CHAPTER 2
£Networks across the Generations
High levels of intellectual creativity are rare. Why this is so is the result of
structural conditions, not individual ones. A famous rhetoric has it that phi-
losophies are lengthened shadows of great personalities. But psychologists’
efforts to show conditions affecting creative personalities are underdetermined.
Particular configurations, such as birth order among siblings, remoteness from
one’s father, a longing for love, bodily clumsiness (suggested by Sulloway, 1996;
Scharfstein, 1980), surely occur much more frequently than major creative
thinkers. Nor is it sufficient to have been born in an era of peace and support
for intellectual activity, or to have experienced other low-level conditions for
self-actualization (documented by Simonton, 1976; Kuo, 1986, 1988; Maslow,
1970). The rarity of creativeness also shows the limits of any externalist
explanation by general conditions of the surrounding society; zeitgeist, political
or material circumstances affect everyone, and such explanations cannot tell
us why their creative agents are so few.
The Rarity of Major Creativity
Let us see how often notable philosophers appeared in China and in Greco-
Roman antiquity. For the moment, let us take eminence as a matter of how
much attention particular thinkers have received from later historians of phi-
losophy. Figures 2.1 and 2.2 display segments of the networks which connect
such philosophers with one another. (A modified version of Figure 2.1 appears
in Chapter 4 as Figure 4.2, and a fuller version of Figure 2.2 appears as Figure
3.4 in Chapter 3.) The full sequence of networks for China from 535 b.c.e.
to 1565 c.e. is shown in Figures 4.1 through 4.4 and 6.1 through 6.5; the
sequence of Greek networks from 600 b.c.e. to 600 c.e. is in Figures 3.1, 3.2,
and 3.4 through 3.8. Such networks will be the backbone of this book,
interspersed throughout the following chapters. On these charts, the names of
major philosophers are given in capitals (e.g. mencius, chuang tzu, socrates,
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