Opening the Mind to Rationality
I found the first edition of this book at friend's used book store, and I was intrigued by the title. I vaguely remebered Adler too, and his connection to the Great Books movement at the University of Chicgao where I attended college. So, I bought the book. In short, this is one of the most important books I have read. Adler's thesis has done much to help me understand the origins of our deteriorating culture and offers a path to a better future.
The first edition, written in 1939, is somewhat different the last edition of the book, written in 1972 and more of a practical manual for reading. I've read both editions, and my comments below are taken more from the earlier edition. The later edition is certainly valuable, and is more streamlined that the first edition, but is also less of the manifesto that I have found so valuable a guide.
Long before Alan Bloom wrote "The Closing of the American Mind", Adler recognized that Western universities, especially American universities, were drifting along a path of specialization and positivist philosopical doctrines that deprived students of a rigorous training in thinking and writing. Instead, the drive to specialize and allow students greater freedom in defining their course work by offering greater numbers of elective courses was creating a generation that lost touch with the great eternal questions of mankind, and, hence was creating a technocracy--one less and less capable of addressing the deep issues that humankind has always, and will always, face.
Adler's prescription for curing this deficiency is to use the Great Books--a list of books that have been recogized as especially vital sources of intellectual expression that was first complied at Columbia University in the 1920s--as a means to develop clear thinking and writing by reading and discussing the texts in a Socratic dialog. It's important to understand taht Adler doesn't advocate using the texts has they had been used traditionally, as a source of academic dogma. Instead, he describes a deeper, active method of reading these books which the reader uses to approach the text in a more profound way; thus the title. Briefly, Adler describes a process of "active" reading in which the reader first becomes familiar with the gross structure of the book; then the organization of the text; and then the finer structure of the arguments and terms of the text. Only when the reader has "come to terms" with the text and really understands the author's premises and arguments can the reader offer judgment and critisism.
Thus, Adler does not use the Great Books as just so much stale and pompous ancient texts from a buch of dead white guys. Rather, he challenges the reader to really try to grasp these texts, which themselves are excellent examples of good writing and thinking, and to reach their own conclusions about the author's arguments and positions. By doing this sort of reading, Adler argues, we improve our own thinking and writing by challening the past masters.
I am very much taken with Adler's arguments and ideas; and I see in our current situation the effects of the failings of academia that he so clearly pointed to many decades ago. In Adler's "manifesto", I can see how so many people who hold degrees from the best universities in our coutry could have led us to disasterous wars in Vietnam and Iraq; how we are so quick to abandon our freedoms for "homeland security"; and how we trade happiness for Wall Street profits.
I also believe in Adler's program to cure these ills: Read the Great Books, read them using the method he describes as often and as best you can, discuss them with your friends, and reclaim your soul by giving yourself the education your teachers couldn't.
