Stagnation (C): Technical refinement. A third type of stagnation may indeed
be not stagnation at all but only the appearance of such. Intellectual life does
not stop in its tracks, but its very progress breeds not respect but alienation.
A common claim about late medieval philosophy has been that the field had
gotten too technical, overrefined, spinning angels dancing in conceptual air.
Duns Scotus was aptly called “Doctor Subtilis,” the Subtle Doctor. The Ren-
aissance Humanists were particularly put out by Duns’s style, both his neolo-
gisms in metaphysics (certainly not known in the days of Cicero!) and the long
tortuous sentences with clause after clause of careful qualification. This is more
than emblematic of the time. The writing of a centrally located philosopher is
a precipitate of the energies and concepts built up by the intellectual commu-
nity. Duns’s abstractions and distinctions, his complicated and rarefied world-
view, and his patient tenacious threads of argument are the embodiment of the
conflicting factions of philosophers who had been realigning for three intense
generations, and driving up the level of abstraction and subtlety at every step.
The Scotists did not stop in their tracks after the death of the master; they
continued to defend and elaborate, now attempting alliances with nominalists,
sometimes making anti-nominalist coalition by playing down their differences
with the Thomists. But the excitement of new synthesis did not appear. The
nominalists, loosely designated, were often very creative, by the standards of
modern analytical philosophy.^17 But they were now specialized in logic or other
technical subjects. Their work provided no strong focus for the intellectual
field, no vortices of emotional energy. The technical innovations did not
propagate very widely; they were no challenge to the image of the overpower-
ing masters, no visible alternative to Stagnation (B). And in time, because such
creativity does not attract followers, it cannot reproduce itself; it dries up, and
the situation begins indeed to approach Stagnation (A).^18 By the time of the
Renaissance, beginning in the 1400s in circles far outside the university world
which had sustained medieval intellectual life, there was genuine loss of ideas,
ignorance of what medieval philosophy was about. Duns Scotus, the Subtle
Doctor, was on his way to being caricatured as the “Dunce,” the stupid pupil
forced to sit in the corner wearing a “dunce cap.”
Reversal of the External Conditions
How does stagnation happen? In principle, the conditions should be the
obverse of those for creativity. If intellectuals are allowed to form a community,
they automatically tend to develop issues and divide the attention space among
factions. Creativity is the energy that builds up as this process continues over
several generations of personal contacts within the network. External condi-
tions determine when such a network structure comes into existence and how504 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths