A HISTORY OF IDEAS

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Post-Modern Anthropology

and the Dialectics of Anthropologos

by Hugh M. Lewis

Ideas do not exist independently of individuals who think them, enact them, bring them into the world and grant them a life of their own. Thus ideas have another kind of history--often untold--other than that normative and structural history of their conception, transformation, explication above and beyond the many minds of humankind. While the principle of progress or the social conception of utopia that has so informed the rise of an enlightened rationalist tradition in western civilization, or the retelling and reinvention of a Marx that is larger than life, are typically presented as if these were in essence separate from the conceiver, with a developmental purpose and trajectory of their own independently of those who invented them, these ideas do not exist in kind of perfect world, vacuum-sealed from the infections of humanness and the mortality of real life. This other kind of history is, of course, biographical, psychological, social, ideological and textual.

The idea is an historical fact and an ideological fiction whose time has come for critical reevaluation in reference to many interrelated factors that have been cumulatively decisive to its articulation and yet remains largely neglected and not assessed for its historical influence.

This conception contradicts the very basis of the western tradition of Platonic Rationalism, as it denies the noumenal basis of ideas as existing in the world in some a priori perfect state, awaiting discovery by the philosophical prospector. Ideas are invented, constructed, revised, discarded and forgotten like any other material artifact buried in the ground. This denies the very basis of a rationalistic version of modern science, especially in its form of analytical positivism, which holds that universal laws or principles preexist in the world--as ideal Structures--waiting to be discovered and brought to life by a systematic science. This rational positivism controverts the real role and function of science in the discovery of Truth in the world, and implicitly denies the actual substantive basis for the production of scientific knowledge and understanding in the world. It denies the empirical ground of a science that is rooted in a common phenomenal experience of humankind and in a common human capacity for the expression, communication and 'understanding' of abstract conceptions of relation in the world. It implies concomitantly a dogmatic assertion of over-determined causality, the search for absolute origins, a necessary isomorphism between formal models and functional patternings, and a unilinear character and unidirectionality of historical change, of atomic time, which denies the inherent and irresolvable relativity of human knowledge of and in the world--that all such knowledge is limited and preconditioned in important ways by the point of view of the knower in the world.

Unlike simple material artifacts, ideas as inventions and innovations of the world have an important, historically irreversible transformational effect upon the world. Such ideas bring about changes to the world which contribute to the growing and developing stock of knowledge which we refer to as human civilization--a trans-cultural, trans-historical, and pan-human phenomena. The first fire may have been extinguished many times before proto-humans figured out how to make their own, but the idea of fire itself, and of its many uses, could not be extinguished once it had been acquired. Similarly, the principle and many possible purposes of the wheel, once achieved, had such a transformational effect upon human history that the principle itself was more important than and was sure to endure long beyond the actual turning of any wheel.

We can look to the arch, the boat, the flaked stone point, the bow and arrow, the aqueduct, the smelting and shaping of metal, the domestication, propagation, hybridization and processing of many kinds of flora and fauna, writing, basic socio-religious principles and practices, and perhaps more recently, flight, electricity, biology, and many inventions of science and modern technology, as well as the idea of a teleological science itself, as all representing basic ideas which transcended the culture historical horizons of their first invention and spread throughout the world as possessions of a pan-human historical civilization. Such seminal ideas were the very germ of historical development which were spread far and wide throughout the world. It is in this wider sense that we may refer to a history of mind that has been the basis of a universal world civilization, trans-cultural in its diffusion and acculturative influence and pan-human in its transformative powers.

The meeting of the peoples of the New World with the peoples of Europe, so dramatic and destructive in many of its consequences, was not merely a discovery or even part of a larger historical process of global exploration, conquest, imperialism and colonization. It was a sudden clash of different historical trajectories, a sudden folding and rending of the seamless fabric of world history in such a way that it forced upon the wider world 'without history' many irreversible transformations which traumatically obliterated past life ways. These processes of global transformation, continuing today under the appellation of 'Development.' This global, pan-human process of the rise and transformation of historical civilization serves as a valid testimonial of the power of ideas in shaping and changing irreversibly human reality and our destiny in the world.

There has been in this process an important dialectic between the invention and innovation of ideas and their instantiation and transformation of the world in which they are realized. This dialectic has not been the immanent unfolding of the Hegelian QED--the Dialectic of the Geist of Human Spirit in the world. It has been rather, the gradual rise of primitive, basic ideas, and the long-term consequences of their elaboration, refinement and interrelation in the world. Cumulatively, these ideas have multiplied to widen the horizons of a kind of collective human consciousness--Mind--that is embodied in and embedded within the many textual examples of their expression in the world. The dialectics of this process has been one of a never ending process of trial and error, experimentation with novel and alternative forms and designs, the efforts to bridge the gap between form and function, word and deed, thought and action. It has been the evolution of paradox--of hen and egg kind of metalemmas in which the idea neither precedes nor follows its exemplification in the world, but takes shape as the practice of its latent principle becomes put into practice. Ideas that have never been put into practice, that have never been successfully realized, remain as ungerminated seed, as virgins and as barren flowers, which, while perhaps pleasing to behold, remain nevertheless historically fruitless and unproductive.

Because such history has usually been one long success story after another, the many failures that precede and pave the way to the final proof. If we multiply our history of every successful idea by a factor of ten or a hundred, we will have a better idea of the actual dialectics of the process--the ten-fold or hundred-fold failures which lie buried in our common past.

The development of human civilization was perhaps an inevitable patterning of unfolding. Given the proper combination of basic elements and the appropriate set of circumstances for their unfolding, its gradual, but eventual chain reaction was more a matter of time. If it did not happen where and when it did, it may have sooner or later happened somewhere and sometime else. Its chaotic configuration would certainly have presented a very different appearance than it had, but though unpredictable in its complexity of cause and event, it was perhaps quite expectable in its consequences.

There were perhaps important structural reasons why Chinese civilization, quite sophisticated and advanced for its day, remained quite stagnant for so long while the occident caught up and advanced technologically beyond its high-water mark, but in a continuum involving tens and hundreds of thousands of years, a few thousand or a few hundred make a minor difference. The basic cultural templates and ingredients for the rise of human civilization, the language, the tools, the social principles, were already in place and spread widely over the globe. It was merely a matter of time before the correct combination of these elements would be created--perhaps one of many possible such solutions before the history of human civilization would 'ake off on its own trajectory of development.

It is important to emphasize that these historical dialectics between basic ideas and the many things in the world to which they are related, have always been mediated and articulated by human beings who have always been bound in one biographical point of time and place in history. Without such human mediation, there would have been no such dialectic. In this sense ideas have been nothing but the elusive phantoms and genies of the human imagination that we have seen fit to bottle up in and give shape to in the many material vessels which contain and symbolically, as well as functionally, express such ideas.

The dialectics of human history between the ideas and their material expressions in the world thus reveal a fundamental patterning and modality of Mind that is perhaps evolutionarily unique to the human experience on earth. From this standpoint, we cannot escape the inevitable consequences of this dialectics as it has been ingrained in the very nature of our evolutionary experience.

The human process of the mediation of this historical dialectic of civilization has also meant that there has always been a shadow side to this process--a hidden but complex set of factors of human nature and of the human condition, of human weakness and frailty, blindness and error, of human susceptibility to fear, the influence of social power, as much as it has been a record of heroic strengths, and epic feats, of vision and wisdom.

In the humanness of their dialectics, in their experiential rootedness, Ideas are complex, composite, multifaceted, sublime entities. In their sophistication and connotative implicitness, they are also always subtly elusive and curiously intangible things that resist facile, explicit definition. They remain mysterious, almost mystical and magical in their effect and their power of illusion.

The shadow side of the historical dialectics of ideas is that they are as often susceptible to the vagaries and vicissitudes of human frailty and fear, of projective prejudices. Ideas have a social history of their development, and can thus be tyrannically persecuted, subordinated to other hierarchies of human inequality and difference. Ideas can be capitalized, and harnessed for the purposes of evil and can be produced and promoted in the forge of human violence and ignorance. Thus ideas are never really pure unadulterated and perfect, they are rarely uncontaminated by superstition and deliberate cunning. They are articulated and played out in a forum of human difference, desire, struggle, perversion and victimization.

The historical dialectics of ideas lacks any kind of internal logic or structure or purpose that makes its pathway of development necessary. Its sense of coherence is always after the fact of its historical unfolding and demonstration. It can only be recognized as meaningful patterning in hindsight and rarely, if ever in foresight. However sophisticated our science, we might be able to tell what the weather will be like tomorrow or even in a week from now, but we can make such predictions with absolute certainty or unequivocally, and the further into the future we cast our dice, the greater the darkness becomes.

About the only kind of patterning which can be inferred is a very loose and scientifically unsatsifactory and sloppy patterning of the present based as much on intuition, ad hoc contingency and a curiously human capacity for creativity as it is constrained by cultural convention, historical horizons or social processes. This patterning of our mediation of the dialectics remains as much out-of-awareness, hence unconscious as it is anything that is directly known. It is at best a very grossly generalizable model, schema, orientation which remains to be inferred, unexplained in its broadest outlines, whose design is perhaps ultimately inaccessible to our science. The little that can be said of this process is perhaps best said in a few lines of a poem, in a koan, rather than to be analyzed in detail in a whole volume of words.

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This alternative dialectical history of ideas must take into account several basic factors relating to the human understanding and mediation of this history.

The argument is for a kind of archaeology of ideas that treats as the object of its inquiry not so much a prehistoric past so much as a proto-historical past in which the artifacts buried beneath the ground are regarded not so much as pre-texts to history as they are proto-texts inscribing their own sense of history. The supposition is that all such artifacts are written in terms of a definite cultural grammar--the problem of the proto-text being to break the code at least referentially if not inferentially. Because such artifacts are rarely genuine scripts in a directly, definitely referential sense, they remain referentially open to multiple readings and primarily contextually bound within a circumscribed provenience of their production. Nonetheless all such artifacts are symbolic, emblematic and iconographic if not wholly ideographic, in at least an unconscious sense.

All such texts, however incipient or rudimentary, have as their structural design the problem of the transmission and expressive elaboration of the basic ideas upon which they are conceived and constructed, and in the relational context of which they are historically situated. Each such artifact of the past, within its proper provenience, is thus both simultaneously and somewhat ambivalently the formal/functional device of the elaboration of meaningful patterning and the communication of such patterning in the world. These are two sides of the same coin of human consciousness and language. The former problem of intrinsic meaning being one of internal design, the later problem of extrinsic communication being one of external reference.

Casting the archaeology of ideas in terms of the history of proto-texts makes the problem of its interpretation primarily a hermeneutic problem as opposed to a strictly and formally critical concern, and as such is involved primarily with the corroboration of evidence of the external validity of the proto-text as opposed to the interpretive analysis of the internal validity. This is a paradox because what remains of most proto-historical artifacts is the object itself separated for the most part from its external context. The only ground remaining for the internal critique of the object being ones own projective reconstruction based upon one's own external context. The basis of the interpretation of the object is drawn in terms relevant to the present rather than drawn directly from the past.

Because the archaeology of ideas is primarily a hermeneutic enterprise, several lessons can be derived from the theory of textual hermeneutics. All texts are discursive and thus dialogically produced and contextualized. All texts are themselves passive repositories of ideas and information. They are not independent of the original act of their writing and the revisionist process of their reading and rereading. All texts undergo a distanciation of surplus meaning that accretes to the original significance of the text and enhances the derivative value of the text. People are engaged in an ongoing process of rereading, rewriting and reevaluating important texts in terms that are relevant to the past and the present. Forgotten texts may be 'revitalized' and brought back to life, and reenacted in a new cultural performance. Such a process is inherently syncretistic, blending elements of the new with the elements of the past into new configurations.

In terms of proto-historical texts, inscribed meanings may be either petrified or unpetrified. Hermeneutic analysis of such proto-texts entails a determination of the relative status of such texts in reference to their immediate provenience as well as in reference to their contemporary importance. Petrified texts are those which are relatively 'dead' and thus unproductively finite in their relevance and significance--they are fossilized and rendered as anachronistic artifacts of a bygone epoch. Unpetrified texts are those which remain relatively vital in their productive relevance of new configurations of meaning. Such texts are open and dynamic in terms of their capacity for generating surplus meanings--such texts cross the lines into a wider stream of human history.

Petrified and unpetrified are relative terms designating the opposed extremities of an relatively open-ended continuum. All proto-textual artifacts fall between these extremes, as being more-or-less petrified or more-or-less unpetrified. It is also of critical importance to emphasize that the relative degree of fossilization or ossification of such proto-texts has nothing to do with the recoverability of their significance or with the revitalization of their forms in terms which are less distantly significant. The process and dynamics of the embedding of texts in the stratigraphy of human ideas is a process which is to some degree independently constrained by other factors than their current context of interpretation. It is the figuring out of these other possible factors that is the problem of hermeneutic inquiry.

Recent critical approaches to the reinterpretation of such evidence have largely neglected the weighty and often onerous burden of hermeneutic analysis of often trivial details. As such, this kind of critique remains unproductive and tied to the problem of the evaluation of the internal validity of such artifacts. Such critique thus largely stands outside of the purview of the actual history of such texts, and thus remains an implicit, if unintentional denial, of such a history. Critical reinterpretation without preliminary hermeneutic corroboration of the external validity of the evidence renders such interpretation fundamentally erroneous, unempirical and mystifying. They make the project of historical revision the handmaiden of the problem of ideological legitimization.

The primary problem remains as to how to actually go about such hermeneutic analysis of proto-textual artifacts. Though there is no single, straight forward and direct method that can be prescribed, there are effective systematic procedures of indexing, cross-referential corroboration and triangulation of the data which makes such an enterprise efficacious and effective in the differentiation between the merely possible, the plausible and the most probable.

Important lessons for such analytical approaches can be gained from the interpretation of other historical documents that remain proto-textual in their design and intent. The paradigm for such interpretation is clearly evident in such cases, especially when and where the actual historical provenience can be recovered in considerable detail. Take the case of the artwork of Vincent Van Gogh. Evident in all of his paintings is both a style rooted in a kind of concrete cultural grammar which nevertheless contains the personal imprint and signature of his own dynamic personality. The interpretation of his paintings in relation to his tragic life has become a vast industry and its scale and range reveals the infinite open-endedness of the hermeneutic enterprise in the understanding of unpetrified texts. If we had been left with just the oeuvre of his work without the documented details of his personal biography, we would be left with a mysterious feeling of beauty found to inhere in his paintings without the sense of personal suffering and tragedy in which these paintings were produced. Because history is not written by conditional counterfactuals, we have no way of knowing whether his art would have achieved the stature in the world which it has without the strong touch of his personality. But such is the situation when we are presented with other proto-textual artifacts that clearly exhibit strong feeling and sublimity and yet whose original creators and authors remain anonymous. Though voiceless, such proto-texts are not altogether silent--they speak to us in a mysterious language of sign, symbol and feeling that is not externally grounded in a world of reference. Such texts may remain deeply buried in a long forgotten past, but they somehow stubbornly resist complete petrifaction in the past. One cannot consider the human footprints in the hardened mud of Olduvai or the fragile remnants nicknamed Lucy, or admire the illuminated walls of Lascaux without a strange feeling of connection and identification with a lost sense of the past.

Because imagination always fills in the spaces between the words, there is a chronic conservatism in hermeneutic reconstruction to resist the revolution of the new and different and to stick close to the tried and true. Alternative interpretations are not devalued as such, but have not withstood the test of time long enough to gain the same status of credibility as older arguments. Old arguments, in light of convincing new evidence, can be as rapidly debunked as old superstitions, but there must remain in hermeneutic interpretation an almost Confucian reverence for the old that regards as superficial, meretricious and superfluous the significances of the new. Such conservatism is rooted in the wisdom of the past, and is in direct contrast to the romanticism of the new that wants to paint in the ignorance of the past its own likeness. Such romanticism confuses as the purpose of its project the rewriting of the past in terms of present significances rather than the more legitimate hermeneutic/historical project of trying to interpret the present in terms that are relevant to the past. There is an inherent danger in such romanticism--a susceptibility to the delusions of narcissistic reflection that enables the past to be rewritten in terms of and for purposes of the present, rather than allowing the present to be a 'representation' of the past. Such delusion renders the historical enterprise the pawn of ideology. It is a danger in which the modern world has been all too well versed.

All unpetrified texts, and all proto-texts, to the extent that they remain unpetrified, are in a critical sense open in that their productiveness is virtually infinite, as are the symbolic resonances that informs their interpretation with significance that remains somewhere between the absolute past and the perfect present. Entering into alien meaning systems represented by such texts requires that we unlearn how to recognize and temporarily suspend our own frames of reference and inference and step into a dark wilderness--no matter how petrified or imaginary.