ritual. As societies grow larger, more stratified, organizationally and economi-
cally differentiated, the spiritual entities of religion become less localized,
expanding in their scope, and eventually leaving the concrete worldly level
entirely for a transcendent realm. Still further on this continuum, the “mod-
ernism” of Durkheim’s day regarded God as a symbol of the universal moral
order, and explained the anthropomorphic traits of earlier belief as reification,
mistaking a symbol for a concrete entity. The Durkheimian explanation cannot
be straightforwardly adopted because of two difficulties. The mechanical soli-
darity of small enclosed groups does not disappear in differentiated modern
societies; concrete symbols subsist along with various levels of abstraction
characterizing the many realms of public and professional life. And the net-
works of intellectuals are not identical with the society at large; the insulation
of an intellectual community from lay conceptions is the key to the existence
of distinctively intellectual topics. With proper amendment, the Durkheimian
explanation can be applied to conceptual trends within the intellectual com-
munity itself.
An intellectual network is a community of implicit awareness among its
members: opposing stances within the attention space structure one another
through their arguments; intergenerational transmission of concepts and topics
makes up the basic sense of what the community is about. As Durkheim held,
abstraction develops so as to maintain unification across diverseness. As more
members are included in the intellectual network, its collective consciousness
is strained to encompass their distinctiveness. G. H. Mead’s generalized other,
which plays the part of the audience for the internalized conversation of
individual thinkers, increases in scope. Ideas are emblems of group member-
ship; to keep up the sense of membership across the generations, under con-
ditions of repetitive creativity, the collective consciousness becomes more ab-
stract. The nomos-physis debate at the time of the Sophists was transcended
by moving to the stance of a higher abstraction, from which particular concepts
of morality (and of cosmology as well) could be seen as sub-realms within a
more encompassing realm of Form. Debates at one level of abstraction are
resolved by moving to a higher level of abstraction from which they can be
judged and reinterpreted. This never brings the process of debate itself to an
end; the intellectual world lives on debates, and each new conceptual level
provides terrain on which new oppositions can be staked out.
The Durkheimian model helps explains the increase in abstraction. Re-
flexivity can be explained as a further consequence of expanding the scope of
the generalized other. The mind of a “sophisticated” intellectual, heir to a
historically complex network of oppositions and changes in level, internalizes
an invisible community of diverse viewpoints, unified by looking on them from
a yet more encompassing standpoint. Reflexiveness grows more intense as there
790 •^ Meta-reflections