The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

The external reference of ideas may also exist; I do not wish to deny
whatever reality contents intellectual ideas may have, in addition to their social
membership sense. (How could I, without undercutting the truth of my own
ideas?) Human thought is double-sided. A thinker simultaneously finds the best
path available through all these constraints and attractions. Ideas leap to one’s
mind and arrange themselves into arguments which represent the most emo-
tionally energizing membership coalition available in one’s network; in this
very process one works out the best statement of empirical truth, of logical
argument, of conceptual adequacy one can. The social construction of ideas is
much deeper than a simple dichotomy between logic and evidence on one side
and social constraints on the other. We shall see that logic is deeply social, an
implicit reflection on the history of the intellectual operations themselves.
In the bulk of this book, as we examine the history of intellectual networks,
we generally find that intimate materials on the micro-level of the sociology of
thinking are not available; our telescope simply does not resolve to a fine
enough focus. What we glimpse, at best, are the long-term contours of inter-
actional chains and their products, the ideas which are famous because they
have been carried along in the ongoing terms of argument. The weak resolution
of the telescope makes it easy to slip back into reifying personalities, the per-
sonal names treated as noun substances who are the normal topics of intellec-
tual historiography. But even where we necessarily peer at the past through a
darkened lens, let us keep reminding ourselves to think analytically about the
reality that once was these human lives: the flow of micro-situations that is the
topic of our story.
There is a social causation of creativity, even at its intimate core—the con-
tents of the new ideas that flash into the minds of intellectuals in their creative
moments. The flux of interaction ritual chains determines not merely who will
be creative and when, but what their creations will be.


Coalitions in the Mind • 53
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