whatever eminent predecessors there were), to reduce their ranking would
enhance the average connectedness among the truly eminent. And it makes
sense that major philosophical creativity does not jump out of nowhere. For
China, the takeoff generation is apparently that of Mencius, Hui Shih, and
Chuang Tzu, just as in Greece it is the generation of Heraclitus and Par-
menides.^18
We might also question the significance of horizontal connections among
major philosophers. That Socrates or Cicero knew virtually everybody of his
day might be a trivial circumstance, simply the clubbing together of people
who were already eminent, much in the same way that today movie stars and
other celebrities are invited to meet one another, without any effect on how
they happened to become famous in the first place. This is a possibility we can
check. In many instances the contacts contributed something because they
preceded later creative productions; this is the case with Cicero, and with
Socrates’ many contacts in his youth. For the most part, I would judge, contacts
among the eminent are not simply the “clubbing together” phenomenon; the
horizontal connections are substantively important. But it is not strictly a
matter of “influence” in the conventional sense, where one person passes ideas
to the other. We see this most graphically where persons are in close contact
long before any of them becomes creative.^19 I suggest three processes, overlap-
ping but analytically distinct, that operate through personal contacts. One is
the passing of cultural capital, of ideas and the sense of what to do with them;
another is the transfer of emotional energy, both from the exemplars of
previous successes and from contemporaneous buildup in the cauldron of a
group; the third involves the structural sense of intellectual possibilities, espe-
cially rivalrous ones.
These processes operate in all types of personal contacts, the vertical chains
of masters and pupils as well as the horizontal contacts among contemporaries.
Consider the question: Why are vertical ties so prevalent, and why are they
correlated with the degree of eminence? One might answer that the chains pass
along intellectual capital: Aristotle is eminent because he received such a good
education from Plato, who in turn was well educated by his contacts with
Socrates, Archytas, Euclid of Megara, and others. This is surely not the whole
story, since the eminent figures of the younger generation make their reputation
not by repeating their received cultural capital but by elaborating it in new
directions. But granted the importance of these intellectual resources, why is
it that they are so often received through personal contacts rather than more
distantly from books?
For very early periods, of course, the latter was not possible. Strictly
speaking, philosophy as we are considering it, in every culture area, only begins
after the time when writing came into use. But it took some time before new
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