that is too remote from the focus of attention where the intellectual action is
going on.
- Individuals beget ideas. Here too is a long-standing tradition, the cult
of the genius or intellectual-hero. Put in those terms the concept seems old-
fashioned. It persists, when stripped of the adulatory rhetoric that once sur-
rounded it, because it is rooted in the categories through which we think about
ourselves. Individuals are defined as the responsible agents in modern law and
politics; the Goffmanian rituals of everyday life worship the autonomy and
privacy of the individual self. The hero mode works just as well in the guise
of the antihero: Wittgenstein in his leather jacket upsetting the rigidities of
Cambridge high table represents the hero-leader as much as the marble bust
of Aristotle or Newton. Efforts to revise the canon leave intact the category of
individuals so honored; the very notion of the neglected thinker, the devalued
woman philosopher or the Romanticist image of the artist creating in oblivion
in a garrett, is that of the individual outside the ranks of the privileged
individuals of the canon.
We arrive at individuals only by abstracting from the surrounding context.
It seems natural for us to do this because the world seems to start with
ourselves. But the social world had to be bracketed for us to arrive at the lonely
individual consciousness; and indeed it is only within a particular tradition of
intellectual practices that we have learned how to construct this pure individual
starting point, like Descartes climbing into a peasant’s stove and resolving to
doubt everything that could be doubted. In the case of the ideas we are
concerned with here, the ideas which have mattered historically, it is possible
to demonstrate that the individuals who bring forward such ideas are located
in typical social patterns: intellectual groups, networks, and rivalries.
The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups.
Nothing abstract is meant here—nothing but groups of friends, discussion
partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social move-
ments. Take the upsurge of German Idealism, from Kant to Hegel and Schopen-
hauer. The first thing to strike us should be the dates: all the major works are
between 1781 (Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) and 1819 (Schopenhauer’s
World as Will and Representation)—38 years, the approximate length of a
generation. There is a social core: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who once lived
together in the same house. Fichte takes the early lead, inspiring the others on
a visit while they are young students at Tübingen in the 1790s, then turning
Jena into a center for the philosophical movement to which a stream of the
soon-to-be-eminent congregate; then on to Dresden in the heady years 1799–
1800 to live with the Romantic circle of the Schlegel brothers (where August
Schlegel’s wife, Caroline, has an affair with Schelling, followed later by a
scandalous divorce and remarriage). Fichte moves on to Berlin, allying with
Introduction^ •^3