JJ posted this. Which got me looking into the Great Books of the Western World and led me to Adler. If you drill down into his page, you will come across this list, his list of the 102 “great ideas” (he explains elsewhere what he means by this) which have constituted the core ideas of the “great conversation” that hs been going on since the dawn of history.
I think this is awesome but I also think it is deficient. This list is to “what you need to know to live life to its fullest” what a librarian’s index is to everything you know. It is wider and deeper, yet less relevant, than “what you need to know to live life to its fullest.” The idea of an astrological approach to knowledge is to avoid the “librarian’s index” approach to organizing knowledge. What is the sense and order of his top-level topics? There isn’t any order I can detect. It just happens to be the blocks into which he found he could most conveniently arrange the atomistic ideas that be started out with.
And please note that my criticism is offered with respect - Adler is clearly a broadly-based scholar. Neverthless, I think there is a lot of missing and “useless” knowledge represented in the encyclopedic approach to organizing human knowledge. A more correct method of organization must begin with introspection, metaphor and deductive extension of these metaphors, at least to the point where they are less useful than the direct study of particular facts and deductive arguments based on reason.
In fact, I think this illustrates my point of why the mystical should not be banished. It’s always there, whether you acknowledge it or not. The only difference is that refusing to acknowledge it simply handicaps your ability to really organize your approach to acting, that is, living life. But I definitely agree with Adler’s goal as illustrated by the Aristotle quote on his homepage, “If there is some end of the things we do…will not knowledge of it, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.” Indeed.
Clayton -