arising in disputes over substantive questions, turns away from answering those
questions and into its own arena of dispute, raising the complaint made by a
critic of neo-Kantianism about the “endless sharpening of the knife which is
never used to cut anything.” This is the distinctiveness of the philosophical
field: as the purest form of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence, philosophy is
constantly re-digging its foundations, moving not forwards but backwards,
deepening its questions by digging the ground out from under them.
Not every form of intellectual life does this. The philosophical mode is
based in the oldest and most central intellectual community, but many special-
ties have branched off from it, some of which remained more resolutely focused
on their substantive questions. Instead of constantly re-digging their founda-
tions, fields of empirical-discovery science and other arenas of scholarship—
such as the study of history—have accumulated facts and principles by dog-
gedly sticking to a fixed level of abstraction. Analytically, the several modes of
intellectual life may overlap; and there are special conditions, to be considered
in their due place, when a field can evade the abstraction-reflexivity sequence,
as well as when it is subject to it.
The second major theme of philosophical networks, then, is goal displace-
ment. Here is one of the sources of conflict in intellectual life. There is
disgruntlement, frustration about being unable to solve questions, or rather
about seeing their meaning fade away before one’s eyes. It is part of a perennial
conflict among traditionalists and progressives, conservatives and radicals—
not necessarily in the lay senses of these terms as they might be applied to
religion or politics, but among intellectuals taking their stand on a higher or
lower level of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. Sniping takes place across
the levels: the disparagement of higher levels as “logic-chopping” or useless
subtleties, “angels dancing on the head of a pin”; and name-calling in the
opposite direction, a lineage in which postmodernist charges of “foundation-
alism” take their place. Each side accuses the other of hindering insight; the
process of intellectual history is merciless toward both. Their conflict is one
more manifestation of the very general process of conflict which drives intel-
lectual change. Neither conservatism nor radicalism at any one level is a guide
to what will emerge as their positions are transformed at later levels of the
abstraction-reflexivity sequence. Goal displacement means that, from the point
of view of the participants, subsequent intellectual history is always a matter
of rude surprises.
What causes the abstraction-reflexivity sequence? Durkheim theorized that
a trend toward abstractness and universalism takes place in the collective
consciousness as the social division of labor increases. As evidence he cites
trends in religion and law. In isolated tribal societies, religious symbols are
concrete and specific; rules are reified and their violations expiated by punitive
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^789