A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas
The Syntopicon must be one of the weirdest and most ambitious projects in the history of literature. In the 1950s Encyclopaedia Britannica published its 52-volume series Great Books of the Western World, which contains the most important works in the Western canon (according to its editors). The Syntopicon, created as a kind of novely to set the series apart from similar collections of canonical literature, is a two-book index. By some arcane process, the authors of the index decided that Western literature consists of exactly 102 Great Ideas, and the Syntopicon is an index of each and every reference to each Great Idea in every one of the books in the series. From this article:
Hutchins and Adler thought each Great Book should be presented as part of one epochal conversation. (Adler, not surprisingly, called it the “Great Conversation.”) Homer’s problems were Hobbes’s problems, Hobbes’s problems Hegel’s, Hegel’s problems ours. Hutchins and Adler produced a “conversation” spanning 32,000 pages, spread over 54 volumes. Hutchins looked upon the work and called it good: “The Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being.”
Technically, there were only 52 volumes of actual “conversation.” Two served as a kind of guide to the others; I say “a kind of guide” because to use that term for these two volumes understates their weirdness. Adler had determined—it’s not clear how—that the Great Conversation was structured by 102 different ideas: Being, Chance, Infinity, Labor, Family, and 97 more. A team of underlings scoured the Great Books, found references in them to each of the Great Ideas (as Adler naturally called them), and compiled a two-volume index that he dubbed the Syntopicon.
According to wikipedia, the project took 400,000 man-hours of reading and cost over $2 million! I am in awe of this project, both in its ambition and in its monumental waste of time.
