chief foil for attacks launching the self-consciously “modern” period of West-
ern philosophy.
Socrates, by contrast, was heroized above all during the period when Cynics
and Skeptics were popular, 400–300 b.c.e., that is to say, in the generations
immediately following his death. He was claimed by many schools. The Cynics
traced their lineage back to Socrates’ associate Antisthenes, whom they re-
garded as the master of Diogenes of Sinope. The Megarian school, founded by
Socrates’ protégé Euclid^6 (or Euclides), carried on the tradition of questioning
and debate, and pioneered methods of logic. From Socrates flowed the short-
lived schools of Elis (founded by his pupil Phaedo) and of Cyrene (founded by
Antisthenes); these too pursued Socrates’ omni-questioning technique, now
applied to questions of the value of life itself. To a considerable extent Plato
propagandized his own doctrines, which derived more from Pythagorean and
other sources than from Socrates, by attaching them to a famous figure, and
thereby riding into the center of attention on the popularity of rival schools
which at the time outshone his own. When Plato, in turn, rose to dominance
(not as dialectics but as metaphysics, increasingly mixed with occultism) after
100 c.e., Socrates’ fame dissipated; nor did it return among the Islamic or
medieval Christian philosophers. For us moderns, Socrates’ fame is largely an
appendage of our interest in Plato.
One can tell similar stories of East Asia. Confucius, whose fame and
doctrinal tradition built up over many generations, was not always treated as
the symbolic property of the Confucian school. He appears as a rather “Taoist”
sage in the Chuang Tzu stories (ca. 300 b.c.e.). And there are the up-and-down
reputations of the “greats,” such as Mencius (fl. ca. 300 b.c.e.), who was not
elevated to the official Confucian canon until 40 generations later by the
Neo-Confucians around 1050–1200 c.e. (Graham, 1958: xiv, 158).^7
The dose of realism provided by the long-term view is a salutary (if
unwelcome) antidote to our personal egotism, and to that projected egotism
which we attach to our hero-ideals, the rare “genius” of generations past whom
we pattern ourselves upon in our inner imagination. Intellectuals make their
breakthroughs, changing the course of the flow of ideas, because of what they
do with the cultural capital and emotional energy flowing down to them from
their own pasts, restructured by the network of tensions among their contem-
poraries. The merit of their contributions, its “intrinsic worth” as well as
“social impact,” is a matter of how the structure develops after their own
deaths. We intellectuals are truly eddies in the river of time—perhaps more so
than other humans, because it is our business to attend to this connectedness
across the generations.
Creativity, then, is for the long haul. Let us be clear what this means. The
minimal unit of intellectual change is a generation, approximately 33 years. It
60 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory