and thereafter tended to swamp it. Finally, there is a version of the abstrac-
tion-reflexivity sequence which takes place on the specialized terrain of mathe-
matics, playing back into philosophy and driving its abstraction and reflexivity
to new grounds. This sequence is found mainly in Europe, beginning in the
1600s and playing a dominant role in the generations around 1900. Our
“modern” or “Western” philosophy has gone especially far in the abstraction-
reflexivity sequence because it has built on all three sequences.
Why did the various world regions start their sequences with argument
around their distinctive questions? Initial contents of discussion were given by
external conditions. Chinese philosophy arose in the context of political dis-
cussions over the legitimating rituals of the state cult. In Greece the background
was the decentralization of cults and temples, which reduced the significance
of religious legitimation, together with the secularization of political and legal
argument in the emerging city-states. In India it was the decline of the Vedic
priestly powers and the competition of rival religious movements. In Islam it
was a tribal coalition administering its conquests and legitimating succes-
sion disputes by forming schools of religious law. Once the argumentative
community is constituted, causal dynamics within each sequence work much
the same way: oppositions splitting the network within each generation, to-
gether with the periodic overcoming of those oppositions on a new level of ab-
straction.
The Cosmological Sequence
from religious mythology to world ingredient cosmologies
The cosmological sequence proceeds along a series of steps. First there are
mythologies, tales recounted by popular storytellers and reworked by semi-
professional reciters and poets.^4 Next the components of the world are clas-
sified as provinces of specialized gods, and stories are told explaining their
origins. There follows a period of rationalizing these fragmentary world ex-
planations by systematizing into genealogies or pantheons. This shades over
into more abstract concepts in answer to the explicit question, what is the
world composed of: at first mixed lists of gods, elements, physical and psycho-
logical processes, followed by discussions of which ingredient or ingredients
are dominant. Eventually discussion moves to the level of metaphysical and
epistemological abstractions; questions are raised about conceptual paradoxes
and logical consistency, which are resolved by making the step to an explicitly
abstract level of philosophy.
In India, the mythological period begins in pre-Vedic times, followed by a
certain amount of systematizing of the Vedic pantheon under the organization
of the Vedic priests. In the Upanishadic period argument centers on the ele-
ments or ingredients which make up the world; the transcendent monism iden-
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^801