Peter Watson
Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud
Wiedenfeld and Nicolson
2005 HB, 822 pp, £30 0 29 760726 X
Ideas, as Peter Watson admits in the introduction to his ambitious guide to how we understand our understanding of the world, do not have a long history. If philosophy traditionally began in wonder, as Aristotle says, after Descartes it had to start all over again, with doubt. Wonder was an impediment to knowledge; and it never showed much scepticism about Plato's transcendental postulates, to which, as Alfred North Whitehead once wryly remarked, ‘the history of Western thought has been little more than a series of footnotes’. It was only with Descartes' near contemporaries, Bacon and Vico, that we discover anybody bothering to keep tabs on the discipline of thinking. Descartes himself had a sharp antipathy to historiography; and the new movement of historical thought that sprang up under his ban was implicitly critical of his attempt to redescribe the world as if he were a mathematical Robinson Crusoe. Yet living every day as if it were the first gave rise to a common cognitive ethic which has transformed the world. It is countered by the notion that history itself is a kind of knowledge, which one closes the gulf between questions about facts and questions about ideas, which Descartes' philosophy had split wide open.
That is where the tightrope runs which Watson treads in his naturalistic history of man's progress from primitive times to contemporary civilisation. That he adopts a largely positivist approach — putting philosophy to work in the service of science — adds to the occasional unsteadiness of the spectacle. Only someone working outside the academy (Watson is a broadcaster and independent scholar) would dare to take on a book like this, charting a universal map of knowledge in 800 pages. The growth of knowledge itself means that very few professional people know much about the history of their disciplines; and the benefits of progress have largely appeased minds troubled by the loss of historical perspective.
Watson, on the other hand, is able to show ideas shifting their freight across cultures and eras. Descartes' refusal to assent to anything susceptible to doubt was not the first time ‘the interiority complex’ had appeared in history. The sense that humans are duplex, both a part of the natural world and distinguished from it by their use of language, goes back to the first great change in human behaviour, in what Karl Jaspers called ‘the Axial Age’, between 700 and 400 BCE: this period saw the separate emergence of the Upanishads and Buddha, Zarathustra, Homer and the entire gamut of Greek philosophies from sophism to cynicism. And the sense that history, unlike nature, had a direction. When Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote that he understood the Fall of Man better than anyone he was expressing the acute sense of discomfort a cognitive ethic induces in the person aware of being no longer fully rooted in history or community. The real traditionalist, as the Muslim thinker al-Ghazzali said, is unaware of being a traditionalist. He has yet to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.
Watson's book offers us four broad swathes, Lucy to Gilgamesh: the evolution of imagination; Isaiah to Zhu Xi: the romance of the soul; Aquinas to Jefferson: the birth of modern individualism; and Vico to Freud: parallel truths: the modern incoherence. His quincunx is a solitary chapter called The great hinge of history, which considers the remarkable quickening that occurred in Europe between the first millennium and the discovery of the New World. How did these ‘frigid, gross and apathetic’ people, as they were described by the Arab geographer Mas'udi, come to dominate the world? Watson traces Europe's ascendancy back to the 12th century, the age of Aquinas, when three highly influential ideas began to take modern form: the soul, the idea of Europe and the experiment. They coincided with the foundation, in 1065, of the Nizamiyah in Baghdad, a theological seminary, and the end of 200 years of intellectual enquiry and toleration in Islamic culture; a few decades later the first European university opened at Bologna. Joseph Needham wrote his book The Great Titration (1969) to puzzle out why Chinese civilisation had, after leading the world intellectually for several centuries, turned away from the development of capitalism and the sciences. Christendom could have gone the same way, too: one of the early Church Fathers wrote, ‘after Christ, we have no need of curiosity.’ But that fundamental dual concept of humankind was strengthened by the Christian doctrine of rendering unto Caesar… Hence the saeculum, which has no equivalent in Islam, and the uniquely Western idea of ‘dialogue’, a kind of market exchange in the ideological sphere.
Watson's fundamental sympathy is realist: knowledge is something out there, not wholly under the control of the explorer himself, if it is to be credited as a discovery. Accordingly, his synopsis suffers from realism's usual problem: blindness about the historical specificities that made it possible. (Descartes, for instance, saw no reason to doubt his Latin or French.) It therefore comes as no surprise that Watson should regret in his conclusion that ‘man's study of himself is his biggest intellectual failure in history’. The ‘science of human nature’ entertained by the 18th century, when it was still believed that the human species like all others was unalterable, has not been successful because its methods have been falsely propagated by analogy with the natural sciences. History itself is an activity of thought: ‘it is the discerning of the thought which is the inner side of the event’ (RG Collingwood). So having scaled the great discoveries of the 19th and early 20th century, we emerge with Watson on the intellectually impoverished plateau of the present. Perhaps Ideas, for all its funambulant high jinks, is itself symptomatic of this lull in inventiveness. It fails to explain how the development of ideas has brought about the kind of absolute anthropological awareness that helped Peter Watson to his overview.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2006.
