The structure of simultaneous and opposing creativity leads us on to the
law of small numbers, and the struggle to divide the intellectual attention space,
which will occupy us throughout the following chapters. Not only Greek and
Chinese but also Indian, Japanese, Islamic, medieval Jewish and Christian, and
modern European philosophers appear in tightly focused networks of rivals.
Here we need take only the general point that the structural crunch is a pattern
of both network density and creativity driven by conflict. The famous names,
and the semi-famous ones as well who hold the stage less long, are those
persons situated at just those points where the networks heat up the emotional
energy to the highest pitch. Creativity is the friction of the attention space at
the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the
hardest. The most influential innovations occur where there is a maximum of
both vertical and horizontal density of the networks, where the chains of
creative conflict have built up over an unbroken chain of generations.
The structural conditions which make this possible are the subject of the
chapters that follow. Here I anticipate a fact which emerges from an overview
of all the networks of world philosophy. The total number of philosophers
who are significant in world history is approximately 135 to 500 persons: the
smaller number if we take only the major figures in each world civilization,
the intermediate one if we add the secondary figures.^25 The distribution of
philosophers for all networks is shown in Table 2.1.
Even if we add the minor figures in all the networks discussed in this book,
the total is still only 2,700, a tiny fraction of the population of the world over
these generations (an estimated 23 billion people who lived between 600 b.c.e.
and 1900 c.e.; calculated from McEvedy and Jones, 1978: 342–354). The
intellectual world of long-term fame is much more sharply stratified than the
economic-political structure of societies, even in those periods when ruling
aristocracies were less than 5 percent of the populace. Moreover, before 1600
c.e. or later, disciplines were relatively little differentiated; after that date most
of the scientific and scholarly fields branched off from the networks of phi-
losophers, and the networks include many of the most famous founders of
such fields. Hence this total ranging from 150 to fewer than 3,000 persons
accounted for virtually all of the intellectual accomplishment in the “theoreti-
cal” fields of knowledge until quite recently—excluding the fields of literature,
music, and the fine arts, which had their own networks.
For the reader of our own time, a question arises in looking over these
networks: Where are the women? I have assembled these networks by collect-
ing the names which have dominated attention among intellectuals over the
last 25 centuries, and there are very few women among them. In China there
were a few women among the religious Taoists; in the Islamic world some of
the Sufi mystics; in medieval Christendom, where philosophy was based in
76 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory