadline which allowed me only ten days to read the book and write the review. It was as if Mark had pressed a button that released energies I had been storing up for the purpose. I read "The Story of Philosophy" with mounting distaste and gave vent to it in my review. Mine was one of only two adverse criticisms that the book received at the time; the other was written by Paul Weiss and published in the "New Republic". The affinity of our reviews established a bond between Paul and me that has grown into a lifelong friendship. My chief complaint was that Durant had "humanized" philosophy -- exactly the thing for which Dewey praised him. His book, like that of his precursor in antiquity, Diogenes Laertius, author of "The Lives and Opinions of the Philosophers", dealt mainly with men, not with ideas, or with ideas only as opinions formed by men under certain psychological or cultural influences. An interest in human beings is one thing; an interest in thought another; and one should not be allowed to get in the way of the other. Nor should a man's thought be explained solely by reference to his personality or temperament, or the social and cultural setting of his life. To use that type of explanation as a basis for evaluating his thought, to insinuate that its origins make its validity suspect, is to commit the genetic fallacy -- the substitution of psychology for logic -- which was my main point of protest against John Dewey and other pragmatists and humanists. The central blindness of Durant's book, I wrote, lies in the fact that "philosophy is conceived in a manner which would be rudely uncongenial . . . to the minds of the philosophers Mr. Durant has chosen to sketch sympathetically. Where he has achieved sympathetic insight into a philosophic system it has been largely on the side of its vital motivations rather than in terms of its dialectical intent. His implicit acceptance of the pragmatic attitude toward the history of philosophy . . . makes his lack of appreciation for antithetical viewpoints the more distressing, since the pragmatic conception of philosophy is the unacknowledged, pervasive doctrine of the book, underlying its exposition of thinkers to whom pragmatism would have been unintelligible. This doctrine commits the fallacy of genetic interpretation. It assumes that ideas are to be exhaustively understood and their validity estimated in terms of their origins; that philosophies are most significantly revealed as biographical items in a socio-politico-economic context." Admitting that "the thinker may be described biologically" and that "thinking may be a psychological process, susceptible to various psychoanalyses," I went on to insist that "thought itself . . . has a logical structure disengaged from life and a life of its own in discourse which is purely dialectical." And I concluded the review by saying that just as the poets were banished by Plato for writing stories about the gods, so "Diogenes and Mr. Durant would have been exiled with them for telling stories about the philosophers. Not that gossips and collectors of opinions could have harmed the real philosophers who ruled the perfect state; simply that lack of insight into the relation between discourse and truth would have offended them." As I now look back upon that review, I can see evidence of my unresolved state of mind about philosophy, torn between a concern with its being true in the same way that science claims a modicum of truth for itself, and an inclination to disengage philosophy from relation to anything outside the universe of discourse in which it flourishes as a dialectical or logical enterprise. The extreme purism, or intellectual austerity, to which the latter tendency drove me is now as repugnant to me as it must have been to my elders then, some of whom may have had the charity to excuse it as a youthful excess. On one thing, however, I have not changed my mind. The genetic fallacy is an error always to be scrupulously avoided. Nor have I ever found the idiosyncrasies of human beings, including myself, more interesting than their ideas.
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