attention space for more than a few to get first-rate recognition at one time,
and over the flow of generations still fewer who are remembered for the
long-term influences which make them secondary reputations, let alone major
thinkers. It is the fate of almost all intellectuals to be forgotten, most of us
sooner than later.
Instead of taking this realization as depressing, it is possible to view it in
a different light. All of us, from stars to bystanders, are part of the same field
of forces. The network that links us together shapes and distributes our ideas
and our energies. We are such stuff as Kant was made of, or Wittgenstein, or
Plato; if we are sociologists, Weber and Mead are quite literally flowing
through our minds, as Dilthey and Rickert, Wundt and James flowed through
theirs; if mathematicians, we cannot think without thinking as part of the
network, however remote, which is also the mind of Pythagoras or Newton.
They, and we, are constituted by the oppositions and tensions among different
parts of the network which make up the intellectual problems and hence the
topics we think about. It is the same with our contemporaries, friends and
rivals alike, and with those who will come after us in the future. The stars are
few because the focus of attention in such a network is a small part of the
whole. Those persons at the centers which become the focal points for us all
are not intrinsically different from ourselves. We are all constituted of the same
ingredients; we make one another what we are.
Networks across the Generations • 79