Daily Inspiration Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler’s line reads like a scolding, and that’s the point: it aims at a familiar evasive posture in intellectual life, where the performance of nuance becomes an excuse for never landing the plane. “Ought never” is a moral cudgel, not a gentle suggestion. He frames decisiveness as duty, implying that indecision isn’t merely a temperamental quirk but a dereliction of the philosopher’s job.

The subtext is a critique of a certain academic ethos: endless qualification, “on the one hand” as a lifestyle, the safety of critique without commitment. Adler came up through the Great Books movement and a mid-century confidence that ideas were meant to be argued in public and used to orient real lives. In that context, refusing to “make up his mind” looks like opting out of the social contract of thinking. Philosophy, for Adler, isn’t mood music; it’s a craft with deliverables.

The wording also smuggles in a democratic sensibility. If philosophy is going to matter beyond the seminar room, it has to risk being wrong in the open. Making up your mind invites rebuttal, accountability, and revision. It’s an ethic of intellectual adulthood: take a position, give reasons, accept consequences.

Adler isn’t praising stubbornness; he’s warning against the prestige of perpetual suspension. The philosopher’s obligation isn’t certainty, it’s commitment under uncertainty - the willingness to decide provisionally, then refine in the friction of argument and evidence.