easy to mistake residues of old arguments for the central issues that will
generate the forward thrust of the attention space. Provincials, latecomers, and
autodidacts flail in the wake of past disputes but do not catch up with the
bright center of energy.
The forward movement in time, if continued at a high level of creative
energy, traverses the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. At each point in creative
time, the current level of abstraction is divided by the three to six factions
allowed by the law of small numbers. Negation at the forefront occurs along
the dimensions stressed most strongly in the arguments of the leading school—
the most brightly glowing particle—as opposing particles formulate negations
to it which preserve or raise the level of abstraction. Thus occurs the multipli-
cation of positions, providing the tensions on which moves can be made to
higher levels of abstraction.
Consider now the external conditions driving creativity. The abstraction-
reflexivity sequence does not run off automatically; there are periods when
intellectual life stagnates at a fixed level of abstraction, or even retrogresses to
a lower level. The famous periods of creativity are those when the abstraction-
reflexivity sequence is moving forward most rapidly. These flareups in the time
tunnel are set off against the periods of mild, steady light when nothing much
seems to be happening, and against the twilights when sophistication is lost.
The two-step model of causality applies: when external conditions disrupt the
intellectual attention space, internal realignment takes place; and this in turn
unleashes the creativity for formulating new positions, new tensions among
the privileged arguers at the core of the attention space. When the material
base for one cluster of intellectual factions is destroyed, their space in the field
is opened up to be occupied by a new set of positions. When a large particle
disappears from the field of oppositions, new particles veer and fragment to
take its place, lighting up the tunnel in an episode of famous creativity. In India,
when the religious base for Buddhism was destroyed, the victorious Hindus
led by Shankara subdivided to take over the range of philosophical positions
once held by their rivals. Conversely, the side experiencing the collapse of its
external base huddles together into a defense alliance, sometimes imploding in
a brilliant moment, as in the grand coalition of pagan philosophies led by
Plotinus against the rise of Christianity. When a new material base for intel-
lectuals springs up, new factions appear simultaneously in a rush to fill this
new arena of attention with the three to six opposing positions available under
the law of small numbers. We have sees this repeatedly: following the invention
of higher education in the generation of Plato and his rivals; with the reform
of the Chinese examination system in the Sung dynasty, undergirding the
outburst of Neo-Confucianism; in the rise of the medieval Christian university;
yet again with the German university revolution, which set off a new terrain
for research specializations.
792 •^ Meta-reflections