CHAPTER 3
£Partitioning Attention Space:
The Case of Ancient Greece
Creative persons are typically linked to one another in chains, and appear as
contemporary rivals. But is there not a sense in which networks of creativity
beg the question? Another factor is presupposed that generates some creativity
in the first place. The structural factors so far identified are part of the pattern
in which creativity occurs. Within chains over time, creativity often increases.
Secondary philosophers in an earlier generation give rise to major philosophers,
and the biggest stars usually have major philosophers upstream. The process
is not merely the transmission of cultural capital but its intensification.
Creativity involves new combinations of ideas arising from existing ones,
or new ideas structured by opposition to older ones. Conflicts are the lifeblood
of the intellectual world. This is rarely recognized by intellectuals in the heat
of action. Their focus is on truth, and they attack their predecessors and
compatriots for failing to arrive at it. The theme recurs across the millennia,
from Heraclitus to the Vienna Circle to the foundationalist controversies of
today. Kant’s version was to complain about the sorry state of metaphysics,
allegedly once queen of the sciences. This is a ritual incantation, a preparation
for battle, for there is no previous period in which metaphysics rules serenely
without disagreements.
The crucial feature of creativity is to identify an unsolved problem, and to
convince one’s peers of the importance of solving it. It is typical for intellectuals
to create problems at the very moment they solve them. In India the issue of
how to escape from the bonds of karma did not exist until the Buddhists
proposed a means of escape. Epicurus made fear of the gods an issue at the
same time that he propounded a solution to these fears. Kant discovered that
science was threatened when he announced a Copernican revolution to end
the threat.
A single philosopher in isolation rarely develops a new issue or a new way
of resolving it; this usually happens to two or more philosophers in the same
generation but rival lineages. The emergence of new problems is part of the
80