Meet the Syntopicon: The Bold Index That Tried to Manage All of Western Thought (1952)

Mor­timer J. Adler rose to cul­tur­al promi­nence within the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Unit­ed States, not {that a} fig­ure like him may have executed so in any oth­er place or time. A hap­haz­ard professional­fes­sion­al and intel­lec­tu­al path involv­ing copy-boy work on the New York Solar, evening college, and an incom­plete Colum­bia diploma even­tu­al­ly led to a fac­ul­ty posi­tion educate­ing phi­los­o­phy of regulation on the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. In 1945, he com­menced work on what would develop into the Nice Books of the West­ern World, a 54-vol­ume set pub­lished by Ency­clopæ­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca includ­ing the works of each­one from Homer to Vir­gil to Dar­win to Hem­ing­manner. Offered door-to-door, it turned an not like­ly suc­cess by the ear­ly 9­teen-six­ties, and for a time it was a good­ly com­mon, if ebook­shelf-dom­i­nat­ing, sight within the aspi­ra­tional properties of sub­ur­ban Amer­i­ca.

What number of of these fam­i­lies reg­u­lar­ly pulled their Nice Books off the shelf is anoth­er mat­ter. Regardless of hav­ing come by means of an inten­sive means of cura­tion, they may nonetheless look reasonably impos­ing because the wall of knowl­edge they fashioned all togeth­er. To this prob­lem, Adler provided a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly ambi­tious and idio­syn­crat­ic solu­tion: a con­cept-ori­ent­ed index referred to as the Syn­topi­con — or reasonably, “A Syn­topi­con.”

“He believed these two vol­umes to be simply the ‘assis­tance’ that the aver­age man want­ed to dig into the books that fashioned West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion,” writes Jonathan White, an alum­nus of the sim­i­lar­ly West­ern canon-based St. John’s Col­lege. They “com­prised an exhaus­tive cat­a­logue of every time one of many 102 ‘Nice Concepts of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion’ was males­tioned within the 431 ‘Nice Books’ enshrined in Bri­tan­ni­ca’s col­lec­tion.”

Good and evil, log­ic and love, plea­positive and ache, uni­ver­sal and par­tic­u­lar: all the massive concepts, at the least as Adler outlined them, had been there in A Syn­topi­con. Cus­tomers report­ed­ly discovered it unwieldy, however the notion behind it holds out a cer­tain enchantment nonetheless as we speak. It’s even impressed the launch of Syntopi.com, a dig­i­tal suc­ces­sor that allows you to nav­i­gate “the Nice Con­ver­sa­tion” in a vari­ety of how includ­ing a 3D visu­al­iza­tion and a per­son­al cur­ricu­lum-cre­ation instrument. The Nice Books of the West­ern World’s mid-cen­tu­ry learn­ers — professional­fes­sion­als and busi­ness­males look­ing to fill the gaps of their gen­er­al knowl­edge, vet­er­ans able to study extra after their G.I. Invoice-fund­ed col­lege edu­ca­tion, home­wives hop­ing to get a han­dle on what intel­li­gent peo­ple had been sup­posed to learn about — may have had enjoyable with it. And we may ben­e­match, little question, from redis­cov­er­ing a lit­tle of their earnest­ly self-improv­ing spir­it our­selves. You possibly can view an edi­tion of A Syn­topi­con on the Inter­internet Archive, or this website.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The West­ern Canon: From Homer to Mil­ton (Free Course)

Harold Bloom Cre­ates a Mas­sive Listing of Works in The “West­ern Canon”: Learn Lots of the Books Free On-line

The West­ern Tra­di­tion by Eugen Weber: 52 Video Lec­tures

Nice Large Concepts: Free Course Fea­tures High Thinkers Tack­ling the World’s Most Impor­tant Concepts in 12 Lec­tures

48 Ani­mat­ed Movies Clarify the His­to­ry of Concepts: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

The ten Nice­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 High Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the creator of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often called Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.