Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

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?