Mortimer J. Adler rose to cultural prominence within the mid-twentieth-century United States, not {that a} figure like him might have achieved so in any other place or time. A haphazard professionalfessional and intellectual path involving copy-boy work on the New York Solar, night time college, and an incomplete Columbia diploma eventually led to a faculty position training philosophy of regulation on the University of Chicago. In 1945, he commenced work on what would turn into the Nice Books of the Western World, a 54-volume set published by Encyclopædia Britannica including the works of eachone from Homer to Virgil to Darwin to Hemingmanner. Bought door-to-door, it turned an not likely success by the early 9teen-sixties, and for a time it was a goodly common, if e bookshelf-dominating, sight within the aspirational houses of suburban America.
What number of of these families regularly pulled their Nice Books off the shelf is another matter. Regardless of having come via an intensive technique of curation, they may nonetheless look fairly imposing because the wall of knowledge they fashioned all together. To this problem, Adler provided a characteristically ambitious and idiosyncratic solution: a concept-oriented index known as the Syntopicon — or fairly, “A Syntopicon.”
“He believed these two volumes to be simply the ‘assistance’ that the average man wanted to dig into the books that fashioned Western Civilization,” writes Jonathan White, an alumnus of the similarly Western canon-based St. John’s College. They “comprised an exhaustive catalogue of every time one of many 102 ‘Nice Concepts of Western Civilization’ was malestioned within the 431 ‘Nice Books’ enshrined in Britannica’s collection.”
Good and evil, logic and love, pleapositive and ache, universal and particular: all the large concepts, not less than as Adler outlined them, had been there in A Syntopicon. Customers reportedly discovered it unwieldy, however the notion behind it holds out a certain attraction nonetheless at present. It’s even impressed the launch of Syntopi.com, a digital successor that allows you to navigate “the Nice Conversation” in a variety of the way including a 3D visualization and a personal curriculum-creation tool. The Nice Books of the Western World’s mid-century learners — professionalfessionals and businessmales looking to fill the gaps of their general knowledge, veterans able to be taught extra after their G.I. Invoice-funded college education, homewives hoping to get a handle on what intelligent people had been supposed to learn about — might have had enjoyable with it. And we might benematch, little doubt, from rediscovering a little of their earnestly self-improving spirit ourselves. You possibly can view an edition of A Syntopicon on the Internet Archive, or this site.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the creator of the newsletter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
