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

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Harold Bloom Cre­ates a Mas­sive List of Works in The “West­ern Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

The West­ern Tra­di­tion by Eugen Weber: 52 Video Lec­tures

Great Big Ideas: Free Course Fea­tures Top Thinkers Tack­ling the World’s Most Impor­tant Ideas in 12 Lec­tures

48 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

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.