Death of a great reader_and philosopher

// Mortimer Adler believed in a marketplace of ideas, encouraging debate of the written word

Mortimer Adler is dead. This won't send the mass of Chicagoans into mourning, but in the 1950s and '60s Adler was a giant in town. He arrived from New York in the early 1930s, lured by Robert Maynard Hutchins, the famous president of the University of Chicago. Adler immediately alienated most of the faculty, and Hutchins was forced to create a special position for him at the law school. That was only the first of decades' worth of conflicts that surrounded Adler. He was an institution builder, launching the Great Books

series at Encyclopaedia Britannica, founding the Institute for Philosophical Research and co-founding, along with Hutchins, the Great Books Foundation.

Just about everyone who worked with Adler came away with grievances, but all came away, too, with greater understanding of the world and the ideas that make it work.

Adler's own big idea was that the Great Books-enduring works of literature roughly from Plato through Freud-convey the spirit and substance of Western civilization, and that no one is truly educated without having read and discussed them all. In 1943, Adler packed Symphony Hall-and left more than 1,000 people on the street-by discussing Plato's Republic on stage with a handful of local luminaries.

To Adler, ideas mattered more than anything. During World War II, he told people that they had a moral obligation to study the ideas at stake in the war. During the prosperity of the 1950s, he told people that they need to understand what, exactly, constituted the good life before they could feel satisfied. And through the turbulent 1960s and '70s, he told people that political protest was meaningless unless the protesters knew the Great Books.

Happiness, Adler said, was not a matter of how you feel. Instead, it is a matter of how good you are. If you're not happy, you need to try to be a better person.

Some critics believed that Adler could become a better person by making room in his list of Great Books for at least a few titles written by women, African Americans or Latinos. But Adler refused, laboring under the belief that all of the Great Books were written by Western men, period. Most of the institutions that Adler created eventually took a broader view, and he found himself a critic of their deviations (he accused the Great Books Foundation of promoting ''phony tolerance'').

Adler's greatest contribution is not a list of which books are great, nor is it the 48 books he wrote on philosophy, though just about all of them are well worth reading. Instead, his greatest contribution is the place he helped make in this nation for public debate of ideas. Adler loved to argue, and in everything he did, he insisted that people open their mouths and argue-with him, with each other, or with just about anybody.

And his exclusion of minority voices from the Great Books reflected the narrowness of his own reading and studies more than anything else. But he did Chicago and the nation a great service by creating the image of an intellectual leader as a man or woman who stands in the public square and gets people talking about challenging issues.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Adler was responsible for opening the debate over minority voices in literature, even though he chose the wrong side of the argument. Truth, in the end, emerges from dialogue and debate. Loud exchange of ideas is the first step. Though some of those ideas might be ugly or offensive, getting them out into the sunlight is the first step in getting beyond them.

It's hard to create a culture in which people talk about books and ideas, but Chicago is known as a town where people are ready to mix it up in part because of Adler. And through the Great Books Foundation, still a Chicago institution 54 years after its founding, more than 1 million kids in American schools read and talk about challenging books-the kinds of books they wouldn't be likely to get their hands on otherwise.

Which books? Some of the usual suspects, for sure. Plato's in there. And Aristotle. But also Virginia Woolf. And Toni Morrison. And Julio Cortezar. Now, Adler might call some of this phony tolerance, but he's the man who set it all in motion more than 50 years ago, and for that he deserves real gratitude.

He got us all talking, and reading, and thinking out loud. You never know where a good debate might wind up-but Adler knew that it's always worth the effort. Particularly as Chicago faces a change in leadership in our school system, this is a good idea to keep in mind.

Peter S. Temes is president of the Great Books Foundation. E- mail:peter@greatbooks.org

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