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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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Great Ideas from The Great Books by William Benton
Ours is the age of the pat answer. The reason is not hard to come by. The tempo of contemporary life leaves us little time to think about abstract questions. So we fall gladly into the arms of the Answer Man, who awaits us everywhere -- in our personal and domestic lives, in our community and political activities, and even in international affairs. We Americans esteem as precious the right to think for ourselves. But as the world becomes more complex we permit more and more of our thinking to be done for us by alleged experts. Mortimer Adler is an anti-expert. He is persuaded that freedom cannot withstand the free man's willingness to surrender his problems to somebody else. Every man is born to be free, and the free man should make his own decisions. Faith in reason -- and faith in reasoning -- becomes identical with faith in democracy. In a democracy, you and you and you must be the Answer Man. I welcome publication of these columns as a lively contribution to man's endless effort to understand the world and himself. Mortimer Adler has one of the most orderly, compendious, and yet adventurous minds I have ever encountered. And he is persuasive. He has persuaded some of the most influential men in America to take time out to think. Let me tell you about one episode I was in. In 1943 the great books movement led by Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago and by Adler was beginning to attract national attention. The Honors Course at the University of Chicago and the curriculum of St. John's College in Annapolis were widely discussed. These were based on the great books. Among adults Adler's How to Read a Book had become a best seller. With several top Chicago business and professional men, I participated in a great books reading-and-discussion group -- the famous "Fat Men's Class" -- with Hutchins and Adler at the head of the table. This was in the midst of a world war, and forty of Americas busiest men were involved! We forty learned -- or, more accurately, relearned -- that the central problems of life are always the same, whether in modern America or in ancient Rome. They are the problems of Man -- good and evil, love and hate, war and peace, happiness and duty, liberty and security. They are the same whether we humans meet them in an oxcart, a chariot, or a tomato-colored convertible. These are the problems the authors of the great books tackled -- in science, history, philosophy, and literature. Theirs is the "great conversation" of the ages, which never ends. The "Fat Men's Class" became the model for similar groups of business, political, and trade-union leaders around the country. And this class and its many lineal descendants still roll on. Seventeen years later the Great Books Foundation, sponsoring groups in libraries, schools, clubs, shops, and factories, is one of the largest adult-education enterprises in America. But in 1943 some of the greatest books were impossible to get in a good edition. Others were unavailable in any edition. And still others had never been translated into English. I suggested to Dr. Hutchins the possibility of publishing a definitive set of the great books. On one point there was instant agreement: if it were to be done at all, it should be, done right, and "right" meant a set of books not just for our time but for decades to come. The whole of Western man's accepted wisdom -- from Homer and Augustine to Darwin and Freud -- had to be comprehended. Out of our discussion came the decision, in 1944, that Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., which I serve as publisher and chairman, would undertake the enterprise. Eight years later came Britannica's 54-volume Great Books of the Western World. The publication was a literary triumph. "A noble monument to the human mind," said Gilbert Highet in The New York Times. "An intellectual enterprise which has no parallel in the history of Western man," said Mark Van Doren in the Herald Tribune. The seven feet of volumes included 443 works of 74 authors. As Editor, Hutchins had presided over the group of scholars and laymen who had made the selection. As Associate Editor, Adler had occupied himself with something vaguely known to the rest of us as "the index." Of the two million dollars and eight years spent in producing Great Books of the Western World, almost half the money -- and much more than half the time -- was taken by Adler in the preparation of this index, now called the Syntopicon, which constitutes two thick volumes of the 54 volume set. Adler and his editors divided all thought into 102 basic ideas -- ranging from Angel to World -- and broke these ideas down into 2,987 topics containing 163,000 exact references to passages in Great Books of the Western World. The Syntopicon also included an inventory of Terms, a Bibliography of Additional Readings, and, most importantly, essays by Adler himself on the history of each of the 102 great ideas. The essays alone total more than a thousand pages. Five hundred Founding Subscribers paid five hundred dollars for each set of the first edition. We celebrated the launching at a banquet in New York addressed by Dr. Hutchins, Dr. Adler, Clifton Fadiman, and myself. Then the Old Dominion Foundation gave 1,600 sets to selected public libraries across the country. Great Books of the Western World was in business. After our first printings, we had an invaluable asset: the plates of the books. We planned a handsomely styled and bound edition priced within the reach of the general public. Our gamble has proved successful. Americans do want the best books in their homes. Americans do want their children to grow up in the company of great literature, great philosophy, great science. Sales increased from 3,300 sets in 1956 to more than 40,000 in 1960, and they continue to rise at an accelerating pace. Marshall Field, Jr., publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News and a member of the "Fat Men's Class" decided on the next gamble: a weekly column to be distributed by his newspaper syndicate in which Adler would choose a question submitted by a reader and reply to it not with the pat answer, but with an analysis of the greatest thinking about it. The sole objective was to present the problem -- not the solution -- to the intelligent reader in terms set forth by the leading minds of all time. Within a year twenty-eight newspapers (including the Tokyo Kenkyu Sha) were carrying the column, a remarkable figure for such a feature. And the number increases. Mounting requests for a collection of selected columns -- one of them from the Librarian of San Quentin Prison -- led to the publication of this book. Here in Mortimer Adler's columns is testimony that the contemporary American cares profoundly about his life and his society -- and about the light that the living tradition of thirty centuries of thought can throw upon issues that confront him today. It has been said, "Great books are the books that never have to be written again." But the Great Ideas they explore are the birthright of every man and woman of every age. They must be constantly examined and re-examined.
William Benton (1900-1973), a personal friend and colleague of Dr. Adler, served as publisher and chairman of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., which produced the set of The Great Books of the Western World. |
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