abstract senses of li was now critiqued, the several realms explicitly separated
and opened for independent investigation.
Reflexivity, the self-consciousness of intellectual operations, comes increas-
ingly to the fore as the intergenerational sequence lengthens. Levels of intellec-
tual self-consciousness are potentially endless. Changes in the content of what
is reflected on change the form of possible reflexivity. There is some incipient
reflexivity in the recognition by the Greek Sophists that concepts are names
given by human thought. More refined reflexivity occurs in Kant’s transcen-
dental critique of the categories of the understanding. Building rapidly on this
step, Fichte and Hegel’s dialectic made the process of increasing reflexivity into
a self-conscious topic. Even that recognition does not bring the sequence to an
end. There have been post-Hegelian philosophies aplenty; the postmodernism
of the 1980s was only one more signpost along this route. Such hyper-reflexiv-
ity is not merely the decadence of a particular branch of philosophy. Modern
mathematics too exemplifies the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. The logical
formalist philosophy following from Frege’s revolution in logic similarly feeds
on itself, as we see from the subsequent history of Russell’s theory of types.
The abstraction-reflexivity sequence has occurred in every part of the
philosophical world. It is produced by a basic dynamic of intellectual commu-
nities, on which are superimposed several other processes. The abstraction-
reflexivity sequence does not run off of its own accord as a self-propelling
Hegelian dialectic. In some world intellectual networks, the abstraction-re-
flexivity sequence extended further than in others; there have been periods
when the sequence is arrested at a constant level of abstraction, and times when
it retrogresses to lower levels of concreteness and reification. There have been
side-branches, among them naturalism and empirical science, which at a certain
point cut against the grain of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. Let us
observe a large caveat. The abstraction-reflexivity sequence is not to be iden-
tified with a single dimension of intellectual “progress,” taking the form of the
emergence of empirical-discovery science. My analysis is neutral regarding the
value of the upper levels of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. It is merely a
predominant feature of the natural history of intellectual communities.
A second general point may be made about long-run intellectual tendencies.
The abstraction/reflexivity sequence can grow from any materials on which
intellectuals focus attention. Philosophy has diverse starting points: issues of
ritual propriety in ancient China, cosmological myths in India and Greece,
theological disputes in early Islam. Philosophical abstraction shifts attention
from the original questions and transforms them into other matters. Higher or
“pure” philosophy emerges as a focus on abstraction and reflexivity in their
own right. Techniques arising as tools ancillary to disputes become ends in
themselves. Sub-topics become specialized branches of attention. Epistemology,
788 •^ Meta-reflections