the grand syntheses of Aristotle, Aquinas, Dharmakirti—with the syncretism
which occurs when there is external pressure to put together disparate positions
because of a radical collapse of their external base. The defensive syncretism
in which intellectuals ally themselves predominantly with lay audiences has a
strongly retrogressive effect on abstraction. Buddhism tantrism in India, Taoist
popular religion, Confucianism as a state cult: all of these make an alliance
which eliminates the internal attention space of intellectuals and thereby un-
dercuts their professional drive toward acuteness of abstraction. It is not the
contents of the doctrine per se that is the key to the loss of this acuteness. The
shift to a cosmology of energy forces in tantrism is part of a de-differentiating,
lay-oriented movement in the death period of Indian Buddhism, but the same
doctrines in the hands of the growing movement of Hindu thinkers (above all
the Kashmir Shaivites) become platforms for raising the level of metaphysical
abstraction and logical refinement.
In general, the externally driven pressures for alliance tend toward syncre-
tism rather than synthesis. The “four Vedas” became a standard package in
the period when the ancient sacrificial cult was in decay, an arbitrary compi-
lation. Indeed, they survived textually for intellectuals above all because they
served as a publication vehicle for the commentaries attached to them. The
original alliance had no overall consistency, all the more so when Upanishadic
interpretations were attached. It was a “lumpy alliance,” sheer masses of
undigested material, held together by the external politics of the situation. Such
“lumpy alliances” are the result of conditions which reduce the internal auton-
omy of the intellectual attention space. External conditions promoting such
loss of autonomy determine most of the historical episodes of retrogression in
the abstraction-reflexivity sequence.Three Pathways: Cosmological,
Epistemological-Metaphysical, Mathematical
We come now to the ways the abstraction-reflexivity sequence has worked out
in historical cases. Three sub-sequences are visible. First, there is a shift from
mythological to philosophical cosmologies; an example is the takeoff into
abstract argument in India and Greece. Second, there is an interplay between
epistemological and metaphysical arguments pushing toward higher levels of
abstraction and reflexivity. This sequence followed and built on the mythologi-
cal-cosmological sequence in India and Greece; Islamic, Christian, and Euro-
pean philosophies generally built further upon this sequence. In ancient China,
the argumentative sequence began with very different materials than in India
and Greece, then proceeded intermittently along much the same path; here the
mythological-cosmological sequence was not initial, but cut into the Chinese
epistemological sequence later on, around the seventh or eighth generation,800 •^ Meta-reflections