Stagnation (B): Dominance of the classics. An opposite form of stagnation
occurs when the ideas of the greatest thinkers overshadow those of their
successors. There is no new creativity, which necessarily would displace the
old. Such a period should not be called a low level of culture; one might say
that it stays at the peak: the ideas that are taught and circulated are the best
yet achieved. It is an irony of the intellectual world that we are not satisfied
with this. We admire creativity, but when great creativity gets its rewards, we
soon regard it as stagnation. There are two sides to creativity: the energy of
creation and the visions it produces. In the long run each undermines the other.
Since creativity is driven by chains of eminence, some earlier figures are bound
to be overshadowed by their successors. The greatest rewards tend to go to
those who are last in a dense and competitively balanced chain. This is why
Hegel could say, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling
of dusk.” Stagnation as well as creativity is at the heart of the network structure
of intellectual life.
Historical comparisons show that there is nothing automatic about this
enshrinement of the classics. In India, where the ideology strongly favored im-
mutable wisdom from the past, there were long periods of change in both Bud-
dhist and Hindu camps. Greek philosophy, too, tended to forget earlier doc-
trines rather than to repeat them; when it thought it was reiterating Pythagoras
or Plato, it often was grafting new doctrines onto them. In China the enshrine-
ment of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the ancient divination texts nevertheless went
along with periods when there was considerable innovation disguised as com-
mentaries on these texts. There is a tradeoff between Stagnation (A) and
Stagnation (B). More precisely, at least one way in which old cultural capital
is lost is through creative reinterpretation of it (although there are more
extreme forms of forgetting, and other versions of creativity). A civilization
may have episodes of either kind of stagnation. In China, after Chu Hsi had
formulated his grand synthesis around 1200, Ch’eng-Chu Neo-Confucianism
acquired a stranglehold on Chinese intellectual life for over 300 years; to put
the matter in a different light, Chinese intellectuals could rest serenely in
enjoying the great philosophy that already existed.
Late Christendom exemplifies Stagnation (B) more than Stagnation (A). The
achievements of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus towered over constructive
philosophy, just as Ockham did on the critical side. The late medieval scholas-
tics enshrined an extremely high level of creativity; yet its very solidity even-
tually provoked an attack from advocates of intellectual movement. The text-
books of the 1500s and 1600s, especially those of the Spanish and French
universities of the Counterreformation, came to represent sterility in the eyes
of Francis Bacon and Descartes. One could also say that the Renaissance,
which coincided with this stagnant period of medieval philosophy, provides
only a rival stagnation of the same type in its adulation of the ancient classics.
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^503