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The reader will still have to do a lot of sorting for himself, and all the decisions on right & wrong will be his. If he asks: "What is history and its function?" he will find Tacitus arguing that history must serve "to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds." He will find Montaigne adding that it should be "the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias." Meanwhile, Saint Augustine and Hegel, each in his own way, will be insisting that history moves in patterns and is therefore really the proper study of the philosopher. Then comes Tolstoi with another idea: that history is a movement of forces which owes no more to the leadership of individual men than does "the direction the herd takes to the animal which happens to be at its head."
Summa Dialectica? This week, as Chicago began taking advance orders for its 54-volume Great Books sets ($500 for the first, "patrons" edition, $250 thereafter, Syntopicon included), Mortimer Adler surveyed what had been accomplished. At the very least, he thought, the Syntopicon would be a gigantic labor-saving device: "The dictionary defines words for man. The encyclopedia gives him facts. Now we have a reference book for ideas."
But bustling Philosopher Adler was already laying his sights on a new and even bigger target. His hope was that the index to the Great Ideas would be the first step to a Summa Dialectica for the 20th Century, something to fit the span of the ideas of Western civilization today as Saint Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica encompassed the span of scholastic philosophy. As Adler sees it, a modern summa would be an attempt, not to umbrella the world with a dogma or a fixed philosophical system, but to create an understandable discussion of the fundamental issues. The trouble, Adler insists, is that there can be no such discussion today, since men speak different intellectual languages, use different methods of arriving at truth, even have different ideas of the basic nature of truth.
Yet, says Adler, the fundamental issues found in the Great Books are still fundamental. Beginning with the Syntopicon as a basis, he hopes to draw as many as possible into a great new conversation. Hopefully, they will discuss the Great Ideas topic by topic, see how one topic leads into another, how each is a part of a whole constellation of topics. Finally they will agree, not on answers, but at least on the order of questions to be asked.
"It isn't that I want to do this," says Adler. "It's just that I have no choice in the matter. It is a sort of megalomania with me."
* An achievement made possible by the brevity of many of the Great Books, e.g., Shakespeare's plays, 37 of which Chicago considers Great.