Thought, Syndicated

Surrounded by comics, crossword puzzles, cheesecake, dog stories and other newspaper fare, the new column in the Chicago Sun-Times looked as out of place as Plato on a comic-book rack. Even the questions from readers were formidable: What is truth? What is justice? What is love? The columnist's name and title were enough to send Smilin' Jack fans into a tailspin: Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, director of the Institute of Philosophical Research. Yet the column has pulled 150 letters a week since it began appearing last October. This month the Sun-Times will syndicate Philosopher Adler in the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Star.

This impressive public acceptance comes as no surprise to Mortimer Adler (TIME cover, March 17, 1952), who has never downgraded the human brain, including his own. The column was, in fact, his own idea, proposed last year to Marshall Field Jr., Sun-Times publisher and onetime Adler disciple (in what Adler calls "the Fat Man's class,'' the Great Books course he gives to business executives). Adler's argument was that newspaper readers think: "The American public can understand more than we credit it with."

Paraphrase of Aristotle. Adler's new readers prove his point. Invited to submit their meatiest questions, they have bombarded him with 2,500. Adler sorts the mail into "C" (useless), "B" (perhaps) and "A" (usable), has already accumulated a three-year supply of A's. These get published in his weekly column, and win a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books (54 volumes, value $300), which Adler co-edited in the 1940s with Robert Hutchins. then the University of Chicago's chancellor.

The published letters are answered at scholarly length in the column. For a reader inquiring about the uses of leisure, Adler paraphrased Aristotle: "Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary, but it does not enrich or ennoble a human life. Leisure, in contrast, consists of all those activities by which a man grows morally, intellectually and spiritually." Asked to define justice, he quoted Justinian--"Render to each his due"--and Mortimer J. Adler--"Treat equals equally and unequals unequally in proportion to their inequality." Occasionally, Adler is stumped by a reader's question, e.g., "Who is God?"

Poor Man's Plato. The new assignment has been added to a schedule already strained. Six days a week Adler, 56, disappears into a 55-year-old Pacific Heights mansion in San Francisco, headquarters for the Institute of Philosophical Research. Behind this imposing title and fac,ade, Adler and six fellow brains have spent seven years patiently sifting the "Great Ideas" of the ages (by Adler's classification, 102), seeking to mold their meaning into patterns intelligible to all men. At the institute's rate of progress (their first "Great Idea," freedom, is half explored), the job will take 12 centuries.

To Adler, the column in the Sun-Times is "a part of the general education function I am trying to perform in my lectures, Great Book series, and seminars. Admittedly, the column may be for a minority, but it's a substantial minority." Sun-Times Executive Editor Lawrence S. Fanning, who calls Adler "a kind of poor man's Plato," is as enthusiastic as Adler. Says he: "If we can move a few people away from the comic strips and into this kind of material, it seems to me that the paper is performing one of its essential functions, which is education."

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