Great Ideas: Possible and Minimal Definitions

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:

1. I exist.
2. There are others like me.
3. 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.

The Great Conversation

As part of the process of tackling "great ideas," we'll be doing a certain amount of meta-talking—talking about what we're talking about, and why we're talking about it in the first place, or why we're talking about it in a particular way, when we could be talking about it in so many other ways. There are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most inescapable one is this: "Greatness" is a "great idea."

Those of you with a little background in critical thinking should have red flags appearing in that part of your brain that marks logical flaws and fallacies. Greatness is great—isn't that a perfect example of circular reasoning? or of simply stating the obvious? And, of course, the answer is YES. But that doesn't let us escape the dilemma.

More meta-talk: what is it we think we're up to, again? Last semester, I put it like this:

Great Ideas is an interdisciplinary course intended to give students 1) some
exposure to ideas that are already considered "great" by some widely-accepted
standards, and 2) to help develop and refine the intellectual tools required to make judgments about the "greatness" of ideas and texts. The course was initially the product of faculty discussions about "the loss of cultural memory" and the troubled status of "the canon."

The term "canon" refers to works considered to be exemplary with regard to a particular culture or tradition. When you hear traditionalists talk about "The Canon" it's already assumed you should know which "Great Books" they're talking about. If you don't know, then perhaps you are lacking in basic "cultural literacy."

The faculty members whose discussions led to our course weren't really traditionalists in that sense. One of the reasons that it's hard to know exactly what
texts ought to be "canonical" these days is that there has been a lot of attention paid
in recent decades to enlarging the range of texts and ideas we choose from when we go looking for the "essential" works. The Western Canon was largely the domain of "dead white guys," and our sense of Western Culture has undoubtedly been enriched by attempts to include representative works by women, people of color, popular authors, etc. But the expansion of the canon does undoubtedly detract from the importance placed on the additions. Shakespeare or Tom Paine is no less great because we also read Elizabeth Palmer Peabody or Malcolm X, but an expanded canon in an age where the "great ideas" are arguably not as important as they
have been in other eras poses particular kinds of social problems.

I'm not going to insist that "loss of cultural memory" is our greatest problem. I will insist - over and over again, no doubt - that, to the extent that it can be managed, and managed with an eye to tolerance and justice, a shared cultural legacy does make it easier for us to talk to one another about important subjects. And, even if you oppose the values embodied in some so-called "great" works, you're probably better able to do the things you want to do in a society based (however nominally or forgetfully) on the values embodied in those "great works."

OK. I hope you recognized that there are two kinds of "greatness" being touched on here. One is received, traditional. It is also contested. Shakespeare and Plato are great because greatness in the realms of western literature and philosophy can hardly be discussed without taking them into account. If you wanted to take Shakespeare out of the high schools or colleges, you can bet you would have to have a pretty good reason why. And even this traditional greatness is not simply the product of some social conservatism. Face it: Shakespeare could really write! There is a reason so many of his bon mots have entered the English language as truisms and common sayings. But what we're really saying here is that the first kind of greatness is not separate from the second kind, which is based in an ongoing evaluation. There may come a day when Shakespeare no longer speaks to us, though it's a bit hard to imagine.

The point for us is that we need to be a bit clever about levels of discourse, right from the start. Remember, for example, that it is possible to say mediocre things about greatness. Consider that the ways in which we judge the individual greatness of individuals or ideas might well change, and yet "greatness" might still mean more or less the same thing. Practice turning this stuff over and around in your head until your get dizzy. It will help later.

Models and metaphors help to arrange things. One of our key models will be The Great Conversation. Mortimer Adler, the primary promoter of the Great Books of the Western World series, to which all Great Ideas programs owe a debt, used the phrase. A colleague of Adler's, Robert M. Hutchins, said:

The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race.

This is a pretty bold claim, and one which may raise more red flags for you. Is it really true that in the West, "everybody is to speak his mind" and "no proposition is to be left unexamined"?

This is, after all, related to our guiding question. How much freedom of thought and expression do we really tolerate?

But, back to the Conversation. If we are part of the Civilization of the Dialogue, or of the movement towards its realization, and if it is possible that that Dialogue is being neglected, then that's Big News, and bad news. The Great Conversation is, by this reading, the central work of Western Civilization, on which all institutions of freedom and progress depend.

Stakes are, apparently, high—even if we don't accept uncritically the sort of characterization that Hutchins gives to the problem.

What should we say about The Great Conversation as we get started? We'll maintain a bit of skepticism about things, but let's acknowledge that there has been, in some sense, ongoing debate about certain key human concerns for as long as humans have been debating. And this conversation is a Great Conversation because:

• it has been going on all of this time;
• it marks certain ideas and concerns as capable of demanding our continued attention while the world changes dramatically around them;
• its outcomes have shaped our political, social and economic institutions; and
• its current state helps shape our current debates.

As a working definition, let's agree that the "great ideas" are those that won't let us go, and continue to demand attention in the Great Conversation. )Adler had his list of 103 such ideas. We won't adhere slavishly to his scheme, but it is an interesting list, and you should get familiar with it.) But who is in the Great Conversation? If you and I talk about duty or dialectic, is that part of the Conversation, or do we have to be the Platos of our day to count?

• The Elite answer: We can, and should, converse, but we should be guided by the best and brightest history has to offer us.
• The Populist answer: Everyone has their share of wisdom to contribute, though obviously some will take their responsibility in the affair more seriously than others.
• The Real-Political answer: Questions of truth, authenticity and wisdom aside, some folks make an impact and others don't. Maybe the important thing is to focus on those who are shaping the world we live in now.

How does we choose? Do we get to choose? There's probably some truth in all those perspectives.

• Some views really do seem to have "stood the test of time," and we would be silly to ignore them.
• However, we do live in a world where sensational journalists, bloggers with perhaps a bit too much time of their hands, and best-selling pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore have as much to do with shaping our general sense of the world as individuals more renowned for wisdom and clarity. We can't, and probably shouldn't, try to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that we don't live in the midst of an extremely complex media environment, in which all kinds of voices vie to be heard.

Let's begin to tackle all of this simply be reading carefully, and always dragging our focus back to the realm of ideas. In any event, the first step in deciding to agree or disagree with any argument ought to be understanding of the position being advanced, and the safest road to understanding is the most dispationate analysis of what is being said, what ideas are being used, etc.

Resource: Melungeon Heritage Association

I've had occasion in the past to reference the Melungeons, "tri-racial isolates" of the southern US. Reports of these groups, and others such as the "Tribe of Ben Ishmael," made up an important part of the eugenics literature of the late 19th century. Some important pieces of that literature are available on the website of the Melungeon Heritage Association. (Check out the left navigation menu or click on "Tools for Research. Thanks to Terry from the Left Libertarian list for the heads-up.)

Does the Peace Sign P*ss You Off?

With Laundry Day fast approaching, I'm getting down towards the bottom of the t-shirt pile, so yesterday I wore the one with the peace sign. Honestly, it's always towards the bottom of the pile, mostly because—much more than most of the genuinely inflammatory shirts I own, more, perhaps, than the one featuring Subcommandante Marcos saying "Ya Basta!" with only one finger—it seems to actively enrage people. It's a post-9/11 thing, and I more or less understand. To fight or not to fight has come to be one of those Defining Questions. While the President has recently said that disagreement about the War on Terror is not unpatriotic, peace is still a bit disreputable.

The politics of it all are one thing—and not the thing we need to talk about. What's of interest to us is the way in which ideas—war and peace, freedom, security, and tolerance, to name a few key terms—have taken on surprisingly fluid, multiple, and sometimes contradictory meanings in our culture. We need to get a handle on that issue before we can really even get around to arguing about practical politics—at least in any very useful and meaningful way.

We're going to wade into the political debates that founded the U.S., and into the events in the newspapers—and we need to keep our focus on ideas and the power they possess to help us think and communicate, to act in the world, but also the power they have to stop us short, before we've taken everything into account. The ideas of "9/11" and "the war on terror" define all Americans (which means more than just all citizens of the United States) in ways that go beyond any personal impacts the terrorist attacks had on us. Not all of those effects are entirely rational, but even the non-rational effects are ultimately explicable, if we care to grapple with them. "Honor," for instance, is important. We understand it's positive importance when, for example, we saw the pitcher for Beaverton, Oregon's little league baseball team walk to first base to shake the hand of a batter he had just "beaned." And we can understand its potential down-sides when we contemplate the phenomenon of so-called "honor killings." Honor itself, apparently, is not a uniformly good or bad thing. Neither, perhaps, is peace. (You'll be hard-put to find any positive references, for example, to "peace at any price." Go ahead and Google it.)

As you're reading the day's news, look for key ideas—and try to figure out just exactly what is being invoked when those key ideas come into play. Try reconstructing the phrases you find with a sort of conscious naivete. What could "homeland security" mean? What would it mean to accept or reject "Israel's right to exist"? What is "choice"? "collateral damage"? Is it a "ceasefire" (as in Sri Lanka and parts of the Middle East) if both sides keep fighting just a little all the time? Were we "at peace" with Iraq before the second Iraq War started. (We had, after all, been attacking targets within Iraq right along.) Did the "kidnapping" of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah recently differ markedly from the seizure and imprisonment of Hamas officials in the Palestinian territories a few month's before? Try to tackle this stuff as logically and dispassionately as you can. How much spin is there in the language we use, and to what extent does our familiarity with the terms prevent us from thinking further about them?

If you want a fairly extreme example of this process of asking "what could this mean?", take a look at this book chapter of mine from a few years back, where I try to figure out if "virtual community" is a good way to talk about groups on the internet.

Using the Parrington text

The only required textbook for the course is the first volume of Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought—The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800. (Check Bookfinder for cheap copies.) Parrington's work is, in its own right, something of a Great Book. It was a Pulitzer prize winner, and stands as one of the classics in the field of American intellectual history. It's not an introductory text, and it is sometimes difficult. And I am not going to require you to read all of it. In fact, I will only require you to read a few sections. But I will be constantly referring to the work in my blog entries, and it will be there for you as a first, handy secondary source* when you're trying to figure out how the primary texts* we're reading matter in the realm of ideas. Parrington will be of particular value to you later, as you find your place in the debates and you you prepare to write your papers. For now, take a look at the book, read the introductory material, check out the table of contents, and generally size it up.

* If you don't already know, a primary source is one written by a participant in the events covered, and a secondary source is written about the primary sources, providing commentary of some sort. A Puritan sermon will be, in our context, a primary source, and Parrington's commentary on it a secondary source. Of course, in the long-running debates about great ideas, commentaries are made on commentaries, and what was secondary in one context can become primary in a later one. Think about something like Supreme Court rulings on constitutional matters. The US Constitution is a primary source with regard to rulings about it, but those rulings become precedents, and, therefore, primary sources with regard to later rulings. We'll see some interesting problems that result from confusions about the primary/secondary distinction as we start to look at Wikipedia.

Beginning

Let's begin with a first reading assignment. Please read the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence. Read them carefully. These are founding documents, marking the beginnings of new societies. What ideas are emphasized in them? [This will be your first discussion question.] How do the values of the documents appear similar to, or different from, the values of modern American society?

For the first two weeks, we will be easing into our readings, while we get some theoretical issues on the table. It is not obvious, for example, exactly what is meant by a "great idea." We'll spend some time surveying various ways of thinking about both "ideas" and "greatness." I'll also be giving you a crash course in critical thinking and critical reading skills.

Looking ahead, Weeks 3-9 will be the period where we focus on readings. From Week 10 on, your required readings will be substantially reduced, and I'll be working with you on your individual research projects. I will still be lecturing, and we'll still do quizzes and reading responses, but you will be much more free to pursue your individual interests. Plan accordingly.

Meet the Teacher: Fall 2006

Hi, folks. Here's a bit of personal information about me:

I was born in the Redwoods, in northern California. My dad worked for our favorite Uncle Sam, as a wildlife refuge biologist with the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and the for first five years of my life, my neighbors largely consisted of ducks, geese and mosquitos. We were in southern Idaho, north-central California, Oregon, Washington, and Georgia before I entered elementary school. My father ended up transferring into the Endangered Species Program of the Service, and we finally settled in Ojai, California for about 12 years, where he was stationed as the biologist in charge of creating a recovery plan for the endangered California Condor and a number of other western birds. (To give away my age, I was living in Ojai during the years when "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman" were occasionally filmed in town. I'm actually on-camera, though hidden behind a court-net, in one of the season-opening episodes, hunkered down out of the shot with my kid sister's beginning tennis class.)

After 12 glorious years of fire, mudslides, more-or-less perpetual summer, earthquakes, floods, cross-country practices, moral scares over Dungeons and Dragons (in that white-boxed version you might still be able to afford on eBay), and the like, I moved up to Portland, Oregon, where I bounced around between schools and bookselling jobs, until finally I graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Liberal Studies (English/American Intellectual History). I worked for Goodwill Industries for a couple of years, waiting for my girlfriend to finish school and move off to grad school with me. When she moved off without me, I accepted a position in the American Culture Studies MA program at BGSU (despite the fact that, after OSU, I had really hoped never to have orange as a school color ever again.) I finished the MA program and then completed all the coursework for a Ph.D, at which point the bookstore which I had purchased in town went (slowly and painfully) belly-up, taking that degree and and a good chunk of my net worth with it. I have been teaching at BGSU for most of the last 15 years, and have taught courses Communications, American Culture Studies, Women's Studies, Environmental Studies, Philosophy. I'm currently attached to the Romance Languages department.

My master's thesis was on models for evaluating popular novels. My subsequent published work has been on "virtual communities" on the internet, paperback book collecting, contemporary French cultural theory, and the history of anarchism. I am currently in the midst of writing a biography of William Batchelder Greene, a 19th-century mutualist, Unitarian minister and Union Army colonel. You'll be seeing bits and pieces of that research, which we'll be using to illuminate some of the questions raised in our readings.

Currently, I'm at BGSU as a part-time instructor, teaching this section of Great Ideas and an Honors section of the same course. I'm the "soundguy" and karaoke jockey at Nate & Wally's Fishbowl (so some of you may know me already). I still deal in books online. And I'm hope to begin teaching a "semi-secular" Sunday School seminar at United Christian Fellowship soon, dealing with some of the same topics we'll be covering. I've been involved since the early '90s in a variety of online education projects.

I should probably add some sort of political disclosure, since these are the days of The Academic Bill of Rights and battles over "political correctness." I'm a mutualist anarchist, which means I'm all for people making up their own minds about things, don't mind genuinely free markets, and think that, while individual freedom and autonomy are probably the most important values, they're never actually achieved except in a social context. We have to think about the other folks if we're going to have personal liberty. I'm not going to fit easily into the liberal vs. conservative split that seems to dominate public debate. Hopefully, that's all to the good, and nobody is going to object to having a historian enthusiastic about the subject of liberty teaching a course centered on freedom and tolerance. If you want to keep an eye on what I'm up to outside of class, my main blog is at libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com and my web pages are at libertarian-labyrinth.org.

Finally, here's a photo, so you'll know me if we pass on campus.



Welcome, folks.

-shawn