A Great Books Reading Plan

As originally published in 1952, the Great Books of the Western World set included a total of 54 volumes. The first volume being the introductory book-length essay by Richard M. Hutchins that we have reproduced over the past several weeks. If you have not read these, you may begin here. The second and third volumes of the set comprise the magnificent Syntopicon - an index to the great ideas. Mortimer Adler oversaw the creation of this volume and we have written about it here. The remaining 51 volumes of the set were arranged partially chronologically and partially by genre to cover the range of thought in history, literature, science, and philosophy from Homer to Sigmund Freud.

A Plan

No list of books is worth anything without a plan for getting through them. The editors of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World decided upon two primary approaches to reading the volumes they assembled. 

The Syntopicon

The first is the Syntopicon itself, covering what were considered to the 102 ideas most readily available to the reader trough a systematic and careful reading of the content of the books.  Therefore a primary and obvious approach to reading the Great Books would be to delve into the study of a topic which we are interested in. 

We might, for example, be interested in what the Western world has had to say about Love. We could begin by reading the introductory essay on the idea of Love in the Syntopicon and then begin working through the outline of topics for Love. These would include readings on the nature of love, the kinds of love, the morality of love, the social or political force of love, sympathy, or friendship, and divine love. Each of these topics would have several subtopics. Using this approach, a reader would be able to read about the Great Ideas topically. It would presume a level of reading that Mortimer Adler has discussed elsewhere as Syntopical reading. 

Ten Years Worth of Books

Another approach suggested by the editors involves the reading of the whole works or integral parts of the works at various points so that over time a full reading of the entire corpus might take place. The editorial staff suggest this method for a couple of reasons. First, not everyone interested in reading the Great Books has an interest in what the authors of the west have said about a particular topic, but about all topics. We want to know what Plato or Augustine said, not just what they said about this or that. A systematic reading of the Great Books allows us to discover this on our own time, as it were. A second reason for reading this way is that it spreads the reading over time and make sit more manageable, especially for adults who wish to discover this repository of learning anew.

A Whole Set?

Should a whole set of these books be bought now to accomplish this task? To this question I give a resounding no. There are several alternatives to the set of books that Encyclopedia Britannica published in 1952 that are available to us now. For one thing, the set was expanded in 1990 to include 6 extra volumes of material, bringing the total set to 60 books. This elaborates on ideas that Hutchins explored in his essay, notably that each generation must create it's list of books. Another reason not to go out and get the set as published is that most of these books are in the public domain and are readily available for reading on e-reader devices like the Kindle.

In the next post, I will begin to examine the first year of readings for the Great Books as suggested by the editors of this collection.