McLuhan led off a decade-long engagement¹ with the University of Chicago with a 1940 review in the St Louis University house journal, Fleur de Lis, of Mortimer Adler’s 1937 Art and Prudence.²

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[30] This is a big book [686 pages] and a big subject — the movies. In announcing his intention in the work, Mr. Adler says (p. x): “The philosophical task here is the ancient one of clarifying public opinion.” This is a noble task to have undertaken and the reader will be disappointed in proportion to his eagerness at last to read a reasoned discussion of the nature and influence of the great popular art of the movie. Some readers may experience an almost equal dismay at Mr. Adler’s ubiquitous self-assurance and satisfaction in his own performance. Adapting an old figure to our own time we may say, “Turn him to any point of policy, the Gordian knot of it he’ll straight unloose, familiar as his necktie.” Mr. Adler’s glowing sense of accomplishment is similar to the Emperor’s pride in his new clothes.

Mr. Adler explains in the preface (p. xi) how he came to write this book:

As a result of their reading of CRIME, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCE [1933, p 440], representatives of the motion-picture producers asked me to review for them the recent empirical investigations specifically concerned with the influence of motion pictures on human behavior — to make, in short, a similar analysis of the problems, methods and results of research.

The recent empirical investigations were mainly unfavorable to the movie industry, but its representatives had reason to believe that Mr. Adler would give the industry carte blanche. His report to the producers is incorporated in chapters 10 and 11 of Part III of the present volume. It is a novel situation when big business calls in a philosopher to clarify public opinion. At least such circumstances might very well lead a philosopher to reconsider his position.

The major positions of this book are not hard to state. The current confused attitudes toward the movies are put in a historical perspective because “Much of the prevailing discussion proceeds upon the provincial assumption that the problem being discussed is a new one, peculiar to the locale of Europe and America in the twentieth century.” Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, Mr. Adler continues with a discussion of esthetics in Christendom and finally under Democracy.³ (Democracy is defined, p. 93, in the Dewey manner, not as a kind of government but as that mode of human association inescapable in a highly industrialized and technical society. Thus Mr. Adler is able to state, and Mr. Dewey unable to escape, the conclusion that “Russia, Italy, and Germany today are democratic.”) This is followed by a chapter of “Historical Transformations,” which is concerned with the history and function of censorship. From this point onwards the volume is given over to the contemporary issue of art versus prudence as it arises in daily debates about the movie.

This historical survey is designed to establish first that Plato assumes an absolutist position with regard to the arts. It is not enough that they should give pleasure, but they must, and in fact do, teach. But what they teach is at best inferior to philosophical knowledge. Therefore, they must be rigidly controlled and subordinated to the philosophical disciplines.

The second position is that of Aristotle, who sets the arts in relation to everyday life and makes no special demands of them beyond requiring that they give pleasure at the appropriate levels. The pleasure provided by even the crudest art constitutes a purgation of the correspondent passions which in actual practice sustains men in the pursuit of such virtues as they might otherwise lose the courage to follow. They provide moments of salutary contemplation for which, as Plato truly saw, men [already] leading the good life have no need.

The third position is that of Christianity. It is the Platonic position qualified by the doctrine of original sin. The first function of the arts is to instruct in virtue — the philosopher and [31] the saint have no need of them. They are barely tolerated as a concession to human nature. But “Aquinas provides a Christian answer to Bossuet as Aristotle gave a Greek answer to Plato” (p. 20).

Mr. Adler insists on a fourth position for Democracy, though he describes rather than defines Democracy, and one is left to infer the position. Democracy is for him not an ideal nor clearly conceived form of government. It is the result of the mechanization of society and the obliteration of all save economic distinctions between persons and social classes. Thus “one cannot live in a democracy and despise the popular arts” (p. 114). Art in a democracy is an instrument in an instrumental society. And it is thus peculiarly fitting that the art form of a mechanized sub-human society should be highly mechanized. This is the movie. It alone provides for the masses a sense of mass participation in all the functions of society. At a very low level, it is true, it nevertheless constitutes a mode of communication between all the functional units of society (units which were formerly persons) without which it is scarcely possible to conceive of Democracy.

From this point on Mr. Adler sings a paean of praise to the movies, brushing aside the critics with a priori exuberance. The historical matter which has been indicated is efficiently used as a conjuror’s cloak into which disappear all possible objections. If any kind of art gives pleasure then it necessarily effects a catharsis of the emotions (of whatever kind) which are involved. Thus any kind of art which gives pleasure is innocuous. If the art does not effect some sort of purgation of the emotions relevant to its matter, the consequent pain will effect more than any censorship can do. Thus can and ought prudence to regard the movies.

This view is upheld on the assumption that historically all confusion between the practical intellectual virtues of art and prudence is Platonist, whereas true discernment of their radical difference is Aristotelian. That so flagrant an historicism should be foisted off as plausible is understandable in the light of Mr. Adler’s bold streamlining of history. For the historical portion of the work does real violence to the issues. As an example of special pleading consider this statement (p. 591):

The conflict between poetry and politics is a special case of the antimony of art and prudence. It may be suggested that Plato solves this antimony by his conception in the Laws of a Minister of Education who is at once the curator of public morals and censor of the arts. He must be a prudent man who understands art, and an artist who possesses the special art of prudence in addition to all others. This would be the reconciliation between art and prudence, which as Maritain says, only “wisdom, being endowed with the outlook of God and ranging over Action and Making alike” can achieve.

Since Mr. Adler makes poetry a term to cover all fictions, including the movie, the question immediately arises as to what other cases of conflict between art and prudence could occur outside the range of poetry and politics. And the word “antimony” is unfortunate since used in regard to Mr. Adler’s view of art and prudence it contradicts his own thesis. For his thesis is that there is no antinomy, but merely accidental opposition between art and prudence. In his next two sentences he misrepresents Plato completely. Plato makes it quite clear that the critic cannot be an artist, though he ought to have some knowledge of the technical problems of the arts. And this fact makes the last sentence, with the specially selected missile from Maritain, quite unfair. It is a complete fallacy to conclude that because art and prudence are separate virtues of the practical intellect, both must be present in their perfection before either may be permissibly regulative of the other. This is Mr. Adler’s thesis, and it represents precisely that extravagant intellectualism which he indicates as being the peculiar weakness of Plato and the Platonists.

[32] Mr. Adler commits over and over again the very errors which he claims to be exposing. For example, he says (p. xii):

The moral and political criticism of an art is usually exaggerated and even distorted by a lack of sensitivity to its problems of workmanship and production, its artistic aims and its technical means.

Now this lack of sensitivity and absence of concern for the technical means and artistic aims of the movie is one of the most striking deficiencies of the volume under review. Mr. Adler loses the reader’s respect for his critical capacity in relation to the movies precisely in the degree to which he ventures to make a particular comment about a particular movie. One was not surprised, therefore, to discover (p. 668) that Pudovkin [1893-1953] is brushed aside because “he is an artist writing analytically about his art, which is clearly not the art of analysis itself.” The trouble with Pudovkin’s Film Technique [1926; translation 1933] and its followers is, from Mr. Adler’s point of view, that they make a drastic critique of the movie he is defending within the limits of the art itself. Pudovkin and all the critics who speak from a knowledge of the artistic aims and the technical means of the movie are much more devastating and effective in their comment on the old bag of stage tricks which Hollywood serves up as film art than the Hays⁴ office. The real case against Hollywood is not a moral one, but an artistic one. The average film is not only badly made, but it fails to give pleasure as well. Stunts entirely extraneous to the art itself are constantly introduced to pep up the jaded patrons.

To come directly to grips with Mr. Adler’s thesis, he fails to show that those who attack art on moral grounds possess even the virtue of prudence, let alone a knowledge of art. It would not be hard to make out a stronger case for quite a different thesis, namely, that the artist in his primary concern for the integrity of the thing to be made can never violate good morals. Because, any conscious violation of morals introduces an inartistic element into the work of art.

To make an end rather than to conclude, Mr. Adler might have written a better book had he written from a less controversial motive. It may be stated as a general principle underlying the relation of art and prudence, of poetry and politics, that the artist receives the matter of his art from the community of experience at a particular time and place. This experience in the case of drama, poetry, novel, movie, is essentially ethical in character (music escapes from this category). While the ethical matter of these arts is accidental to the arts themselves, it ought to be subject to the same prudential considerations as the same matter in non-artistic contexts. Thus the prudential aspect of the artist’s matter or vehicle becomes for the artist a further technical problem. As such it in no way frustrates the artist. On the contrary, the worst problem for the artist is to be confronted with an immoral society — when the matter and vehicle of the arts become increasingly non-ethical and confused, the artist has to make bricks without straw, he has to make matter and form vehicle as well as content.