of “reason” against those of theological traditionalism. These were alliances
of convenience, ephemeral over the long run, and their ideologies held no
insight into the deeper oppositional pattern that drives philosophical creativity.
The disputes recurring in the West along the lines of faith versus reason
were by no means a battlefront of progressive and traditionalistic forces,
whatever their conscious self-identifications. The abstraction-reflexivity se-
quence is driven by conflict and by the discovery of deep troubles. Rationalism
by itself is often glib and in its own way traditionalistic, for instance, in the
attachment of medieval Averroists to their aging texts, or in the backward-
looking stance of the Renaissance Humanists. It was the reemergence of the
cultural capital of high scholasticism in the era of Descartes and Leibniz that
got philosophy moving again. It is the dispute between faith and reason that
is crucial for philosophical and especially epistemological advance, not the
victory of one side or the other.^18 The pattern occurs repeatedly: Kant’s creation
of a new level of critical epistemology happened in the heart of battle over
theological control of the organizational base of intellectual life. This was not
the extreme rejection of metaphysics by Enlightenment-style secular intellectu-
als, but a move within the contested terrain of faith and reason, a deep puzzle
played through again fruitfully on a higher level of abstraction. Again in very
recent times, Heidegger’s existentialism comes from tension between neo-or-
thodox theology and the “rigorous science” of phenomenology.
Contrary to the ideologies of both its proponents and opponents, conser-
vatism cannot help being dynamic. Conservatism is a recurrent mediating
moment in the epistemology-metaphysics sequence, whenever conditions allow
competition among intellectual factions. A community of curators of the
canonical texts always produces a faction of rationalists, pursuing the normal
scholastic tendency toward systematic classification and conceptual consis-
tency. Conservatism is not primordial. The emergence of a conservative con-
sciousness, explicitly aware of the particularity of tradition, is a response to
the prior existence of rationalists. This split is part of the normal dynamics of
the intellectual life.
The battle between faith and reason is an impetus to epistemology, since it
raises explicitly the question of the nature and source of knowledge. Often it
is the conservatives, the theological particularists, who push toward critical
epistemology, attacking the confidently taken-for-granted tools of the construc-
tive metaphysicians. In Islamic philosophy, it was from the theologically con-
servative camp that al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyah raised acute questions about
the bases of reason and Ibn Khaldun attacked the scholasticism of syllogistic
method. In India, it was the most conservative school, the Mimamsa, literalist
curators of the Vedic texts, who made the most explicit moves into epistemol-
ogy and set off the higher flights of Hindu philosophical abstraction.
The tensions which drive upward the epistemology-metaphysics sequence
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^831