The Idea of Freedom by Mortimer J. Adler (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 565 The Idea of Freedom. By MoRTIMER J. ADLER. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1958. Pp. 716, with bibliographies and indexes. $7.50. " A man will turn over half a library to make one book." This remark of Samuel Johnson's will sound like understatement to a reader of The Idea of Freedom. Since 1952 Mortimer Adler and his staff of more than twenty researchers for the Institute for Philosophical Research have turned over a library on freedom so enormous that they call it simply " the literature." The bibliography is forty pages long. The Institute was founded nine years ago and Dr. Adler has been its Director from the start. Its purpose is to take inventory of Western thought in order to find the basic agreements and disagreements among the varied philosophical theories of the last twenty-five centuries, " to clarify the prevailing philosophical diversity on basic subjects like freedom, law,_ justice, knowledge, or love, in the way that seems best suited to advancing the pursuit of truth." (p. xix) This first product of the Institute's program is a highly successful beginning. Another volume will follow to complete the work on freedom before other fundamental ideas receive the same treatment. After a brief General Introduction which explains the objectives and methods of the Institute, there are two books of unequal length. The first is Philosophical Discussion and Controversy, which outlines in less than a hundred pages the procedures used by the researchers in their effort to chart the areas of agreement and disagreement In Book II, The Discussion of Freedom, the method is applied to the library on freedom. Book III, now in preparation, will complete the project on liberty. But the present volume can be understood without dependence on Book III. For Adler and his coworkers it is a basic assumption that genuine agreements do exist among those who differ about freedom. The task they set themselves here is to reconstruct the age-old debate in an impartial, objective way. Regarding themselves as a corps of observers who listen to the discussion but do not participate, they aim to record it as accurately as they can, to report in neutral language the conversation, including the silences, of representative philosophers of freedom. Without taking sides or inquiring which conception is true, the observer (or "the dialectician," as he is called here) undertakes the creative work of extracting from the literature implicit as well as explicit positions and comparing them. Readers familiar with scholastic logic will recognize in Book I the strong influence of Aristotle and medieval thinkers. The dialectical approach was used for theology in Abelard's Sic et Non, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and the Summae. In philosophy, however, examples are harder to find. " The kind of independent dialectical work that Abelard and Lombard did for theology has never been done for philosophy, at least not in an equally comprehensive and sustained manner." (p. 77) Adler suggests that the 566 ROOK REVIEWS Disputed Questions of the medieval schoolmen are among the rare illustrations in the history of philosophy (p. 63, footnote). He is hopeful that the future progress of philosophy will be speeded if this kind of dialectical effort is undertaken today. But like so many advances in the physical sciences the acceleration must come from a division of labor rather than from individual genius; only by the joint effort of teams of researchers will many breakthroughs become possible. Book I is very weH done. The exposition is careful and dear, especially with regard to terminology, and there is an abundance of apt examples. But the prime iHustration is to be found in the five hundred pages of Book H. The Discussion of Freedom on the whole, a successful application of the dialectical principles expounded earlier. On the hypothesis that the literature reveals at least three particular types of liberty, each the subject of a special controversy, and also a more general controversy about the general understanding of freedom, Adler poses these five problems for si!Jlution (p. 52) : to identify the distinct freedoms which are the subjects of the special controversies; (9.!) to identify the subject of the general controversy, i.e., freedom...