density of interactions among intellectuals drives up their energy—all the more
so when famous names come together, rival sacred objects embodied in actual
persons, bathing their audience in the clash of their auras.
These energies are channeled in particular directions. Intellectual fields
allow only certain possibilities to flourish at a given time. To know about these
possibilities, to have a sense of what is opening up, it is crucial to be in the
thick of things, and especially to be in contact with one’s rivals. Thus, major
intellectuals meeting one another do not necessarily communicate any intellec-
tual capital; they may not learn anything at all substantive from one another.
The fact that the rival Neo-Confucians Chu Hsi and Lu Chiu-yüan met and
debated perhaps added nothing to each other’s repertoire of ideas. But the very
situation that brought them together must have involved a long-standing
consciousness of a split in the intellectual field, and this in itself encouraged
both Chu and Lu to develop such positions, expanding them into rival super-
systems.
The Structural Crunch
At the level of the flow of ideas and emotions, there is a disparity between
causes and effects. If contact with eminent forebears and contemporaries is
important to creativity, as is living in a time when there are structural rivalries,
there are nevertheless many more individuals who are exposed to these condi-
tions than there are newborn intellectual stars. Confucius was reputed to have
1,000 pupils, Theophrastus (perhaps more accurately and less rhetorically) is
credited with 2,000 (DSB, 1981: 13:328). Of these my charts list 11 of
Confucius’ pupils (1 borderline minor, the rest at minor rank or below), and
4 of Theophrastus’ (1 major, 1 secondary). We know the names of some of
Cicero’s compatriots who studied with the same array of philosophers at
Athens and Rhodes (Rawson, 1985: 6–13), but only Cicero reaped the intel-
lectual and emotional resources to make himself famous in philosophy. We can
be sure that for every major philosopher capable of transmitting significant
cultural capital and emotional energy, there were many more pupils who had
the opportunity to reinvest these resources than actually did so.
Does this mean that our sociological model is inevitably incomplete and
needs supplementing with psychological, individual, and other idiosyncratic
circumstances? It would seem prudent to admit that it does. But this sort of
distinction would rest on a misunderstanding. Individuals do not stand apart
from society, as if they are what they are without ever having interacted with
anyone else. We could go into further detail about just what social experiences,
what chains of interaction rituals of the sort described in Chapter 1, have
generated their individuality.^23 The particularity of the individual is the par-
ticularity of the social path.
74 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory