Once the shock in the external base subsides and the internal rearrangement
of factions in the attention space runs its course (a process which takes several
generations), intellectual life settles into a routine. Continuous movement in
the abstraction-reflexivity sequence depends on repeated shocks to the external
base. The dynamism of intellectual life which characterizes Europe rather
continuously in the 30 generations from 1000 c.e. onward, is due indirectly
to the amount of institutional change in the surrounding society, resulting in
a large number of shifts in the bases which have supported intellectuals.
Textual Scholasticism and Arrested Sequences
In periods when there are no shocks rearranging the material base, the internal
division of the attention space remains static. What then are the intellectuals
doing to fill up their time and the attention of their colleagues and pupils? The
problem strikes us most forcefully in the case of “scholastic” periods, when
intellectuals are primarily curators of old texts. Nevertheless, even a back-
wards-looking textual mode is not necessarily stagnant. We find here another
analytically separable strand: a textual scholastic sequence which may unfold
either in isolation—totally dominating the intellectual space—or in combina-
tion with the abstraction-reflexivity sequence.
There is a temptation to identify this textual-scholastic mode with Asian
modes of thought; we see it prominently in Confucianism, in both Indian and
Chinese Buddhism, and within the Hindu darshanas. Yet it is not a matter of
regional mentality; there is similar textual-scholasticism in Hellenistic and
Roman antiquity, among the Arabic Aristoteleans, and in medieval Christen-
dom. A textual-scholastic mode becomes prominent again in the university
scholarship of the 1800s and 1900s, within both philosophy and other disci-
plines. The study and commentary on classic texts of “dead Germans” is a
large part of contemporary sociological theory; and in the contemporary
academic world more generally there is polemic over the attention paid to the
canon of “white European males”—a polemic whose principal results are to
enlarge the canon, not to move away from the textual commentary mode.
It is not the activity of preserving texts and writing commentaries per se
that makes a philosopher unoriginal. The textual commentary is employable
in the mode of scholastic conservatism but adaptable as a means of publishing
new ideas. The copyist takes the opportunity to add clarifying commentaries,
which become all the more acceptable as the growing antiquity of a text brings
a demand for explaining archaic language or cryptic modes of expression
grown incomprehensible with time. We are inclined to regard a string of
super-commentaries as the essence of scholasticism, but they can also be cases
of cumulative development to progressive levels of sophistication. The advan-
tage from the point of view of the writer is that if one attaches one’s commen-
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^793