Our Journey, Day 56

The Great Books and Syntopicon

It's day 56 of the Journey, and once again I'm going to introduce a topic that I'll be elaborating in another section of my blog and channel. As I've mentioned several times by now, my book club is currently reading Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book. There are videos of the discussions we have each Saturday, in case people are interested. And I'll be reviewing each of the chapters as I process my notes on them, in the Note-Making section of my Substack. I wanted to say something here, though, about what I've said during the book club discussions; so that people won't be confused.

In the notes I've posted and in the discussions, it may seem I'm overly critical of the authors, Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001) and Charles Van Doren (1926-2019). I've said several times that I think they tried to do a bit too much in the book and they come off as a bit too magisterial or professorial, in my opinion. However, I think the book is very important and useful, even if I'd update some of its content.

We need to remember this book was originally published in 1940. Eighty-three years ago. That's closer to the end of the Civil War than to the present. It's also before World War II, and thus before the G.I. Bill that democratized Higher Education. So the authors were a much different type of academic, used to addressing a different type of audience. And yet they wrote a book for regular people. Adler was also one of the creators of the Great Books of the Western World series and the discussion-based reading groups that introduced generations of Americans to the classics of European and American literature and non-fiction.

Probably not so much in the most recent generation or so. The Great Books are a lot less popular than they once were. Since the compilers of the 54-volume set (first published by the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952) focused on the foundational books of European and British culture, they left a lot out. And they published it in 1952, which although it's after the Second World War is still almost halfway to the Civil War. So a lot has been published since then. It's not entirely fair to criticize them for focusing on Dead White European Males. Everyone else in 1952 was as well.

And that focus does not mean these books they excerpt or include entirely in these 54 volumes are not worth reading. Often I think people who object to reading these classics because they don't "tell the whole story" are just making an easy excuse for laziness. They should read these classics. And then they should also read classics from other traditions and classics that have been written more recently, and compare them all.

And comparison is one of the key skills Adler and Van Doren describe in How to Read a Book. I'll describe it in detail when I review that chapter, but they stress the value of what they call Syntopical Reading. This involves comparison of the ideas, themes, and interpretations between books (or other sources), and it's how we build a web of our own knowledge. This is basically the project of Note-Making, so I'll have a lot to say about this in the near future. Something else you can look for in the Note-Making section soon, is a review of the first couple of books of the Great Books series. I wasn't aware of this until just the last couple of weeks, but the first three volumes of the original 1952 set consist of a small introductory volume called "The Great Conversation" followed by two bigger (thousand-page) volumes called "The Syntopicon". These are basically a massively annotated and cross-referenced bibliography, dividing the ideas contained in all the rest of the series' content into 102 key ideas, each of which is divided into a dozen or more sub-ideas. Each section includes an introductory essay and then a sort of index of all the works in the series that touch on each of the sub-ideas. And then some additional suggestions of readings that were not included in the series. I got the second part of this via ILL yesterday and I was so impressed that I ordered a used copy of the first part (which contains the first 50 topics including History). You can also see these in the Internet Archive, at https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-CXH-707/page/n7/mode/2up.