fucians absorbed in political reform), but they serve to confirm our impression
of intellectual routine in philosophy proper.
Perhaps the outermost fringe of the intellectual world that we can grasp
historically consists of persons who have no eminence at all, even in their own
time, not even through incidental connections with the more famous. They
show up in historical sources on ordinary life, and are sometimes brought to
light by a historian such as Elizabeth Rawson (1985: 49), who would like to
display the reading habits of ordinary people in the provinces, in this case
landowners in the Roman countryside ca. 50 b.c.e. There were apparently
many such people, from our adventitious sample, scattered here and there, not
only reading but expounding Epicurean and Stoic ideas. We know we are in
the intellectual provinces because the ideas are not only old but garbled. They
stand in contrast even to those of our “minor” philosophers, who were after
all persons of some importance in the intellectual networks of their own day.
It is good to know about this fringe, for the sake of realism, and good to know,
too, because it makes us understand ourselves. The horizontal spread of
intellectual structures does not change much over the centuries; we too live in
a mass of readers and would-be writers, reflecting old ideas without knowing
what we are doing, dreaming of intellectual glory. Creative epochs are rarer
than routine ones; and even at the best of times, the inner circles of the
intellectual world are surrounded by peripheries upon peripheries, where most
of us live.^10The Structural Mold of Intellectual Life:
Long-Term Chains in China and Greece
It has been conventional in intellectual history to write in terms of “schools.”
Texts as far back as the Warring States period of ancient China (before 220
b.c.e.) spoke, somewhat rhetorically, of “the hundred schools” (chia) (see, e.g.,
Chuang Tzu, chap. 33). Diogenes Laertius (ca. 200 c.e.) grouped his biogra-
phies into Ionian and Italian schools or “successions.” But at least four differ-
ent things can be meant by “school.”
The loosest meaning, that individuals have similar modes of thought, need
not imply anything about their social organization. About 100 b.c.e. the
official Han historian Ssu-ma T’an first grouped earlier Chinese philosophers
into six “schools,” among them the “Taoist school,” for texts resembling the
Tao Te Ching. But Tao was a term used in many different intellectual camps
over the previous centuries, and the emergence of a tightly organized Taoist
religion was to come in the centuries after. Such “schools of thought” are not
very important unless they are based on more tangible structures.
A more rigorous use of the concept of school is to demonstrate intellectual
influences among its members. This is the principal pursuit of intellectual64 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory