The Great Ideas

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.

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.

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