KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA1 (Muller)

Commentary 28 (on Adler's C26)

( IS INTELLECT IMMATERIAL ? )
by Glenn C. Wood
28 April 2002, posted 7 May 2002

<1>
I'd like to respond to David Herman's recommended posting of Mortimer Jerome Adler's "Is Intellect Immaterial?" "Chapter 4, Intellect, Mind Over Matter" and the by-the-way reference to Deal W. Hudson's "...Adler, Catholic." Hudson stated that he occasionally ribbed Adler about crossing the Tiber, or converting to Catholicism. I'm ribbing a bit hereafter too in this response but with little hope that it will result in a crossover which requires at least a leap to Abraham, and it's doubtful one heavily cultured can make it. This response is primarily an effort to get locked in, so to speak, on the initial responses for highly predictable reasons.

<2>
Some Maybe Unpredicted Preliminary Ideas: How interesting to observe the movement from a struggle as simple and basic as a mind-brain dialectic to Adler's 1999 "conversion" to Catholicism after he became an Episcopalian in 1986. But it seems relatively insignificant from a philosophical perspective. From a metaphysical-empirical standpoint it might be nothing but repayment for Thomists showing greater reverence than the non-romantic might condescend to due to principle. I mean if Adler as a member of the -- Americanized -- High Church of England had been made a knight, if it could mean more than a humorous antidote, perhaps he would not have made the hardly distinguishable short step of "conversion." Otherwise it seems to me hardly worth Hudson's note. It might be significant that he has not apparently rejected the title of Catholic, but then that's true of many on the other side of this life, and the other side of Presbyterianism -- the other side being Episcopalianism down from which runs the broad way to Rome, a trip made easier by emphasizing immaterialistic inclinations -- after arbitrarily distinguishing something invisible from something visualized.

<3>
The last I read of another Adler, Alfred, was his "Understanding Human Nature." That was about 1968, and I was critical of his comment about the soul arising from a "hereditary substance" and being "entirely conditioned by social influences." There's nothing on the name of Mortimer Adler in my Dictionary of Philosophy, nor The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, but it's not surprising to see that Thomistic ... fathers have attempted to charm -- and make famous -- someone into accepting an unofficial sainthood degree. I'm indebted to this posting and the Hudson reference for bringing Mortimer Adler's conversion to Catholicism -- which presumptively began in 1986 after he repeated the Lord's prayer "Our father..." -- to the world's awareness. Perhaps he was having trouble with reducing the heavenly father's to the imagination and needed something more material.

<4>
Wild Metaphysical Speculations Continued -- Perhaps Adler's middle name, Jerome, gave rise to a romantic idea about the significance of his conversion. At least it offers me occasion to dabble about ... too. There are two, well actually three, outstanding historical Jeromes; not many Mortimers and now at least two Adlers. The first is the Jerome, who upheld the celibacy of clergy, and who was given sainthood in the name of infallibility which means celibacy must be consistently maintained in view of this established procedure for the canonization of Saints. But there's another Saint Jerome. He, only an existential saint, as mind-body, was burned at the stake for, among others things, refusing to pray to deceased once-material but then immaterial Saints -- in the strictest sense of a rigid or religious ontology. He was not made a Saint or knight by an institution but became and remains constantly an indivisible unadulterated tried and tested saint in deed (Foxe's Book Of Martyrs).

<5>
Then there was that Apache Jerome (Geronimo). That was not his birth name, which was something like Goyakla, meaning yawning baby, and his name changed with character changes. He was given the name Geronimo by fellow warriors after having reaped vengeance on a village's inhabitants. During the assault his victims had been calling on the village patron, Saint Jerome. After the battle, fellow Apaches were amazed at what Geronimo had done. Looking about at the carnage, it was obvious to them that the spirit of "Saint Jerome" had not materialized, unless it was... yes...unless this Apache warrior had been the answer to prayers. He, they said in effect -- clearly with tongue in cheek -- must be the spirit of St. Jerome. Henceforth his second name became Geronimo. Although, if either, I could only guess which spirit of the two saints might match that Apache's anger.

<6>
How this "recommended" bit of Mortimer Adler's reading throws light on the mind-brain enigma must lie somewhere between a psychopathological complex and a very simple normal existential explanation -- as in illumination. In other words I found the comments hardly moving in a therapeutic sense with regard to solving the problem, but rather a struggling bit of experience such as with an opponent's will to power. It reminded me of something Karl Jaspers wrote -- though he was referring in part to Alfred Adler: "Every intellectual movement is materially determined by the men who founded it." I suppose in some "movements" the significance is found in something as mysterious or immaterial as a "conversion" or in the fact that it's hard to oppose what has been made elegantly...unclear. Jaspers continues, after the above reference, to say that psychotherapy requires a "high order," and such a high order of the whole being could never be "based on Freud, Adler and Jung, and because one grows dependent on one's opponent, no successful engagement with them along their own lines will ever find the way. This can only come by our getting a grasp on the great traditional truth." (Gen. Psychopath. The Human Being as a Whole, p. 815, 1963, University of Chicago Press). So, with this as a precedent, refusing an engagement on predetermined terms, we proceed:

<7>
That was my experience with Mortimer Adler's comments; that the reader, was being led down dangerously close to a primrose lane to Rome by way of Episcopalianism allured by the hypnotic smell of roses and the suggestion that if some failed to follow regally the historic path -- while backing away from the priestly High Church of England's technique of waving incense -- they might be suffering from ... agnosia. But, those capable of not only detecting a rose by its fragrance, but also by sight, and adept at deciphering linguistic symbols, can also detect something simultaneously unsavory in those Adler samples of agnosia. I detect a potential support for an empirical systematic theology designed to put knots in what binds the intellect to the brain while saying things about the immaterial...moderately immaterial. That can, when combined with religion, contain potential seeds that can restrain the mind rather than serve as a launching pad for the vertical thrust to intellectual ascendancy.

<8>
A Catholic systematic theology was not the sort of traditional truth Jaspers -- quoted above -- was referring to in his thoughts about a being's search for wholeness. The great traditional truth is more like a romanticized rose of Sharon, or existential art seen in the meaning one gives to the image of the desert's blossoming rose. Great traditional truth is not restored by converting to something like an institutionalized inhibition to individual freedom.

<9>
So, personally, I don't find it inspiring to dance or analyze with Mortimer Adler to the tune of how many variable ideas can dance on the tips of the enigmatic mind-brain horns. It requires a clear distinction be made with regard to which might be more certain than the other. In my own thinking I've elevated uncertainty to an epistemological principle: Whether one observes tiny particles or waves of brain stuff, or the behavior of other stuff like light waves or particles, macroscopically or microscopically, whether in the so-called material or immaterial purposeful classifications, neither brings more religious or philosophical certitude than the other. Needless to say my mind wanders and wonders more about many other things like why a dual horned animal has teeth only in the lower jaw, or what religion was Descartes associated with that he should have become some pivotal person to go back beyond to escape a "primary" subject/object split. And, by the way, my world of so called sense-experience and my imagination, my memory, is filled more with no-thing than with "nothing but individual objects." So I guess that excuses me from the primrose path.

<10>
One thing Mortimer Adler clearly did here is confirm his dependence on a misunderstood-Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes in some spin-off manner which in turn endeared him to some Thomists still seeking for an updated philosopher to replace Thomas. And there's enough clarified though to suggest that there's an orthodoxy or dogma that can predetermine the intellect's ... deciphering ... processes, but even that degree of clarity is eroded by the following :

<11>
It's important, while considering Adler's near solution to the mind-brain enigma, to mention the Arabian factor. Aristotle was not properly understood until Averroes' commentaries were rediscovered and he reintroduced him to the world thus breaking the pack string between Aquinas and Aristotle -- though the string is now reappearing in new ... canon ... fodder : Adler, if not Marcel and Heidegger.

<12>
Averroestic interpretations of Aristotle are more accurate than those Greek texts that Thomas relied on, especially in regard to the theory of the intellect. And though one researches the internet and finds such statements as : there's no doubt about the decisive influence Averroes had on Thomas "the greatest of all Catholic theologians" there's an implication that Averroes is great because influenced by Aristotle and Aristotle is great retroactively by an immaterial "Saint" string. It's a twist not unlike how now the Lord's Prayer is more significant, more Catholic, because Adler uttered it on the road to Catholicism.

<13>
From a historical-consciousness perspective, it seems one should keep in mind that accommodation and manipulation by traditional institutional Catholicism (though the name nominalistically begs reality for an ontology because it means universal) is not characteristically unique enough to warrant credit for independent - individual - existential - intellectual derivation. For, the 12th century Averroes could be culturally assimilating too by a unique approach having a special view which included the suicidal terrorism of the knights involved in the capture of Jerusalem in the 11th century. Making a Saint out of Thomas does not reduce Averroes to a derivative status that's subject to will-to-power remnants of the Holy Roman Empire -- vs. Mohammedanism.

<14>
Such Church tactics mentioned are what Jaspers refers to where he writes about the political methods of the institutional church: "The basic phenomenon is that the Church, a group of men, turns the call upon God into an instrument of worldly power. The human will to power is disguised as God's will." (Philosophical Faith and Revelation.) His idea here seems appropriate enough to cover and illuminate the current struggle over Jerusalem -- a previously and easily predictable struggle. Such thoughts seem clearly appropriate to apply to the suggestion, hope, or Thomists' implied consensus, that someone has come close enough for now to solving the mind-brain question analytically while leaving room for the necessity of one universal church. But, still, the immateriality of the material, and the materiality of the immaterial provides ... individuals ... with the buoyancy to be directly receptive to revelation and the freedom to be anything but seriously Episcopalian or Catholic.

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Glenn C. Wood