long it will last. The crucial conditions for creativity are those which sustain
multiple bases of intellectual conflict across a primary focus of attention.
Creativity depends on a center, crisscrossed by material resources that can
uphold opposing factions; a small number of centers linked by intermobility
of their participants can provide this necessary intermeshing of focus and
conflict.
As long as this structural shape continues to exist, external conditions may
intervene by destroying, prohibiting, or promoting a particular faction. This
in itself does not damage the creativity of the whole network, as it may
rearrange intellectual space and set the occasion for new internal alignments.
Upheavals in the external bases of factions, destructive as they may be to the
people within them, are not a bad thing for intellectual life as a whole, provided
that the overall structure still contains multiple factions and a common focus
of attention. Surrounding social conflict, organization-building, and destruc-
tion—the rise and fall of schools and states, of religious factions and orders
of monks, of the papacy or the caliphate—will in fact promote creativity by
causing the realignment of factions. Creativity comes to an end when external
conditions either end the bases for multiple factions or eliminate the common
center.
Let us briefly survey the overall structure of the intellectual world in the
creative and non-creative periods of philosophy.
Greece. In the pre-Socratic period, creativity was centered at first in a network
of cities on the Ionian coast, with Miletos at the core. Then the network
migrated to a number of colonies in southern Italy and Sicily, where the main
institutional continuity was provided by the Pythagorean brotherhood; another
branch dispersed around the Aegean, to Abdera in the north as well as the
medical schools at Cos and Cnidus in the southeast. It is possible that creativity
would have dissipated, but geopolitical events now provided a center. The
Persian conquest of Ionia and the Greek coalition and counterattack fostered
migration, as did the democratic revolutions and the upsurge of tyrants;
refugees and ambassadors formed the milieu for a cosmopolitan intellectual
network which came to center on the imperialist power at Athens. The me-
tropolis was just that: a center of intellectual attraction, filled almost entirely
with foreigners. Socrates and Plato were virtually the only Athenians among
the important intellectuals of their city for hundreds of years; Aristotle, Dio-
genes, Epicurus, Zeno, and others came from the remote provinces. The
situation is similar to that of medieval Paris during its great generations of the
1200s, when there was scarcely a Frenchman among the leading masters.
For a couple of generations, Athens was flanked by peripheral nodes at
Megara, Elis, Cyrene, Cyzicus, and elsewhere. These were specialized homes
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^505