CHAPTER 8
£Tensions of Indigenous and Imported Ideas:
Islam, Judaism, Christendom
Philosophy in the medieval societies of the West built on earlier cultural capital.
In the long historical view, we are tempted to skip over that which is derivative
and to concentrate on that which is originating. Our deprecating image is an
unsophisticated society overwhelmed by imports from a previous civilization
and unable to get its own creativity off the ground. The image is doubly
misleading.
Importing ideas has its own intellectual rhythm: passive at first, it is capable
of turning into the normal creative process within a few generations. We see
this in the Buddhist philosophies of medieval China, where the receiving
environment already had a well-established tradition of literate culture—no
peripheral region here overwhelmed by sophisticated imports. In the regions
of Islam and European Christendom, the imports came into tribal societies
newly organized into state and church. What made their philosophies distinc-
tive in quality was not so much their initial dependence on imports—which in
the case of Christendom was repetitively dependent, repetitively importing
ideas from other civilizations, including Islam—as that the receiving context
was dominated by a politically powerful religion. Idea imports are tagged for
their relevance or opposition to religious orthodoxy.
Such a situation is ready-made for a Whiggish interpretation of intellectual
history, in which defenders of tradition battle against openness to new ideas.
But openness to new ideas initially takes the form of adulation of old ideas,
hardly creative in its own right. Our received tradition of a Greeks-to-Arabs-
to-Christians sequence imposes a second kind of blindness. We miss the op-
portunity to peer into the cauldron where indigenous intellectuals develop their
own disputes. Starting from religious-political disputes, the Muslims drove up
the level of abstraction and revealed the ontological and epistemological issues
which are distinctive to monotheism. Imports are rarely passive; indigenously
developed factions have their own motivations for seeking out imports and
reacting to what comes in. Our aim must be to look at the creative and un-
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