The Four Dimensions of Philosophy
by Mortimer J. Adler
Adler didn't write for other professional philosophers, and other professional philosophers have returned the favor by not writing about Adler. This sort of thing was entirely characteristic of 20th century philosophy; and, thus far, 21st century philosophers promise to be no more willing to put their own intellectual house in order. Philosophy has long devolved into a game of "publish or perish".
Philosophy, even more than other disciplines, is in need of an understanding of its own nature. It falls to philosophy to provide the conceptual foundations for every other intellectual discipline, including science, logic, and mathematics. And, although they sometimes have, philosophers can hardly afford to give less consideration to the nature of their own discipline. But in the 20th century philosophy went almost comically off the rails, its worst errors distilled into something known as "Logical" Positivism, a philosophical movement that asserted that the only true and meaningful statements were assertions of bare fact. Everything else was mere metaphysical nonsense. Of course, this assertion itself was not a statement of positive fact. And this says much about the intellectual sophistication of the "logical" positivists.
Enter Adler. What he's up to in The Four Dimensions of Philosophy is providing a fuller and far more sophisticated account of what philosophy actually has been historically, and should remain today. Emphatically, it isn't what the Positivists made it out to be. But Adler takes a little while to wind up. It's only on pages 76 - 77 that he states this thesis in so many words:
"The dogmatic claims of positivism are widely prevalent at the end of the twentieth century, not only among scientists, but also among all those who have been miseducated in our colleges and universities, as well as in the unthinking multitudes who are overly impressed by the achievements of science and technology.
It is the central thesis of this book that such positivism is a mistake. There are transempirical aspects of reality that cannot be scientifically investigated and measured."
Adler ultimately succeeds in making his case. And, as "scientific" dogmatism, superficiality, and nearly universal philosophical illiteracy are perhaps the defining defects of contemporary culture, what Adler is up to is supremely important. Most philosophers themselves, unfortunately, are desperately confused (Rorty is here exploded) - and sometimes even seem to be proud of it, conceiving themselves to be "tough minded" or, in Rorty's case "open" minded. If philosophers want, instead, to be clear-headed, they should, and, in fact, must read Adler.
There are enormous consequences for the intellectual confusion of most modern "intellectuals". Just for starters, if we ascribe to the Positivist's fallacy, there can be no possible foundation for ethics or politics. What we normally refer to as "persons" disappear entirely from the landscape. And even mathematics and logic become unintelligible, for these are not concerned with assertions of fact.
Putting the Meta in Metaphilosophy
Apart from presentation of Adler's vastly more appropriate, and sophisticated, characterization of philosophy than prevails among those of positivistic persuasion, there is another advantage to a reading of TFDoP.
In the late '40s, under the auspices of Encyclopedia Brittanica, Adler undertook one of the most breathtaking, and important, intellectual ventures of all time. 2,500 years of civilization had brought forward an enormous amount of thought devoted to the great concerns of humanity; but this thought was a vast, incoherent mass, without order, and without beginning or end, leaving everyone alike without the faintest guidance through the vast wilderness.
Adler undertook to identify the core ideas underlying Western civilization itself, as well as the most canonical of works concerned with these. The objective was, for the first time ever, to bring order to our intellectual house. The result was something called "The Great Books," a collection of canonical works, with a cross-reference revealing what the most canonical thinkers have thought about the most important topics. A two-volume "syntopicon" provides a kind of overview and dissection of the essentials of each of 102 key concepts. Though Adler's final product was somewhat imperfect, the staggering importance of this project, has simply not been grasped, even now. I've never heard a single professional philosopher so much as mention it.
Toward the end of The Four Dimensions of Philosophy, Adler can be found laying the groundwork for an understanding of that project. Indeed, he provides an except from it (in Chapter 13), laying out the structure of a dozen of the 102 key concepts. And that means that TFDoP serves as the best possible introduction to The Great Books. That, in turn, means that TFDoP is one of the most foundational and important of all books.
Rather interestingly, the sheer heft of the ideas presented delivers a knockout punch to the Positivistic fallacy. And it further makes clear the sort of content with which philosophy is properly concerned.
Presciptions for Better Philosophy
Adler is greatly, and rightly, concerned with the status of contemporary philosophy as an intellectual enterprise. With a clear view of what sort of discipline philosophy is, he is uniquely well qualified to lay out a persuasive framework for its advancement. Among his prescriptions is the recommendation that philosophers actually address each other's ideas. Often, they lack a clear understanding of the questions they're trying to answer. To this end, he recommends a large-scale exercise in what he refers to as dialectics, which is a form of metaphilosophy that tries, agnostically, to sort out what the various questions in philosophy have actually been, and what the assorted answers have amounted to. His own heroic efforts in this direction have decisively made the case for the importance of this clarifying discipline.
Incredibly, no other philosopher has taken Adler's challenge to heart. And this doesn't bode well for civilization itself.
Quotations
Pgs. 19 - 20
"Readers . . . will see that the first two dimensions [of philosophy] are metaphysical and moral philosophy in first-order inquiry; and that in second-order inquiry, the third and fourth dimensions consist of the understanding of ideas and the understanding of subjects, such as the branches of knowledge and the other forms of intellectual work. This philosophical book about history, mathematics, science, and philosophy is philosophy in its fourth dimension."
Pgs. 58 - 59
"When philosophy is properly conducted as a public enterprise and philosophers work cooperatively, they will succeed to a much larger extent than they do now in addressing themselves to the same problems, clearly joining issue where they differ in their answers, and carrying on rational debate on the issues in a way that holds some promise of their eventual resolution.
. . . . I reiterate that philosophy, like science, can be conducted as a public enterprise, wherein philosophers work cooperatively. In the very nature of the case that is possible, even though little has been done to move philosophy in that direction. Nevertheless, should philosophy ever fully realize what is inherently possible, its achievement with respect to agreement and disagreement will be as commendable as the achievement of science in the same respect, for each will then have done all it can do within the limitations of its method as a mode of inquiry and appropriate to its character as a type of knowledge."
Pg. 71
"The power that science gives us over our environment, health, and lives can, as we all know, be either misused and misdirected, or used with good purpose and results. Without the prescriptive knowledge given us by ethical and political philosophy, we have no guidance in the use of that power, directing it to the ends of a good life and a good society. The more power science and technology confer upon us, the more dangerous and malevolent that power may become unless its use is checked and guided by moral obligations stemming from our philosophical knowledge of how we ought to conduct our lives and our society."
Pgs. 225 - 226
"Philosophy, as a noninvestigative discipline, cannot be expected to make the same kind or rate of progress, achieve agreement in the same way or to the same extent, or have the same kind of usefulness of which science, an investigative discpline, can rightly boast.
To recognize this is to see that in moden times - with the ever-increasing cultural preeminence of science since the seventeenth century - philosophy has suffered from these mistaken comparisons with science. However, it is not only in modern times that philosophy has suffered from its relation to other disciplines. As I see philosophy's historic development from its beginning to the present day, it has had a checkered career, full of misfortunes and disorders.
In antiquity, it suffered from confusion with science, on the one hand, and with religion on the other; in the Middle Ages, it suffered from the cultural dominance of religion and theology; in modern times it has been suffering from the cultural preeminence of science.
Throughout its history philosophy has been led by false aspirations, arising from its misguided emulation of the certitude of dogmatic theology, the demonstative character of mathematical thought, or the empirical procedures of investigative science. At all times it has suffered disorders within its own household resulting from the failure to understand itself - its separate sphere of inquiry, its four dimensions, its own distinctive method, its characteristic procedure, and, above all, what it can and cannot hope to achieve.
In view of this, the kindest thing that can be said about philosophy in the twentieth century is that its present state reveals it to be, unwittingly, a victim of its past. The more generous comment to add is that there are no instrinsic obstacles to its having a future much brighter than its past.
Such optimisism should not be expressed as a predicition, but as a hope that what is possible for philosophy to become, it will become in the future."
Conclusion
Pg. 260
"The gradual achievement of maturity in the philosophical enterprise may require a much longer span than the three hundred years - from the seventeenth century to the present - during which science appears to have outgrown its infancy and to have matured.
One reason for this delayed maturity may be that philosophical problems are more difficult than scientific ones, humanly speaking, if not intellectually. To conduct philosophical discussion fruitfully requires greater discipline of the passions than is needed to carry on scientific investigations in an efficient manner.
It is easier to lift scientific research to the high plane of the near-perfect experiment than to lift philosophical discussion to the high plane of the ideal debate. In addition, the philosophical enterprise may be a much more complex form of intellectual life than the scientific endeavor is; and, like all higher organisms, therefore slower to mature."
