Now we tackle the most difficult of our preliminary questions: What is a Great Idea?
We’ve already talked a bit about “greatness,” but the other half of the term threatens to get at least as complicated. My big old 1919 Webster’s has the following definitions:
1. An archetype or pattern; a conception of any perfection; an ideal; hence, in a less exalted sense, a preliminary or imperfect conception or construction; a plan, outline, sketch, or draft;—now usually restricted to a plan or purpose of action; an intention or design.
2. The embodying form or exemplar of a conception, person, or thing; a real likeness or representation; [etc. . . obsolete form]
3. A mental transcript, image, or picture of an object. . .
4. A mental image or notion to which there is. . .no corresponding reality. . .
5. Broadly, any object of the mind. . .; a notion, thought, or mental impression. . .
6. A general notion. . .
7. A belief, opinion, or doctrine. . .
. . .
9. Idea as used to express Plato’s [insert original Greek], is the most celebrated word in philosophy. . .
And part of what this “most celebrated” definition contains is the notion of the idea as “form-giving cause.” We’ll save more specific treatments of the major philosophers of “the idea” for another day, but we’ll note that the notion of the idea played a key role in the thought of Kant, Hegel and Hume as well.
There probably aren’t too many surprises here, and we can expect to deal with ideas in many of these ways, but we still need to know a bit more about what kind of thing an idea is, and what kind of work it can do in the world.
Mortimer Adler, one of the prime movers behind great ideas movement, takes an interesting approach to the question. His “What Is An Idea?” is worth reading carefully, but the heart of his position is that ideas are most properly considered as “objects of thought”—and when he talks about “objects,” he really intends us to think of something objective, with an existence apart from our discussions of it. He compares an idea to a wine-glass on a table, and our various understandings of the idea to observations based on viewing the glass from various positions. There is a good deal that is useful about the wine-glass metaphor. It is almost certainly the case that we can benefit from looking at most ideas “from more than one side.” And the notion of a realm of ideas apart from what going on in our Great Conversation gives us one way of thinking about what the conversation is good for. But there are certainly plenty of at least potential problems with this approach. We’ll have a chance to see some pretty radical changes in common understandings of ideas like “liberty.” But what are we actually seeing? On Adler’s model, there is an Idea of Liberty, much like the forms in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and we’re much like the blind men in Saxe’s “Blind Men and the Elephant” (a very nice text on tolerance) seeing what our positions and prejudices predispose us to see. The Conversation allows us to compare notes and develop a better understanding of the total nature of the thing. This assigns human understanding to a relatively humble role, of course. We do not create concepts, and our best intellectual productions must still be considered “shadows” of something existing prior to and outside of ourselves and our societies.
The egoist Max Stirner rebelled against this sort of position in The Ego and His Own. He objected to the idealization of things that human being can’t grasp, and he claimed that humans were in fact help down by their devotion to the realm of spirit, and to fixed ideas or “spooks” which haunt our thinking and limit our intellectual independence. (See the section on “The Possessed” for part of that argument.) Charles S. Pierce also talked about how ideas cause us to stop thinking, in his “The Fixation of Belief.”
But, back to Adler. . . Maybe Great Ideas really do have an objective existence, and we should get used to our role regarding them. What would that mean about the universe and our relation to it? Are the Great Ideas something that reside in the mind of a god? That’s certainly one possibility. Another is that they are somehow “hard-wired” into into nature, or human nature. Adler believes that his 103 ideas are pretty obvious and inclusive, if you give the matter some thought. He also believes that they are a common heritage of all human beings. They don’t belong to specialized disciples. In some way, they belong to humanity itself. One way of deriving a system of idea that inhere in humanity would be to try to identify innate ideas or a priori concepts. These sorts of ideas are characterized by the fact that once you grasp them, you realize that they were in some sense there all the time, and you simply can’t logically claim their opposite. We can actually derive quite a few of Adler’s great ideas from a few more-or-less self-evident statements. Let’s start with these:
- I exist.
- There are others like me.
- There is death.
We might say that the concept “one” was already implied in the “I” of the first statement, and that the first two give us the distinction “same/different.” Add 3 and we have “something/nothing” or “one/zero.” We can derive an arithmetic and an increasingly complex set of ideas regarding social relations from these starting points. And the first stages of this process are likely to seem inevitable, or nearly so, if only because there is a high probability that similarly constituted beings would develop certain fairly basic ideas from the basic facts of their existence. Some of what Adler says seems to indicate that this is part of his vision of ideas, but, if so, he seems to be giving the “objectivity” of ideas a somewhat different meaning than he did in the essay linked above.
As our idea-systems become more complicated, the inevitability of any particular concept arising from the development of the system is likely to diminish. Adler includes quite a range of ideas on his list. Take a look: do all of these look like the same kind of thing? Mathematics and oligarchy and angel—all Great Ideas, but in some ways radically different in scope and in the likely means by which they were discovered or derived.
We need to tackle a couple of issues before we can go much further. The first is to present an inter-subjective alternative to Adler’s account. At the other extreme from Adler’s neo-platonic approach is social construction theory, which places heavy emphasis on the growth of ideas out of human effort. From this point of view, the Great Ideas exists only because of the Great Conversation. Our physiology and environment may give us a strong push towards certain ideas, but the work is ours, and it is a work of construction and reconstruction. We would say then, regarding the apparent evolution of “liberty,” that it was indeed a different thing in, say, 1865, than it was in 1620, and it was human reasoning, debate, and various kinds of social interactions that made the change. Sometimes it was outright struggle and war, as happened several times in the interval just mentioned. This view complicates things. In practical terms, it means that there is not actually one “liberty” about which we disagree on the details. Instead, there may be nearly as many ideas of liberty as there are people thinking about the matter, and we have to think in terms of hegemony or “common sense” and look for rough aggragates of opinion.
How do we choose between the models? Ask yourself which model actually corresponds both to the conditions you see around you and to your needs as a thinker and social actor within that environment. When we read, for example, Mill’s “On Liberty,” or Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Experience of Freedom, we can expect to get a pretty clear sense of what is meant by the key terms. When the President says that our enemies “hate freedom” it isn’t as clear what is meant. Our practical solutions has to be something like this: whether or not you believe there is an Idea of Liberty “out there” somewhere, you can be pretty certain that we’re dealing with something a little less uniform and ideal in our daily lives. That’s why I’ve already begun to ask you to cultivate some of the tools of the constructivists. A Great Conversation where everyone just assumes they’re all talking about the same thing may end up being not so great after all.
OK. We’ll come back to some of this, including some theories that assign a more forceful role to ideas. But I want to present, once again, the sort of minimal definition of a Great Idea that I would like you to keep in mind.
Great Ideas are those ideas which we, collectively, can’t seem to stop thinking, or thinking about. They are the ideas that have a hold on us, in large part because we find them structuring our conversations and our institutions. They are the ideas we encounter when we try to think about ourselves, our identities, values and goals.
We can, perhaps, measure the greatness of these ideas by imagining the cost of their disappearance. What would we lose if we simply stopped thinking about freedom? Are there circumstances under which we could do without a notion of tolerance? I think, if you give it some thought, you’ll find two categories of ideas without which we would be in pretty deep trouble. There are the concepts without which we would hardly be able to think at all: one/other, singular/plural, difference, self-other-relation, hierarchy, etc. Then there are the immediate social extentions of these ideas: freedom, tolerance, authority, etc. It’s the second class of more-or-less necessary ideas that we will focus on.
