period of stagnation. The Renaissance, especially the Italian intellectuals of the
late 1400s and 1500s, viewed the preceding period as barbaric and pointed to
the universities of their own times as exemplars of its most decadent phase. By
the late 1300s, scholastic thinkers themselves felt that their own intellectual
culture was dead. In 1402 Jean Gerson, the last important philosopher at the
University of Paris for over 100 years, condemned the rationalist philosophy
of his predecessors (Gilson, 1944: 716). Echoing both nominalist and fideist
themes, he declared that intellectuals engage in arbitrary and absurd specula-
tion; they follow pagan philosophy instead of penitence, humility, and faith;
their overestimation of reason is the source of heresies, like those which
proceeded from the realist Bradwardine to Wyclif and Hus. Gerson’s contem-
porary Peter of Candia, who became pope in 1409, observed the factional wars
of his time as ones which no one expected to have any resolution (Gilson,
1944: 615). He considered various opinions, not citing them as authorities for
arguments in the manner of the scholastics, but with detachment like that of
an intellectual of our own time who falls back from participation into histo-
riography. This sounds not unlike the “end of philosophy” themes and the
disparagement of “foundationalism” of present-day intellectuals. We thus find
another reason to be interested in the social causes of stagnation: the suspicion
that we might be in a similar situation today.
Stagnation is not a simple condition; there are at least three kinds.Stagnation (A): Loss of cultural capital. Ideas may simply be forgotten as later
intellectuals are unable to do what earlier ones could. Aristotle’s doctrine was
lost for several centuries after his death; the achievements of Stoic logic were
forgotten by late antiquity, Megarian logic even sooner. In India after the
1600s, the acute metaphysics of the previous periods was swallowed up in a
simplified Advaita Vedanta. In China the sophisticated positions of the late
Warring States period, especially Mohist logic and its rivals, were largely
eclipsed by the religious Confucianism of the Han dynasty. In the late T’ang,
the metaphysical subtleties of the Consciousness-Only philosophy, as well as
most other schools, were lost among the Buddhists. And to leave philosophy
for an area in which technical criteria of puzzle-solving are especially clear, the
breakthrough into generalized and explicit algebraic methods achieved during
the Sung and Yuan dynasties (ca. 1050–1300) was lost in the Ming (1366–
1644), so that later mathematicians could no longer understand the earlier
texts (Qian, 1985: 69–70; Ho, 1985: 106; Needham, 1959: 38–145; Mikami,
1913: 110). The loss of ideas makes us think of a Dark Age, brought about
by destruction of material conditions of civilization, such as the decline of
Rome in the West. But these examples show that idea loss can also happen
during prosperous periods of high civilizations; indeed, the loss of Greek
culture had started in Rome long before the barbarian conquests.502 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths