Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago, 47, is a bounding dynamo of a man who is apt to have, "in my more paranoiac moments," rather extravagant visions. "Imagine Carnegie Hall," says he, "filled with all the great intellectual leaders of the world today. I don't think that you could get them all to agree on a single point, much less a series of ideas. But you could perhaps get them to agree that there are certain valid questions modern man should ask."
What are the questions modern men should ask, and then thrash out? Last week, Philosopher Adler announced that, after working on it for seven years, he had "an instrument" to help them decide.
Baedeker of Thought. The instrument: a two-volume, 2,500-page concordance of the Great Ideas in the Great Books. When it is published later this year, as the "Syntopicon," or index, of the first full set of the Great Books ever printed, Philosopher Adler will have due cause to claim that he and his colleagues have completed the first Baedeker to 30 centuries of Western thought.
Actually the Syntopicon (a name coined by Adler from the Greek words for synthesis and topics) was less a vision than an afterthought. It was conceived one day in 1943 when Adler and Chicago President Robert Hutchins were discussing their plans for publishing the 443 Great Books in a 54-volume set.* Suddenly Hutchins remarked, "We will have published the Great Books. You prepare an index of the ideas contained." It took Adler a while to learn what a job he had taken on.
He started in a university basement, got down to work with a staff of "a 4-F and a couple of girls," and a preliminary master list of 700 possibly-great ideas. In time, his staff grew until he had 26 men & women ("the first intellectual assembly line in history") combing through the books and plucking out pertinent passages for indexing.
As the work progressed, Adler kept revising the list. Some ideas were combined, e.g., War & Peace, Good & Evil. Other ideas were reduced to subtopics, e.g., Music was treated under Art and Poetry, Health under Medicine.
Finally, this month, seven years and almost a million dollars later (with the money advanced by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which will join Chicago in publishing the 54 volumes with index), the Syntopicon was ready. From 443 Great Books by 74 authors, Adler & Co. had plucked 102 Great Ideas, with 3,000 sub-ideas. The Great Ideas ranged from God, with the most references (7,065), to Induction, with the least (284), from Angel to World to Eternity to Temperance.
Interruptions, Please. The ideas behind these words, argues Adler, represent the most important questions that Western man has been asking since his civilization began. That civilization "is like a long continuing conversation in which Plato is talking to Copernicus and Copernicus is talking to Kant." With the Syntopicon (and Chicago's set of the Great Books), a reader will be able to put the conversation together, can interrupt it at any point, and follow any theme through as many centuries as he cares to.