But the basic deep trouble remained, to be re-exploited whenever the motiva-
tion arose to construct a new metaphysical system. The existentialists, for all
their hostility to Idealism, reworked the dialectics of Fichte and Hegel in a
version which denies the priority of substance and gives primacy to negation
as the paramount human reality. The anti-essentialism of the postmodernist
generation continues to work that terrain in another fashion. No doubt future
philosophies will be created upon this long-standing deep trouble.
Mathematical Networks and the Distinctiveness of European Philosophy
Let us summarize where we are so far. If external conditions keep up creativity
in intellectual networks for many generations, the content is driven beyond
cosmological descriptions of the world to reflexive questions about the nature
of knowledge itself. Epistemology entwines with metaphysics proper, opening
for exploration the realm of abstract properties of what there is. This episte-
mology-metaphysics sequence is propelled by several different social processes,
of which I single out the following.
First, the sheer density and continuity of debate raises the issue of what
knowledge is, initially on the level of bald assertion, then description. Formu-
lating rules of debate leads to the rules of logic as the mechanics of truth. As
usual, there is danger that a side-sequence will set in, making classificatory
scholasticism an end in itself. But if conditions exist to keep the abstraction-
reflexivity sequence going even across this classificatory tendency, logic will
entwine with ontology and become part of the abstract framework of what
exists in general.
At times the density of debating factions floods the attention space with
contending positions; this excess of horizontal density is fateful for the abstrac-
tion-reflexivity sequence too, because it generates epistemological skepticism.
This faction takes the meta-stance of “a plague on all houses,” denying on
reflexive grounds the very possibility of knowledge. This in turn provides a
foil for a cogito move, providing new transcendental grounding for epistemo-
logical-metaphysical systems. This “horizontal” crowding of the network’s
collective conscience has a counterpart in the “vertical” crowding which takes
place if continuing factional wars are kept up across the generations. Such
long-term debates drive up the abstraction-reflexivity sequence by raising the
level of reflexivity concerning the categories of argument: names, universals,
particulars, radical contingency.
Debate is most fruitful when it discovers deep troubles. An especially
intense journey to high-level abstraction leads through monotheism, because
this is a primary source of deep troubles. From relatively superficial or par-
ticularistic deep troubles about the Trinity or free will, the network reaches
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^845