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Editor's note: POLYSEMY makes no claim to have permission to reproduce this essay by Mortimer Adler. I transcribed it directly from the bound book of Adler's called Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, which I checked out from the Chicago Public Library. I did so because I believe this essay is an important resource to working artists, and deserves wider exposure. Of course, so many of Adler's essay are already online, and even one that shares a title with the one below, though is different. In the case where objections be raised, it is my hope that the reproduction of the essay is seen in the light that perhaps Adler himself may have approved: namely, that of serving to increase exposure to the great ideas of Western culture, through an expertly written preview of their general contour. For those who read this essay and find it interesting, please see the Amazon.com listing for this book, by clicking
here.
By Mortimer Adler (originally published in the Saturday Review of Literature, November 22, 1958) What is an idea? Ideas are my business. I've been at it forty years now, and I have not yet found a new idea. But the old ones — and I am just getting started on some of them — have kept me going. And in all this time I have come to some conclusions and, I believe, a clearer notion not only of what an idea is but of what it is not. It is not just a word, nor it is a string of words. Words are performing their highest function when they express ideas, but they do not constitute the ideas they express. This is clearly shown by the fact that different persons all using the same word may not have the same comprehension of the idea which that word expresses. Consider the word "love". It has many meanings which we recognize as soon as we consider the difference between romantic love and conjugal love, the difference between the love that parents readily bestow upon their children and the love that children slowly develop for their parents. All these meanings of the word — all these kinds of love — have something in common. All are related aspects of a single, very large idea — the idea of love. But as most people employ the word in ordinary speech, they have only a small part of this idea in mind; and when young people use it they seldom have in mind the same part that older people have. Few who use the word ever have the whole idea in mind, for it takes a lifetime of experience and thought to comprehend it fully. And idea is not a fact of any kind, nor a collection of facts, no matter how massive or rrecondite. The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea. A history book is full of facts, none of which is an idea, though if the writer is given to philosophizing about history he may illuminate the facts with some basic idea, such as the idea of progress, the idea of chance, or the idea of fate. Suppose we are dealing with the idea of "progress", in itself abstract and general. To grasp it, we consider one example after another, each a concrete or particular instance of the essential idea. We look at the changes that have been made in transportation to increase comfort and speed. We call attention to the advances that have been made in the conquest of disease. We may even point to improvements in certain social or political institutions, such as the treatment of criminals or the protection of human rights. But none of these things is the idea of progress, though each may exemplify it. Moreover, if we did not have some idea of progress in the first place, we would not have chosen these examples to illustrate what we have in mind and to hold that idea before us. Ideas influence our actions no less than feelings, desires, emotions, and purposes do, but not in the same way. Our particular passions or desires determine the attitudes we take and move us to the things we do. But if we ever recognize the discrepancy between what we do and what we ought to do, we are moved by ideas, not passions. Particular loves and hates may lead us to befriend certain minority groups and persecute others. But if we ever question such discrimination — our own or someone else's — we do so in virtue of ideas about love and man (especially insights about the fraternity and equality of men) that move us to judge our attitudes, and even perhaps to overcome our prejudices. Some of the positive attributes of an idea have already been indicated by the difference between ideas and words, facts, examples, and emotions or desures. An idea alters and grows. Having a life, it can have a history — a past, present, and future. Each of the great ideas is a complex and organic whole, a dissectible structure of related parts. It has an interior, and in this sense it is like a domain which can be probed, pried into, explored, approached from many angles, taken apart in many ways. Ideas may look alike from the outside, but the more we look into them the more we find that each is a world of its own, with its own special history and its own special structure. Yet each also belongs to a vaster world or universe of thought in which ideas group themselves as so many constellations or galaxies. In themselves and in relation to one another they comprise the configuration of the human mind, as intricate and varied in their crisscrossing patterns as the starry heavens. And like each individual star, every idea is a source of life and light which animates and illuminates the words, facts, examples, and emotions that are dead — or deadly — and dark without them. The idea of Government, for example, moves in the orbit of such other ideas as State, Law, Constitution, Citizen, Democracy, Revolution. The idea of Virtue not only has such ideas as Wisdom, Temperance, Justice, Prudence, and Courage as its satellites, but it also is one of the focal points in a group of ideas that includes Desire, Duty, Sin, Happiness, and Pleasure and Pain. The more fully one investigates any great idea the more one has to delve into the others. The pursuit is endless — and fascinating. None of these things would be true if ideas were words, or facts, or examples, of feelings. Nor would words, facts, examples, or feelings play the roles that they do in humanh life if idea did not intervene to give them meaning and direction. Apart from ideas, great or small, they would not be discussable, interpretable, or even relatable. But while all ideas have the properties mentioned, the nature of ideas is most clearly seen in the case of the relatively small number of great ideas that are the main point of reference in the universe of human thought. What are these "great ideas"? Working with a large research staff, I spent eight years directing the construction of a reference work entitled The Great Ideas or Syntopicon, which aimed at a systematic and comprehensive inventory of the fundamental ideas to be found in the great books of the Western world. In the beginning, we drew up a list of some seven hundred possible candidates for inclusion in our encyclopedic catalogue of great ideas. Then we started to examine them. After two years we found that most of these notions were parts or bits of more inclusive ideas. When we came to count up the really big and independent ideas that could stand by themselves, we determined that the irreducible minimum numbered 102 [ed — subsequently added to, to make 103].
The Syntopicon was published in 1952 as an adjunct to the fifty-two volume Great Books of the Western World. Since then I have been continuously at work on ideas with my colleagues at the Institute for Philosophical Research, and so far we have not found any ideas of a magnitude comparable to the [103]. Nor has dropping any from the list been suggested. None of the [103] great ideas is a recent discovery in the sense of which there are really new inventions in every age. The ancient Greeks had a name for every one of them. All have been objects of speculation and inquiry since the beginning of thought. They have always been the common stock of the human mind. Innumerable men have engaged in the discussion of each one of them. The vast literature which exists on every great idea reflects not only the continuity of human thought about them, but also the wide diversity of opinions to which such thought inevitably gives rise. In the sphere of the great ideas we can find all the fundamental disagreements — and agreements — of mankind. When I say that there are no new ideas — or no great ones that are new — I do not mean that there is nothing new in the world of ideas. On the contrary, most of the great ideas have kept on changing and growing in substance and scope, to whatever extent thinking men have been at work on them century after century. Unlike facts, which remain fixed for all time once they are established, the great ideas, once discovered in the dim past, remain the same in the way in which living organisms remain the same while developing. In every epoch, intellectual geniuses have added not new ideas but new facts to the same enduring ones. Some of the great ideas have been more energetically or creatively pursued at certain periods of places than at others. Ideas like Prophecy or Angel have had a livelier history in antiquity or in the Middle Ages than in modern times. The opposite is true of such ideas as Progress and Evolution. But the lineage of these goes back to antiquity. As Mark Twain wryly observed, "The ancients stole all our ideas from us." Even more important than the living presence of a great idea is its future. Each is still unfinished business, each is still imperfectly understood. For six years the staff of the Institute for Philosophical Research has worked on a single idea — Freedom. We studied its past by trying, so far as ossible, to read through all the major writings on the subject. We explored the whole range of differing conceptions and theories which eminent thinkers have advanced or held about freedom, assessing this idea's present significance by taking stock of all that as been thought about it in the past and is being thought about it now. This stocktaking, we hope, will reveal the fundamental agreements and disagreements which unite and divide men, together with the arguments by which they have carried on the debate of the issues. Later we plan to understake similar inquiry and investigation ofr such fundamental ideas as Justice, Law, Love, Wealth, Knowledge, and Government. The venture is a formidable one. Taking four or five years for the exploration of an idea, it will require much more than several lifetimes to examine human thought on all [103] of the great ideas, each of which has a future larger and more interesting than its past. One thing we know from the experience we have had in constructing the Syntopicon and in examining the idea of freedom. Every one of the great ideas is a unique adventure. Each has an interior structure and life of its own, not to mention its difference from others in size and complexity. Some great ideas — God, State, Man, Knowledge, and Wealth — involves as many as forty or fifty difference topics. Some, like Fate, Element, and Honor, require only ten or fifteen. Some have a relatively simple order of parts. Some have a complex and intricate structure. But all have enough scope and variety to deserve a fuller treatment than can be given in a short essay. In the Syntopicon, the treatment of liberty took about twenty-one pages. When The Idea of Freedom, the first volume of which has recently been published, is completed, it will run to about 1,500 pages. Whether we know it or not, we are all philosophers. We all think — well or sloppily, enthusiastically or inattentively. The slightest sense perception — a falling leaf, a twinkling star, a smiling child — awakens our minds as well as arouses our feelings and forces us to ask: Why? What? Whence? Whither? Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men. The ant can life without ideas because the whole course of its life is fixed. But man has the freedom — and, therefore, the necessity — to chooes and to choose in terms of ideas. We often think of ourselves as living in a world which no longer has any unexplored frontiers. We speak of pioneering as a thing of the past. But in doing so we forget that the greatest adventure of all still challenges us — what Mr. Justice Holmes called "the adventure of the human mind". Men may be hemmed in geographically, but every generation stands on the frontiers of the mind. In the world of ideas, there is always pioneering to be done, and it can be done by anyone who will use the equipment with which he is endowed. The great ideas belong to everyone. |
