Ideas Read online

  Of course, there is nothing sacred or inevitable about ‘the rule of three’. An alternative approach has been to stress the continuity of ‘big’ thoughts. Many books, for instance, have been written on such overwhelming topics as ‘Progress’, ‘Nature’, ‘Civilisation’, ‘Individualism’, ‘Power’, what is and what is not ‘Modern’. A number of scholars–political historians and moral philosophers in particular–have seen the most important intellectual strand running through the past as a moral saga revolving around the twin issues of freedom and individuality. Immanuel Kant was just one who viewed history as the narrative of man’s moral progress. Isaiah Berlin also devoted his energies to defining and refining different concepts of freedom, to explaining the way freedom has been conceived under different political and intellectual regimes, and at different times in history. The study of individualism has grown immensely in recent years, with many historians seeing it as a defining aspect of modernity and capitalism. Daniel Dennett, in his recent title Freedom Evolves, described the growth of individualism throughout history and the various ways that freedom has increased and benefited mankind. Freedom is both an idea in itself and a psychological/political condition especially favourable to the instigation of ideas.

  Each of these approaches to intellectual history has something to be said for it and each of the books and essays referred to above is warmly recommended. In the event, however, I have given this book a tripartite structure, in the manner of Francis Bacon, Thomas Carlyle, Giambattista Vico, Carlo Cipolla, Ernest Gellner, Jared Diamond and others. Not merely to ape them (though one could do worse than follow this array of distinguished minds) but because the three particular ideas I have settled on, as the most important, do, I believe, concisely summarise my argument about what has happened in history and describe where we are today.

  All of the forms of organisation mentioned above are recognisable in the following pages, but the three ideas I have settled on as the most important, and which determine the book’s ultimate structure and thesis, are these: the soul, Europe, and the experiment. I do not intend to rehearse the argument of the book in this Introduction but, if I may anticipate some criticisms, I trust it will become clear why I think the soul is a more important concept than the idea of God, why Europe is as much an idea as it is a place on the map, and why the humble experiment has had such profound consequences. I also think that these three ideas are responsible for our present predicament–but that too will emerge in the following pages.

  I should perhaps expand a little on what I mean by ‘idea’. I do not have any magic formula according to which ideas have been chosen for inclusion in this book. I include abstract ideas and I include inventions which I think are or were important. According to some palaeontologists man’s first abstract idea occurred around 700,000 years ago, when stone hand-axes became standardised to the same proportions. This, the scientists say, shows that early man had an ‘idea’ inside his head of what a hand-axe should be. I report this debate and discuss its implications on pages 26–27. But I also treat the invention of the first hand-axes–2.5 million years ago, before they became standardised–as evidence for an ‘idea’, after early man realised that a sharp stone would break through animal hide when his own fingernails or teeth wouldn’t. Writing is an idea, a very important idea, which was invented before 3000 BC. Today, however, we tend not to regard letters or words as inventions, as we do computers or mobile phones, because they have been so long with us. But inventions are evidence of ideas. I have treated language as an idea, because language reflects the way that people think, and the ways in which languages differ characterise the social and intellectual history of different populations. In addition, most ideas are conceived in language. Thus I consider the history and structure of the world’s most intellectually influential languages: Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, French and English.

  The first person to conceive of intellectual history was, perhaps, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). He certainly argued that the most interesting form of history is the history of ideas, that without taking into account the dominating ideas of any age, ‘history is blind’.26 Voltaire (1694–1778) spoke of the philosophy of history, by which he meant that history was to be looked at as what interests a philosophe (rather than a soldier-politician, say). He argued that culture and civilisation, and progress on that score, were susceptible of secular, critical and empirical enquiry.27 The French Annales school, with its interest in mentalités, some of the less tangible aspects of history–for example, the everyday intellectual climate at various points in the past (how time was understood, or what, say, medieval notions of privacy were)–also comprised a form of the history of ideas, though it was hardly systematic.

  But in modern times, the person who did more than anyone else to create an interest in the history of ideas was Arthur O. Lovejoy, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore in the United States. He was one of the founders of the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins and gave a series of lectures, the William James Lectures on Philosophy and Psychology, at Harvard University, in spring 1933. The topic of the series was what Professor Lovejoy called the most ‘potent and persistent presupposition’ in Western thought. This was ‘The Great Chain of Being’, published as a book of that title in 1936 and which, by 2001, had been reprinted twenty-one times. The Great Chain of Being, Lovejoy said, was for 2,400 years the most influential way of understanding the universe and implied a certain conception of the nature of God. Without acquaintance with this idea, he insisted, ‘no understanding of the movement of thought in [the West]…is possible.’28 At its most simple, the notion underlying The Great Chain of Being, as identified in the first instance by Plato, is that the universe is essentially a rational place, in which all organisms are linked in a great chain, not on one scale of low to high (for Plato could see that even ‘lowly’ creatures were perfectly ‘adapted’, as we would say, to their niches in the scheme of things) but that there was in general terms a hierarchy which ranged from nothingness through the inanimate world, into the realm of plants, on up through animals and then humans, and above that through angels and other ‘immaterial and intellectual’ entities, reaching at the top a superior or supreme being, a terminus or Absolute.29 Besides implying a rational universe, Lovejoy said, the chain also implied an ‘otherworldliness’ of certain phenomena, not just the Absolute (or God) but, in particular, ‘supersensible’ and ‘permanent entities’, namely ‘ideas’ and ‘souls’.

  The chain further implied that the higher up the hierarchy one went the greater the ‘perfection’ of these entities. This was the notion of ‘becoming’, improving, approaching perfection, and from this arose the idea of the ‘good’, what it is to be good, and the identification of the Absolute, God, with the good. ‘The bliss which God unchangingly enjoys in his never-ending self-contemplation is the Good after which all other things yearn and, in their various measures and manners, strive.’30 The conception of the eternal world of ideas also gave rise to two further questions: why is there any world of becoming in addition to the eternal world of ideas or, indeed, the one Supreme Being–why, in effect, is there something rather than nothing? And second, what principle determines the number of kinds of beings that make up the sensible and temporal world? Why is there plenitude? Is that evidence of the underlying goodness of God?

  Lovejoy went on to trace the vicissitudes of this idea, in particular in the medieval world, the Renaissance and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He showed, for instance that Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium, which introduced the idea that the earth went round the sun, rather than vice versa, was understood by many of the time as a new way to contemplate the heavens as ‘the highest good’, as closer to what God intended mankind’s understanding to be.31 For example, Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church’s resistance to Copernicus, also said: ‘God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatures, and bec
ause no single created thing could fitly represent the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied creatures, and bestowed on each a certain degree of goodness and perfection, that from these we might form some idea of the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who, in one most simple and perfect essence, contains infinite perfections.’32 On this reading, Copernicus’ breakthrough was an infinitesimal increase in man’s ascent to God.

  Rousseau, in Émile, said: ‘O Man! Confine thine existence within thyself, and thou wilt no longer be miserable. Remain in the place which Nature has assigned to Thee in the chain of beings…’33 For Pope: ‘Know thy own point; this kind, this due degree, / Of Blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.’34 The writers of the Encyclopédie, in France in the eighteenth century, thought this approach would advance knowledge: ‘Since “everything in nature is linked together”, since “beings are connected with one another by a chain of which we perceive some parts as continuous, though in the greater number of points the continuity escapes us”, the “art of the philosopher consists in adding new links to the separated parts, in order to reduce the distance between them as much as possible”.’35 Even Kant spoke of ‘the famous law of the continuous scale of created beings…’36

  Influential though it was, Lovejoy felt that the idea of the great chain had failed. In fact, he said, it had to fail: it implied a static universe. But that had little to do with its influence.*

  Lovejoy was by all accounts an impressive man. He read English, German, French, Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish and his students joked that on his sabbatical year from Johns Hopkins he occupied himself by ‘reading the few books in the British Museum Library that he had not yet read’.38 Nonetheless, he was criticised for treating ideas as ‘units’–underlying and unchanging entities, like the elements in chemistry–whereas his critics saw them as far more fluid.39

  But Lovejoy certainly started the ball rolling in that he became the first editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, founded in 1940. (Among the contributors to that volume were Bertrand Russell and Paul O. Kristeller.) In the first issue, Lovejoy set out the Journal’s aims as: to explore the influence of classical ideas on modern thought, the influence of European ideas on American thought, the influence of science on ‘standards of taste and morality and educational theories and models’ and the influence of certain ‘pervasive and widely ramifying ideas or doctrines’, such as evolution, progress, primitivism, determinism, individualism, collectivism, nationalism and racism. He argued that the history of thought is not ‘an exclusively logical progress in which objective truth progressively unfolds itself in a rational order’. Instead, he said, it revealed a sort of ‘oscillation’ between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, between romanticism and enlightenment, arising from non-rational factors. This, he thought, was an alternative model to ‘progress’. In an essay elsewhere, he identified the subject matter of a history of ideas as: the history of philosophy, of science, of religion and theology, of the arts, of education, of sociology, of language, of folklore and ethnography, of economics and politics, of literature, of societies.

  In the years since then, the Journal of the History of Ideas has continued to explore the subtle ways in which one idea in history leads to another. Here are some recent articles: Plato’s effects on Calvin, Nietzsche’s admiration for Socrates, Buddhism and nineteenth-century German thought, a pre-Freudian psychologist of the unconscious (Israel Salanter, 1810–1883), the link between Newton and Adam Smith, between Emerson and Hinduism, Bayle’s anticipation of Karl Popper, the parallels between late antiquity and Renaissance Florence. Perhaps the most substantial spin-off of the Journal was the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, published in 1973 and edited by Philip P. Wiener, who had followed Lovejoy as editor-in-chief. This massive work, in four volumes, of 2,600 pages, had 254 contributors, seven associate editors, including Isaiah Berlin and Ernest Nagel, and seven contributing editors, among whom were E. H. Gombrich, Paul O. Kristeller, Peter B. Medawar and Meyer Schapiro.40 The dictionary identified nine core areas–these were: ideas about the external order of nature; ideas about human nature; literature and aesthetics; ideas about history; economic, legal and political ideas and institutions; religion and philosophy; formal logical mathematical and linguistic ideas. As one reviewer remarked, ‘it is a vast intellectual Golconda’.

  In an essay in the Journal, to mark fifty years of publication, one contributor singled out three failures worthy of note. One was the failure of historians to come up with any understanding of what one big modern idea really means–this was ‘secularisation’; another was the widespread disappointment felt about ‘psychohistory’ when so many figures–Erasmus, Luther, Rousseau, Newton, Descartes, Vico, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche–cry out for a deep psychological understanding; and the third was the failure among both historians and scientists to get to grips with ‘imagination’ as a dimension in life generally and in particular so far as the production of ideas is concerned. These alleged failures are something worth bearing in mind as this history proceeds.41

  In the pages of the Journal of the History of Ideas a distinction is often made between ‘the history of ideas’ (an English language, and mainly American, usage), and several German terms–Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts), Geistesgeschichte (history of the human spirit), Ideengeschichte (history of ideas), Wörtegeschichte (history of individual words) and Verzeitlichung (the anachronistic disposition to insert modern concepts into historical processes). These are useful terms for scholars, for refining the subject. The general reader, however, needs only to be aware that this deeper level of analysis is there, should they wish to take their interest further.

  In this Introduction, by discussing the theories and arguments of others, I have tried to give a flavour of what a history of ideas is and can be. But perhaps another, altogether simpler way of looking at this book is as an alternative to more conventional history–as history with the kings and emperors and dynasties and generals left out, with the military campaigns, the empire-building conquests and the peace treaties and truces omitted. There is no shortage of such histories and I assume here that readers will know the bare bones of historical chronology. But although I do not explore particular military campaigns, or the deeds of this or that king or emperor, I do discuss advances in military tactics, the invention of new and influential weapons, theories of kingship and the intellectual battles between kings and popes for the minds of men. I do not discuss in any detail the actual conquest of America but I do dwell on the thinking that led to the discovery of the New World and the ways in which that discovery changed how Europeans and Muslims (for example) thought. I do not describe the build-up of empires but I do discuss the idea of empire, and of colonialism. I explore ‘The imperial mind’, how for example the British changed Indian thinking and vice versa. Ideas about race haven’t always been as contentious as they are now and that, in itself, is a matter of interest and importance.

  One set of arguments I make space for is the alternative to Lovejoy’s ‘Great Chain’ thesis, as epitomised by James Thrower’s excellent, if little-known, The Alternative Tradition.42 This is a fascinating exploration of naturalistic views of the past, in other words ideas which seek to explain the world–its existence and order–without recourse to God or the gods. In my view this tradition has not had the attention it merits (and is needed now more than ever). Thrower’s book is discussed in Chapter 25.

  I have introduced many ‘little’ ideas that I found fascinating but are rarely included in more conventional histories, despite being indispensable: who had the idea to divide time into BC and AD and when? Why do we divide a circle into 360 degrees? When and where were the ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs (+ and ?) introduced into mathematics? We live in an age of suicide bombers, who do what they do because they believe they will earn an honoured place in paradise–where does this strange notion, paradise, come from? Who discovered the Ice Age and how and why did it come about? My aim throughout has
been to identify and discuss those ideas and inventions that have had a long-term influence on the way we live or have lived and think. I do not expect everyone to agree with my choice, but this is a long book and I urge any reader who thinks I have made serious omissions to write to me. I also urge the reader to consult the notes at the back of the book. Many aspects of the past are the subject of fascinating dispute among scholars. To have laid out these disagreements fully in the main text would have held up the narrative unreasonably, but I do make space for the more important intellectual sword-fights in the notes.

  Prologue

  The Discovery of Time

  To Prologue Notes and References

  On the evening of Wednesday, 1 May 1859, John Evans, a British archaeologist, crossed the English Channel by steamer from Folkestone to Boulogne. He took the train to Abbeville where he was met by Joseph Prestwich, a renowned British geologist. Next morning they were collected at seven o’clock by Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, chief customs officer in the town but also an amateur archaeologist. Evans and Prestwich were in France to investigate certain discoveries of their host.