Mortimer J. Adler rose to cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth-century United States, not that a figure like him could have done so in any other place or time. A haphazard professional and intellectual path involving copy-boy work at the New York Sun, night school, and an incomplete Columbia degree eventually led to a faculty position teaching philosophy of law at the University of Chicago. In 1945, he commenced work on what would become the Great Books of the Western World, a 54-volume set published by Encyclopædia Britannica including the works of everyone from Homer to Virgil to Darwin to Hemingway. Sold door-to-door, it became an unlikely success by the early nineteen-sixties, and for a time it was a fairly common, if bookshelf-dominating, sight in the aspirational homes of suburban America.
How many of those families regularly pulled their Great Books off the shelf is another matter. Despite having come through an intensive process of curation, they could still look rather imposing as the wall of knowledge they formed all together. To this problem, Adler offered a characteristically ambitious and idiosyncratic solution: a concept-oriented index called the Syntopicon — or rather, “A Syntopicon.”
“He believed these two volumes to be just the ‘assistance’ that the average man needed to dig into the books that formed Western Civilization,” writes Jonathan White, an alumnus of the similarly Western canon-based St. John’s College. They “comprised an exhaustive catalogue of each time one of the 102 ‘Great Ideas of Western Civilization’ was mentioned in the 431 ‘Great Books’ enshrined in Britannica’s collection.”
Good and evil, logic and love, pleasure and pain, universal and particular: all the big ideas, at least as Adler defined them, were there in A Syntopicon. Customers reportedly found it unwieldy, but the notion behind it holds out a certain appeal still today. It’s even inspired the launch of Syntopi.com, a digital successor that enables you to navigate “the Great Conversation” in a variety of ways including a 3D visualization and a personal curriculum-creation tool. The Great Books of the Western World’s mid-century readers — professionals and businessmen looking to fill the gaps in their general knowledge, veterans ready to learn more after their G.I. Bill-funded college education, housewives hoping to get a handle on what intelligent people were supposed to know about — could have had fun with it. And we could benefit, no doubt, from rediscovering a little of their earnestly self-improving spirit ourselves. You can view an edition of A Syntopicon on the Internet Archive, or this site.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
