745. Ideas
As befits the new millenium, a most brilliant book by Peter Watson was
published in 2000. If ever we have a modern polymath equivalent to Francis
Bacon in the 16th century it is Peter Watson. The book was A Terrible
Beauty: A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind and
the Oxford University historian, Robert Gildea, said of it: "An
encyclopaedic work on a vast scale. The command of artistic and scientific
understanding is extraordinary."
Amen to that. It is a fantastic piece of work and has been a bible of mine
in the past few years. Peter Watson has now written another book, Ideas: A
History from Fire to Freud which -- it would seem -- is a more objective
summary (and, at 822 pages, is 70 pages longer than his previous one!). I
shan't be buying the current one -- at least not until it appears as a
paperback and only then to help Watson's royalties -- because, according
the reviewer below, Peter Watson seems to have come to a similar conclusion
that I had reached after reading and dwelling upon A Terrible Beauty.
This is that we have probably reached the end of ideas that can be conveyed
by the spoken and written word. Apparently, in Ideas, Watson doesn't
exactly say that. He concludes: "Looking 'in', we have found nothing --
nothing stable anyway, nothing enduring, nothing we can all agree upon,
nothing conclusive -- because there is nothing to find."
The hollowness of "looking 'in' " may not mean the same to many people as
saying words and linguistic philosophy have now reached the end of the road
but it does to me. This is not to say that words are not important. Of
course, they are, and they should be used with as much exactitude as
possible if we wish to maximise the chances of altering the neuronal
networks of our interlocutor's brain. But they're not things or ends in
themselves.
But many of the "ideas" which are now shaping the modern world cannot
possibly be conveyed by words alone. The need a substratum of specialised
knowledge. The word "instinct", for example, which has been politically
impossible to use for the past 30 years or so, is as alive -- and as
strong! -- as it ever was but we have to use wishy-washy words such as
"predispositions" instead. But "instinct" cannot really be understood until
one has an appreciation of the structure of the chromosome molecule and the
way its genes perform both in the normally functioning cell and when it is
creating sperm or eggs.
And then there is "time". This is becoming a tremendously important concept
in all sorts of disciplines. It is important in the design of electronic
circuits, and in understanding how cultures have to change before economic
growth can occur, and in thinking about cosmology and whether time existed
at all before the Big Bang -- and so on. But, essentially, what we call
"time" is a multipolar event that happens simultaneously in a particular
set of circumstances which can then lead to another event which, in
principle, and using old-fashioned language, can as easily "flow" backwards
as well as forwards.
And, to refer back to Peter Watson's quotation briefly, be it noted that
all scientific "ideas" are provisional anyway.
But there we are. I'm winding down now, preparing to go on holiday to
France where, among other places, I hope to visit the Lascaux Caves again
and see those wonderful drawings as brilliantly done as Pablo Picasso in
his early days or Augustus John. No doubt I will try and go "backwards" for
30,000 years and put my mind into that of the artists of those days.
Incidentally, I don't believe for one minute that drawings of bison with
spears sticking out of them and figures running round them in an apparent
state of high excitement had any religious content as so many pious
philosophers and art historians are apt to say. (Used to, anyway. They seem
to have dropped this one in recent years.) The artists were simply relating
past incidents or perhaps the drawings were instructional materials for
their teenager sons.
But words-as-ideas can often be dangerous. President Bush and other
politicians use words like "democracy" and "freedom" as though they really
exist and in doing so give themselves permission to kill and torture many
thousands of innocent people in other lands and leaving their cultures in
chaos as they do so.
I will not be at my laptop for three weeks, imbibing the woes of the world.
Instead, I will be imbibing coffee in a caf� every morning with Le Monde in
front of me struggling to understand what President Chirac is up to or what
the latest street demonstration in Paris is all about. It will be
difficult, given my 45-year old schoolboy French, but I have bought a
pocket dictionary and I will be trying.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
Ideas: a history from fire to Freud
Peter Watson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Reviewed by John Gray
The history of ideas has a history of its own, and it is not long. Peter
Watson believes the first person to conceive of intellectual history may
have been Francis Bacon, which places the birth of the subject in the late
16th century. In Greece and China more than 2,000 years ago, there were
sceptics who doubted whether the categories of human thought could
correctly represent the world, but the recognition that these categories
change significantly over time is distinctly modern. Thanks to thinkers
such as Vico and Herder, Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault, the notion
that ideas have a history is an integral part of the way we think today,
and it surfaces incongruously in unlikely places. Thinkers of the right may
rant against moral relativism and look back with nostalgia to a time when
basic concepts seemed fixed for ever, but these days the right is committed
to a militant belief in progress -- and so to accepting that seemingly
permanent features of the conceptual landscape may turn out to be no more
than a phase in history.
Given the importance of the history of ideas to the way we understand
ourselves, you might expect it to be a flourishing discipline, but that is
far from the case. As Isaiah Berlin used to say, it is an orphan subject.
Ever sceptical of abstraction, historians complain that it slips easily
into loose generalisation. For philosophers, who tend to assume that
questions asked hundreds or even thousands of years ago about knowledge and
the good life are essentially the same as the ones we ask today, it is
irrelevant. Very few economists know anything much about the history of
their discipline, and the same is true of many social scientists. At a time
of grinding academic specialisation, intellectual history seems a faintly
dilettantish, semi-literary activity, and the incentive structures that
surround a university career do not encourage its practice. More
fundamentally, the history of ideas is a casualty of the growth of
knowledge. Anyone who aspires to study it on anything other than a
miniaturist scale needs to know a great deal about a wide range of subjects
- in many of which knowledge is increasing almost by the day.
In these circumstances, a universal history of ideas seems an impossibly
daunting project. Yet in Ideas a history from fire to Freud, Watson gives
us an astonishing overview of human intellectual development which covers
everything from the emergence of language to the discovery of the
unconscious, including the idea of the factory and the invention of
America, the eclipse of the idea of the soul in 19th-century materialism
and the continuing elusiveness of the self. In a book of such vast scope, a
reader could easily get lost, but the narrative has a powerful momentum.
Watson holds to a consistently naturalistic philosophy in which humanity is
seen as an animal species developing in the material world. For him, human
thought develops as much in response to changes in the natural environment
- such as shifts in climate and the appearance of new diseases - as from
any internal dynamism of its own. This overarching perspective informs and
unifies the book, and the result is a masterpiece of historical writing.
Watson's sympathy for naturalism enables him to spot some crucial and
neglected turns in the history of thought. Nowadays, naturalistic
philosophies are usually connected with those Enlightenment beliefs which
hold that humanity progresses through the use of reason. Watson notes,
however, that Spinoza, a pivotal thinker who may well have had a greater
role in shap- ing the early Enlightenment than better-known figures such as
Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes, took a different view. He never imagined
that human life as a whole could be rational, and in a lovely passage
quoted by Watson he wrote "Men are not conditioned to live by reason alone,
but by instinct. So they are no more bound to live by the dictates of an
enlightened mind than a cat is bound to live by the laws of nature of a lion."
In Spinoza's view, the capacity for rational inquiry may be what
distinguishes human beings from other animals, but it is not the force that
drives their lives - like other animal species, humans are moved by the
energy of desire. This view reappeared in the 20th century in the work of
Sigmund Freud, who took the further step of recognising that much of human
mental life is unconscious. In conjunction with later work in cognitive
science showing that there are many vitally important mental processes to
which we can never consciously gain access, Spinoza's naturalism has helped
shape a view of human beings that is different from the one we inherit from
classical Greek philosophy and from most Enlightenment thinkers.
One of the curiosities of intellectual life is the persistent neglect by
philosophers of non-western traditions. No doubt this is partly ignorance
on their part. Beyond a smattering of Plato and Aristotle and a few scraps
from the British empiricists, most English-speaking philosophers know
practically nothing of their own intellectual traditions, and no one would
expect them to have any acquaintance with the larger intellectual
inheritance of mankind. A more fundamental reason may be the view of the
human subject found in some non-western philosophies. The ideas of personal
identity and free will we inherit from Christianity have often been
questioned, but they continue to mould the way we think, and any view of
human life from which they are altogether absent remains unfamiliar and
troubling. Watson is refreshingly free from the cultural parochialism that
still disables so much western thought. Ranging freely across time and
space, his survey includes some enlightening vignettes of Chinese and
Indian thought, and he gives a useful account of Vedic traditions in which
human individuality is regarded as an illusion. For those who want
something more engaging than the dreary Plato-to-Nato narrative that
dominates conventional histories of ideas, this wide range of reference
will be invaluable.
Inevitably there are gaps in Watson's account. His treatment of Buddhist
philosophy is cursory -- a surprising omission, given his naturalistic
viewpoint. He concludes with some interesting thoughts on the failure of
scientific research to find anything resembling the human self, as
understood in western traditions. He asks whether the very idea of an
"inner self" may not be misconceived, and concludes "Looking 'in', we have
found nothing -- nothing stable anyway, nothing enduring, nothing we can
all agree upon, nothing conclusive -- because there is nothing to find."
This conclusion is also mine, but it was anticipated more than 2,000 years
ago in the Buddhist doctrine of anatman, or no-soul. The thoroughgoing
rejection of any idea of the soul was one of the ideas through which
Buddhism distinguished itself from orthodox Vedic traditions, which also
viewed personal identity as an illusion but affirmed an impersonal world
soul an idea that Buddhists have always rejected. For them, human beings
are like other natural processes, in that they are devoid of substance and
have no inherent identity.
The view of the human subject suggested by recent scientific research seems
less strange when one notes how closely it resembles this ancient Buddhist
view. Modern science seems to be replicating an account of the
insubstantiality of the person that has been central to other intellectual
traditions for millennia. It is an interesting comment on prevailing ideas
of intellectual progress that one should be able to find such remarkable
affinities between some of humanity's oldest and newest ideas.
----
John Gray's most recent book is Heresies: Against Progress and Other
Illusions (Granta)
New Statesman -- May 2005
>>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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