Conclusions to Part I:
The Ingredients of Intellectual Life
For a long time the West has regarded Asia as exotic. Even today in an ethos
of tolerant multiculturalism, the stress is on non-Western cultures as unique
sensibilities running on distinctive inner logics. What we see in examining the
dynamics of Asian intellectual networks is quite the contrary.
We did not have to wait for the chapters on modern Western philosophy
to meet the basic structures of intellectual life. The most important principles
come out in full clarity in Asian histories, once we remove the lenses tinted
with static primordiality that have kept most of us, Westerners and Asians
alike, from seeing just how full of conflict and change these histories have been.
Asian history shows us the basic ingredients of all of world history. A summary
of the sociology of Asian intellectual life is a convenient summary of the central
theory of this book.
First: Intellectual creativity is concentrated in chains of personal contacts,
passing emotional energy and cultural capital from generation to generation.
This structure underwrites all manner of contents: we see it in the chains of
popular evangelists in Pure Land Buddhism, as among the masters of Zen,
among Indian logicians and Japanese Neo-Confucians.
Second: Creativity moves by oppositions. Comparably important philoso-
phers appear contemporaneously, their rivalry underpinning one another’s
fame. Chains of oppositions create the inner content of philosophies; new ideas
unfold by negating the major points of rival positions on a shared topic of
argument and a common level of abstraction. The dance of counterpoint is
played over again as levels of abstraction shift, whether toward greater reflexiv-
ity or toward greater concreteness and reification. Not zeitgeist but structured
rivalries constitute the successive moments of intellectual history.
Third: The emotional energy of creativity is concentrated at the center of
networks, in circles of persons encountering one another face to face. The hot
379