“normal science” of philosophy, played at a level of reified abstractions,
providing a fund of small-scale puzzles rather than the deep troubles around
which philosophy makes its more spectacular moves.
The same may be said in a more general sense about textual scholasticism.
The causes of scholasticism are to be found in the normal conditions of any
community of teachers, curators of past knowledge to be passed along to
subsequent generations. Scholasticism is the baseline of intellectual life; it is
one analytically distinct process along with whatever other sequences, abstrac-
tion-generating or otherwise, happen to take place. In the absence of external
shocks to the material base and of internal rearrangements under the law of
small numbers, scholarship settles down to a routinized activity. The quanti-
tative extension of classifications and commentaries is the bureaucratization of
intellectual life.
Reversals and Loss of Abstraction
What then of periods in which there is an actual slippage, a retrogression in
the abstraction-reflexivity sequence? We find several instances of this pattern.
In China, the abstraction reached by the Mohists and the School of Names is
reversed into the concrete reifications of Han Confucianism; the revival of
abstract philosophy in the “Dark Learning” period lasts only a few generations
before Confucianism (and all the more so Taoist religion) returns to a concrete
level for many centuries, until the abstract sequence is resumed again with the
Sung Neo-Confucians. In late Greco-Roman Neoplatonism, there is a tendency
to lose abstraction as concrete deities are inserted into the austere metaphysics
of Plotinus’ emanations. In late Indian Buddhism, tantrism marks a collapse
in abstraction, a movement toward magical forces and their concrete manifes-
tations. Again in later Hindu philosophy, the acuteness of earlier argument
collapses after 1600 in the combination of bhakti theist devotionalism with
the Advaita “leap-philosophy” beyond conceptual distinctions. Advaita be-
comes a united front against the political dominance of Muslim invaders, and
later the emblem of Indian nationalism in the face of European colonialists. In
each case the material base for intellectual production gets squeezed; it is the
defensive move in time of weakness that produces the loss of abstraction and
reflexivity.
We need to treat this process with some care. Not every weakening of the
external base of an intellectual position results in retrogression of the abstrac-
tion-reflexivity sequence; after all, there are also the great synthetic positions
in times of weakness, which push up the level of abstraction in the grand
combination. Plotinus is the best example. We should avoid confusing the kind
of synthesis which occurs in response to overcrowding in the attention space—
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^799