Nature of the Syntopicon
Originally posted 11/25/2023
This is the Preface to Volume 2 of the Great Books, describing the Syntopicon. A more complete, functional description was also provided in an Appendix which I'll review separately.
Mortimer Adler began by asserting its "originality as an intellectual instrument", which seems a reasonable claim despite the similarity this tool bears to those developed by others in the past. The Chicago Great Books project seems unique, bringing this type of connected understanding of the foundations of western culture to a wide and general audience. Adler expanded on this idea, saying, "It is claimed for this set of great books that all of the works in it are significantly related to one another and that, taken together, they adequately present the ideas and issues, the terms and topics, that have made the western tradition what it is." The result, he said, was "a new kind of encyclopaedic whole--a new kind of reference library."
The Syntopicon contains 102 chapters that correspond to the 102 "Great Ideas" the researchers found in the 443 texts they decided made up the Great Books. Adler said there were about 3,000 topics present and that the chapters contained an average of about 30 topics each, although they ranged widely from 6 to 76. Each chapter also includes an average of 1,500 references to passages in the texts, although this also varies from 284 in the most sparsely linked chapter to 7,065 in the densest. In total, the Syntopicon contains about 163,000 references.
The chapters are arranged chronologically, based on the editors' claim that these texts are in a "Great Conversation" with each other as well as with us; so later texts are influenced by or may even refer to earlier ones. Reading a chapter from beginning to end "enables the reader to follow the actual development of thought on a topic." It is also possible, however, to use the entries like an index and zero in on exactly the elements of a topic that interest the reader. This will allow the reader to find, for example, "the role of experience in politics: the lessons of history" within the category of Experience. Checking this subsection would allow the researcher to access 21 passages in 17 volumes of the Great Books, ranging from Herodotus to Marx. Or to find out exactly what Gibbon had to say on the matter, in three sections of Decline and Fall; or compare what Mill wrote in On Liberty and Representative Government.
In addition to 443 books by 76 authors that make up the collection, each chapter contains a list of "Additional Readings" totaling 2,603 titles by 1,181 authors. These are all compiled into a Bibliography in the Appendix at the end of the Syntopicon that includes the years of the author's life and a chronological list of their important works. The Bibliography also includes additional titles by the authors included in the collection. Although these works and the additional authors did not "make the grade" for inclusion in the collection, they are still important sources for researchers who wish to understand an author's entire body of work or to explore particular ideas in more detail.
Adler described three possible ways to use the Syntopicon. It can be very useful as a reference book; a sort of annotated index of ideas answering the question, "what do the great books have to say on this subject?" The Syntopicon does not contain the answers, he explained, but pointed to texts that provide possible answers from different authors in different times and places. And these authors were all, he believed, in a sort of dialogue with each other about the question.
Secondly, the Syntopicon could be read as a book. Each chapter begins with an essay tracing the connections between the topic idea, its relationship with other Great Ideas, and its development over time in the Great Books. This creates, Adler said, "a network of connections radiating from each idea as a point of origin." Readers can thus wander through this network, following the paths that interest them to destinations that might surprise them.
Finally, Adler suggested the Syntopicon may be the ultimate "instrument of liberal education." In contrast to the valuable but extremely time-consuming technique of simply reading the Great Books from beginning to end, the Syntopicon helps to jump-start the process by "enabling persons to read in them on the subjects in which they are interested." Over time, Adler trusted, people's interests would expand to include the ideas connected to the topics people went looking for. He said this process worked "initiatively and suggestively". Syntopical reading "opens the great books at the pages of maximum interest to the individual and, by the force of the passages read and their dependence on context, carries him from reading parts to reading whole works." Since the entry-point to a passage is the topic the reader looked up, this provides a contextual aid to at least part of the passage's interpretation. The collection of passages from different works that all address the idea provides an additional opportunity to "sharpen the reader's interpretation." And finally, the recurrence of passages in citations on different topics helps to impress on readers the "amplitude of meaning" they can find in these Great Books. this will further encourage exploration of whole books.
For advanced readers, Adler said that even multiple readings of Great Books can still leave ideas undiscovered. Syntopical reading can direct readers to themes they might not have recognized because their attention was focused on something else. This could also help educators (or self-educators) make the Great Books "available in the teaching of courses concerned with particular subject matters or ... the study of particular problems." And finally, this can lead, he said, to a more general study of the history of ideas. The Syntopicon can help readers focus on a topic, an author, or a time period, resulting in "a summation of western thought" on important ideas "from the beginning to the present." Of course, the present he wrote of was 1952. But that's a pretty good start.