networks exist in modern European philosophy, right up through the twentieth
century (see Figures 10.1 through 14.1). We still see chains running from
Brentano to Gadamer, Marcuse, and Arendt, and from Frege to Wittgenstein
and Quine, and groups in Vienna, Paris, and elsewhere.^22 I would venture to
predict that the importance of personal connections will not decline in the
future, no matter what overlay of new communications technology is invented.
E-mail, or any other form of communication which opens up a dispersed and
defocused structure of communications, will not substitute for the focused
chains which are the core of intellectual life.
What then is being passed through these personal chains? Intellectual
capital, to be sure. The reason why books are not as valuable as personal
contacts is that a general exposure to the ideas of the time is not sufficient for
first-rate intellectual performance; what personal contact with a leading prac-
titioner does is to focus attention on those aspects of the larger mass of ideas
which constitute the analytical cutting edge. Of course, creative intellectuals of
each new generation take off from this point in new directions. Personal
contact with leaders of the previous generation can help here too, not so much
in the substance as in the style of work; there is a transmission of emotional
energy, and of a role model showing how to aim at the highest levels of
intellectual work.
Emotional energy is intensified to high levels in the interaction rituals of
everyday life by strongly focused group interactions. The experience of wit-
nessing a famous teacher surrounded by pupils is a motivating one, even
though, for reasons that we will see presently, few pupils get full benefit. The
same experience occurs in horizontal group contacts. A group such as the
“Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” is simultaneously building up the creative
inspiration among all its members; without one another, their more extreme
flights of fancy and iconoclasm would surely not have taken wing.
Contacts with opponents is just as emotionally intensifying as contact with
one’s allies, perhaps even more so. It is for this reason that intellectuals seem
to be drawn to their opponents; they seek them out, like magnets tugging at
each other’s opposite poles. The intellectual world at its most intense has the
structure of contending groups, meshing together into a conflictual super-com-
munity. The horizontal ties that meshed at Athens at the time of Socrates and
his successors formed the same kind of structure that built up the excitement
of the Chi-hsia Academy and its rivals during the Warring States, that existed
among the Buddhist factions in the early T’ang, and again among the multiple
schools of the Sung dynasty which crystallized in the Neo-Confucians. Intel-
lectuals are excited by the flow of ideas, by the prospects for development, by
their struggles with their enemies; and this is so even if they are looking
backwards toward restoration of some ancient or even eternal ideal. The ritual
Networks across the Generations • 73