Ideas Come From People

This is my fault.

I repeated a quotation to Faië: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” It is one of those sayings that allows you to classify humanity while quietly awarding yourself the highest classification. I was enjoying that part.

“That’s dumb,” she said.

I asked what was dumb about it.

“Ideas come from people.”

“That isn’t an argument.”

“It is.”

It was not, at least not yet. It was an observation standing where an argument might eventually be built.

Faië likes to insist that she has no brain for these things. This would be more convincing if she did not keep bringing them up. On another visit, she returned to the quotation. Then again on another. She would resume halfway through an objection whose first half she appeared to have delivered somewhere I was not.

People made ideas. The people were still in the ideas. Nietzsche was Nietzsche. If you understood enough, you came back around.

Around what?

People.

Her argumentation was balls.

Unfortunately, my counterargument was beginning to consist of pointing that out.

I had supplied the quotation. I had understood it. I had expressed myself in complete sentences. These were advantages, certainly, but I was becoming uncomfortably aware that none of them established that I was right.

So I looked it up.

The familiar version is routinely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt without reliable supporting evidence. Quote Investigator led me to an older formulation in Charles Stewart’s 1901 memoir, Haud Immemor. Stewart recalled the historian Henry Thomas Buckle dividing people into three “orders of intelligence,” according to their habitual subjects of conversation: persons at the bottom, things in the middle, ideas at the top. This is a remembered remark attributed to Buckle, not a securely identified sentence from his own published work. The distinction is worth keeping.

Nevertheless, there it was.

Persons. Things. Ideas.

I brought this improved version to Faië.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s worse.”

I asked why.

“Because you come back to people.”

I had gone away, done research, and returned to precisely the same conversation. I did not immediately appreciate this as an intellectual achievement.

But the older wording exposed something the familiar version makes easy to overlook. The maxim was not merely advising us to stop gossiping. It was proposing that our preferred subject matter reveals our intellectual rank. The farther we move from particular people toward abstract ideas, the better the company.

I understood the appeal. I had, after all, invited myself into that company.

There is a cheap way of talking about people. Who has slept with whom, who has insulted whom, who has money, who has debt, who has debt and an exceptionally persuasive coat. I work in fashion. I am not unfamiliar with the material.

There is also a genuine intellectual achievement in abstraction. You notice a pattern across unlike cases. You distinguish a principle from an example. You discover that what looked inevitable from your own position is merely familiar. Sometimes you have to surrender an opinion you have been wearing for years.

None of this is trivial.

But Faië was not objecting to abstraction. That was the first thing I had to stop explaining to her.

She was objecting to where I thought it ended.

Nietzsche is unfortunately Nietzsche

Nietzsche was the first useful name she threw at me, although “But Nietzsche is Nietzsche” was not the assistance I had hoped for.

In §6 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes great philosophy as a “confession of its originator,” a kind of involuntary autobiography. He asks us to look beneath the philosopher’s declared pursuit of knowledge toward the values and impulses directing it. The argument may be presented as a discovery. Nietzsche wants to know what in its author needed this discovery to be made.

This is not a harmless suggestion, and I do not need to accept it whole to find it useful.

Handled badly, it gives us a miserable substitute for reading. The philosopher was unhappy, therefore the philosophy is unhappiness. He was vain, therefore the system is vanity. We diagnose a motive, congratulate ourselves on our penetration, and save ourselves the trouble of examining the argument.

This is gossip with a library card.

A mathematician’s divorce records do not refute his proof. Nor does our admiration for his courage repair a missing step. A motive can explain why somebody wanted a conclusion without deciding whether the conclusion follows.

Origin is not a verdict.

But neither is a verdict an exhaustive explanation.

Suppose we have understood an argument, checked its premises, followed its reasoning and decided what to make of its conclusion. There remains another fact: this person produced it.

Why this problem? Why these distinctions? Why did one difficulty become intolerable to this mind while another scarcely registered? What trained the attention? What made the pursuit worth the trouble?

Those questions do not spare us the argument. Often, we cannot ask them intelligently until we have understood it.

That was what I had missed in Faië’s insistence that you come back.

The return happens through the ideas, not instead of them.

I could begin with anecdotes about Nietzsche, proceed to a serious examination of his philosophy, and return to Nietzsche with questions the anecdotes had never equipped me to ask. The name would be the same. The object of my attention would not.

Nor is this merely a choice between evaluating a proposition and collecting background information. Sometimes the context helps establish what the proposition actually is.

Consider a philosophy of freedom. Before I can evaluate it, I need to know what its author counts as a constraint, whose freedom is under discussion, and which conditions of life have been quietly treated as normal. Those assumptions may be explicit. They may also be so familiar to the author that they never make it onto the page.

The person and the world around them can help me discover the missing premises.

That does not give biography unlimited authority. A plausible story about somebody’s childhood remains a story until there is evidence for it. The thinker is not a password that unlocks the correct interpretation of everything they wrote.

But it is possible to understand every step in an argument and still misunderstand what it was an answer to.

At that point, talking about the person is not a retreat from intellectual work. It is the work.

Marx makes the return larger

Marx makes the return larger.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels begin with people engaged in actual material and social life, rather than treating their ideas as an independent realm that explains everything beneath it. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” Thought is produced by people who work, depend on one another and live within conditions they did not simply choose.

This is a much stronger position than the modest claim that background matters. I am not smuggling the whole of historical materialism into an argument about conversation. What matters here is the change of scale.

We have returned to the person, but the person is not a sealed container.

They speak a language they did not invent. They inherit problems, institutions, possibilities and prohibitions. Someone taught them what counted as a sensible question. Someone else may have supplied the experience that made the sensible questions seem inadequate.

“Why this person?” begins opening into “Why here?” and “Why then?” and “With whom?”

The lone thinker becomes less lonely, at least as an object of explanation.

This also prevents the return to people from becoming a cult of the original genius. An idea’s maker is not its permanent proprietor. Other people can understand it differently, discover implications its author missed, or use it against the purposes for which it was developed.

People make ideas. Ideas change people. Those people do things with the ideas that change the circumstances in which further ideas become possible.

There is no final portrait to hang on the wall and declare the matter understood.

We keep moving between the thought and the lives through which it moves.

By this stage I was no longer trying to establish that Faië’s objection was empty. I was trying to establish its limits.

This was progress, although I did not announce it to her.

Russell makes it properly difficult

Bertrand Russell made the disagreement properly difficult.

Faië had already indicated that she had a problem with Russell. Her account of the problem did not initially improve my opinion of it. Disliking a philosopher is easy. Identifying the sentence that deserves the dislike takes more application.

I went back to the closing chapter of The Problems of Philosophy, substantially intending to defend him.

Russell argues that philosophical contemplation can release us from the confinement of private interest. He treats what is “personal or private,” particularly what depends upon habit, desire or self-interest, as a source of distortion. His ideal intellect gives greater value to “abstract and universal knowledge” into which the “accidents of private history” do not enter. This is part of an ethical aspiration as well as an intellectual one: impartial contemplation can enlarge our sympathies beyond the narrow circle of our own concerns.

It is a serious and attractive argument.

I do not want a world in which my desires decide what is true. Nor do I want the limits of my experience mistaken for the limits of what can be understood. Learning that reality is not obliged to accommodate me has been useful, however intermittently I have welcomed the lesson.

And Russell is not simply offering Buckle’s dinner-party ranking in more expensive language. The chapter does not establish that he regarded biography as worthless. His concern is the freedom of contemplation from the tyranny of the private self. Those are distinctions we owe him.

Nevertheless, the preference is there: the intellect approaches an ideal as knowledge becomes less bound to its particular circumstances.

This was what finally made Faië’s irritation legible to me.

“But he came from somewhere too,” she said.

Of course he did. That, by itself, gets us nowhere. Russell’s having a personal history does not discredit his ideal of impersonality. Wanting impartiality does not make impartiality a fraud.

The useful question was not whether we could catch Bertrand Russell being a person.

It was what, exactly, we improved by leaving the person out.

My history can give me prejudices. It can also give me questions. Desire can make me overlook evidence; it can also keep me attending to a problem long after sensible people have lost interest. A body restricts what can be perceived, but it also supplies the encounter from which an inquiry begins.

A point of view creates blind spots. It also creates a view.

The fact that thought happens somewhere is not only an obstacle to overcome. It can be something worth understanding.

Here I made what I considered my strongest remaining objection.

We were changing the question.

Whether an argument is sound is one question. Why a person produced it is another. A successful answer to the first does not become unsuccessful because it fails to answer the second.

Faië agreed.

This annoyed me. I had intended it as an objection.

But her agreement forced me to notice what the quotation had actually claimed. It had not said that biography is unnecessary for checking a proof. It had ranked the intelligence of people according to the subjects they habitually discussed.

The second question was allowed to exist. It was also allowed to be difficult. Nothing about its return to a person made it inferior.

A proof can be complete while our interest in it is not.

That was the distinction I had been resisting.

Abstraction is an operation, not a promotion

I design clothes. I should have understood this sooner.

A paper pattern makes selected features of a garment manageable on a flat surface. That is an achievement. The abstraction lets work happen that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

But I would not conclude that the wearer is an unfortunate complication from which the garment ought to be liberated.

Flatness has a purpose on the cutting table. It is not a promotion.

I knew how to use an abstraction without making it the judge of everything it left out. Somehow, when discussing intelligence, I had forgotten.

Abstraction is an operation, not a promotion.

We omit information to answer a question. Sometimes that is precisely the right thing to do. The philosopher’s appetite need not appear in the analysis of a syllogism. The physicist’s marriage need not enter the equation.

But information omitted for a purpose has not thereby been shown to be worthless.

Ask another question and it may become central.

Sometimes it will remain irrelevant. There is no obligation to make every breakfast intellectually significant. Restoring the person is not a licence to explain everything through a favourite anecdote.

It is permission to ask what the abstraction was designed to show, what it leaves out, and whether we have mistaken its usefulness for completeness.

That is a more demanding position than either indiscriminate gossip or indiscriminate abstraction. You have to know what you are asking. You have to justify why a detail matters. You cannot merely attach an intimate fact to an intellectual name and call the result an explanation.

But you also cannot declare yourself above the particulars before examining what they contain.

Persons, things, ideas, persons

Eventually I wrote the sequence down.

Persons. Things. Ideas. Persons.

A helix is closer to what I now mean than a ladder. You return to the vicinity of your starting point with a different view of it.

First, Nietzsche as a name and a collection of anecdotes. Then the philosophy. Then the person whose attention, judgments and commitments have become newly interesting because you have encountered the philosophy.

The return can send you outward again: into another argument, another life, another set of circumstances. It need not conclude with the author, and it certainly does not conclude with the author’s own account of themselves.

I am wary, however, of installing this as a fourth intellectual class. Giving myself a better seat in the same hierarchy would be a poor reward for the exercise.

The deeper problem with the maxim is that a subject does not certify the quality of the attention paid to it.

Ideas can be discussed with all the laziness, factionalism and appetite for borrowed prestige we associate with gossip. You can repeat a fashionable position without examining a word of it. You can make a philosopher’s name perform exactly the social function of a designer’s label.

Conversely, “Why did she do that?” can be a cheap invitation to sneer, or a question demanding patience, evidence, imagination and the revision of everything you thought you understood.

The nouns do not tell us which conversation we are having.

I had mistaken the appearance of intellectual seriousness for a guarantee of it. Faië, who did very little to maintain that appearance, had noticed the problem.

This does not make her a secret professor whose every scattered remark should be received as wisdom. Some of her objections were bad. Some of my replies were necessary. The thought became more precise because it met resistance, including resistance that was not merely my vanity.

But my vanity was certainly present.

Russell had been useful about that, too.

I wanted the quotation to survive partly because I had been the one to say it. I wanted her objection to fail partly because it was inconveniently presented. These were facts about a person, and without them my slowness to understand the idea would be harder to explain.

What survived the argument

Faië did not hand me the argument you have just read.

She did not have this essay in her head, waiting for somebody with better punctuation to extract it. Nor did I. She had an objection she could not satisfactorily defend. I had a confidence I could not satisfactorily justify. Across several visits, something happened between them.

Nietzsche, Marx and Russell helped me give that something a structure. Looking up Buckle gave us a clearer target. Writing exposed distinctions neither of us had initially bothered to make.

I could have left the visits out.

I could have begun with the quotation, proceeded through the philosophers and delivered the conclusion without mentioning the woman who had made the problem impossible for me to put down. The reasoning would still be available for inspection. You could still agree or disagree with it.

I would also appear to have arrived at it rather more gracefully.

The article would be tidier.

You would know less.

When I told Faië I had written it, she asked whether this meant she had been right.

“Your argumentation was balls,” I said.

She agreed immediately. This deprived me of a useful diversion.

“But was I right?”

Unfortunately, yes.