Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Here, therefore, and arising from this book, is one last idea for the scientists to build on. Given the Aristotelian successes of both the remote and the immediate past, is it not time to face the possibility–even the probability–that the essential Platonic notion of the ‘inner self’ is misconceived? There is no inner self. Looking ‘in’, we have found nothing–nothing stable anyway, nothing enduring, nothing we can all agree upon, nothing conclusive–because there is nothing to find. We human beings are part of nature and therefore we are more likely to find out about our ‘inner’ nature, to understand ourselves, by looking outside ourselves, at our role and place as animals. In John Gray’s words, ‘A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.’27 This is not paradoxical, and without some such realignment of approach, the modern incoherence will continue.

  Notes and References

  When two dates are given for a publication, the first refers to the hardback edition, the second to the paperback edition. Unless otherwise stated, pagination refers to the paperback edition.

  INTRODUCTION: THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS IN HISTORY–SOME CANDIDATES

  1. Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, London: Fourth Estate, 1997, page 3. Keynes also said: ‘I fancy his [Newton’s] pre-eminence was due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted.’ Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, London: Macmillan, 2003, page 458.

  2. Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment, London: Penguin, 1990, pages 34 and 36.

  3. James Gleick, Isaac Newton, London: Fourth Estate HarperCollins, 2003/2004, pages 101–108; Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968, page 398n.

  4. Joseph Needham, The Great Titration, London: Allen & Unwin, 1969, page 62.

  5. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, London: William Heinemann, 2002, page 322.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid., page 327.

  8. Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition: 400–1400, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1997, page 249.

  9. Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, volume two. From the Renaissance Through the Eighteenth Century, New York: Dover, 1937, page 825.

  10. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, aphorism 129, quoted in Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, volume 1, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1954, page 19.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Barnes, Op. cit., page 831.

  13. John Bowle, A History of Europe, London: Secker & Warburg/Heinemann, 1979, page 391.

  14. Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994/1996, page 395.

  15. Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book, London: Collins Harvill, 1988.

  16. Ibid., page 19f.

  17. Barnes, Op. cit., pages 669ff.

  18. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, two volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, volume 1, page 265.

  19. Gellner, Op. cit., page 19.

  20. Carlo Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700, London: Collins, 1965, pages 5 and 148–149.

  21. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, London: Pimlico, 1991, pages 298ff.

  22. Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilisation, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1992, pages 164ff.

  23. Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, edited by Henry Hardy, London: Chatto & Windus, 1996, pages 168–169.

  24. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, London: Jonathan Cape, 1997, pages 200–202.

  25. Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960, page 495.

  26. Barnes, Op. cit., page 720.

  27. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 259.

  28. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1936/1964, page 23.

  29. Edward P. Mahoney, ‘Lovejoy and the hierarchy of being’, Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 48, 1987, page 211.

  30. Lovejoy, Op. cit., page 55.

  31. Ibid., page 89.

  32. Ibid., page 91.

  33. Ibid., page 201.

  34. Ibid., page 211.

  35. Ibid., page 232.

  36. Ibid., page 241.

  37. Paul Robinson, ‘Symbols at an exhibition’, New York Times, 12 November 1998, page 12.

  38. Gladys Gordon-Bournique, ‘A. O. Lovejoy and the history of ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 48, 1987, page 209.

  39. This was similar to an idea of Hegel’s which he called ‘philosophemes’. See: Donald A. Kelley, ‘What is happening to the history of ideas?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 51, 1990, page 4.

  40. Philip P. Wiener (editor), Dictionary of the History of Ideas, four volumes, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

  41. Kelley, Op. cit., pages 3–26.

  42. James Thrower, The Alternative Tradition, The Hague: Mouton, 1980.

  PROLOGUE: THE DISCOVERY OF TIME

  1. Jacquetta Hawkes (editor), The World of the Past, London: Thames & Hudson, 1963, page 29.

  2. Ibid., page 33.

  3. James Sackett, ‘Human antiquity and the Old Stone Age: the 19th-century background to palaeoanthropology’, Evolutionary Anthropology, volume 9, issue 1, 2000, pages 37–49.

  4. Hawkes, Op. cit., pages 30–34 and 147–148.

  5. Ibid., page 27.

  6. Glyn Daniel, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (second edition), London: Duckworth, 1975, pages 25–26.

  7. Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, page 53.

  8. Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995/1996, page 8; and Hawkes, Op. cit., pages 25–26.

  9. Hawkes, Op. cit., pages 28–29.

  10. Sackett, Op. cit., page 46.

  11. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (revised edition), Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989, pages 32–33.

  12. Trigger, Op. cit., pages 92–93.

  13. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary

  Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000, page 146.

  14. Ibid., page 105.

  15. Peter Burke, ‘Images as evidence in seventeenth-century Europe,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 64, 2003, pages 273–296.

  16. Burke, Op. cit., pages 283–284.

  17. Trigger, Op. cit., page 74.

  18. Ibid., page 76.

  19. Sackett, Op. cit., page 48.

  20. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 1: IDEAS BEFORE LANGUAGE

  1. George Schaller, The Last Panda, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, page 8.

  2. Robert J. Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pages 119–120.

  3. But see Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World, London: Constable, 2003, page 10.

  4. Journal of Human Evolution, volume 43, 2002, page 831, reported in New Scientist, 4 January 2003, page 16. Of course, action by wooden implements, if they existed, wouldn’t show up as remains.

  5. Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer, The Human Revolution, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989, page 70 and chapter six, ‘Multi-regional evolution: the fossil alternative Eden’, by Milford H. Wolpoff. Chimpanzees are now thought not to be as closely related to man as once believed–see New Scientist, 28 September 2002, page 20. The most recent, but still disputed evidence puts the chimpanzee–human divergence back to 4–10 million years ago–see Bernard Wood, ‘Who are we?’, New Scientist, 26 Oc
tober 2002, pages 44–47.

  6. New Scientist, 13 July 2002, page 6; and 13 July 2002, page 6. As Bernard Wood points out, the Djurab desert is 150 kilometres (95 miles) west of the East African Rift valley, which means this area may no longer be regarded as the exclusive home of early humans: ‘Who are we?’, New Scientist, 26 October 2002, page 47. Sahelanthropus was later criticised as being a form of early ape, not an ancestor of man–see the Times Higher Educational Supplement, 25 October 2002, page 19. The find of a leg bone was reported in 2000, said to be the remains of our ‘Millenial Ancestor’, dated to six million years ago, which had upright posture. New Scientist, 15 December 2000, page 5. Stephen Oppenheimer says the earliest ‘clear evidence’ for bipedalism is seen in the skeleton of A. anamensis at four million years ago. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 5.

  7. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 11.

  8. Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, London:

  Thames & Hudson, 1996, page 238.

  9. Richard G. Klein with Blake Edward, The Dawn of Human Culture, New York: John Wiley, 2002, page 56.

  10. Another theory is that the upright posture allowed for greater cooling of the body in the African heat, via the top of the head, which was now more exposed. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 5.

  11. One recent theory argues that rapid climate change, which occurs every 100,000 years or so, is responsible for the development of intelligence: Times Higher Educational Supplement, 4 October 2002, page 29.

  12. Klein with Edward, Op. cit., page 65.

  13. This may have something to do with the fact that when mammals began to flourish, after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago (after the earth was hit by an asteroid), the early species were nocturnal creatures and therefore required larger brains to process information from several senses–touch, smell and hearing as well as sight. Chimpanzees, for example, seem better at drawing inferences from acoustic clues than from visual ones. Mithen, Op. cit., pages 88 and 114.

  14. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 11.

  15. Mithen, Op. cit., pages 108–109.

  16. Wenke, Op. cit., page 120.

  17. Mithen, Op. cit., page 22. Homo habilis is known as Australopithecus habilis among some palaeontologists. See Bernard Wood, ‘Who are we?’, New Scientist, 26 October 2002, page 47.

  18. Mithen, Op. cit., page 126.

  19. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 14–15. John Noble Wilford, ‘Experts place ancient toolmaker on a fast track to northern China,’ New York Times, 5 October 2004, citing a report in the then current Nature.

  20. The latest H. erectus discoveries, at Dmanasi, in Georgia, consist of individuals with much smaller brains, with a600 cc capacity. This suggests they moved out of Africa not because they were more intelligent than other hominids, or had better tools, but because, owing to climate, African conditions extended into Europe. Alternatively, these examples were actually children. The Times (London) 5 July 2002, page 14.

  21. Wenke, Op. cit., pages 145–147.

  22. Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York: The Free Press, 1999, page 143.

  23. Goudsblom, Fire and Civilisation, Op. cit., pages 16 and34.

  24. Ibid., pages 25–27.

  25. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 88 and Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 428. A curious aspect to stone tool technology is that in some sites the hand-axes do not appear to have been used. This has prompted some palaeontologists to suggest that the accumulation of such ‘tools’ was in fact an early form of ‘peacock plumage’, in effect a showing-off device as an aid to attracting mates. Klein and Edgard, Op. cit., page 107. Even today, certain Eskimo groups distinguish between tools used on animals and tools used only on social occasions. Mellars and Stringer. Op. cit., page 359. Herectus is sometimes known as H. rhodesiensis in Africa but this term is falling into disuse.

  26. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 163. Experiments conducted on Neanderthal bones, by Steven Churchill at Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, support the idea that they used both arms to thrust spears, not throw them. This, at 230,000–200,000 years ago. New Scientist, 23 November 2002, pages 22–23. Archaic H. sapiens is also known as H. helmei and H. heidelbergensis.

  27. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 176.

  28. Ibid., page 177.

  29. Ibid., page 226.

  30. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., 214.

  31. El País (Madrid), 12 August 2002, page 1.

  32. Francesco d’Errico, ‘The invisible frontier. A multiple species model for the origin of behavioral modernity’, Evolutionary Anthropology, volume 12, 2003, pages 188–202.

  33. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 156.

  34. This may also explain why Neanderthals made repeated use of caves for short periods of time: to build fires, raise the temperature in a confined space, and get at the meat. Then they moved on.

  35. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 217. At the same time, these skeletons have been found only in areas relatively light on carnivores, which may mean that all we are seeing is the differential remains of other animals’ scavenging behaviour.

  36. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 217.

  37. Ibid., page 219.

  38. Paul Mellars, ‘Cognitive changes in the emergence of modern humans in Europe’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 1, number 1, April 1991, pages 63–76. This view is contradicted by a study published later in the same journal, by Anthony E. Marks et al., which showed that there is no difference between burins produced by Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. ‘Tool standardisation in the middle and upper Palaeolithic’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 11, number 1, 2001, pages 17–44.

  39. Mellars, Op. cit., page 70.

  40. James Steele et al., ‘Stone tools and the linguistic capabilities of earlier hominids’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 5, number 2, 1995, pages 245–256.

  41. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991, pages 149–150.

  42. Ibid., page 163.

  43. Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, page 150.

  44. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, Op. cit., page 210.

  45. Donald, A Mind So Rare, Op. cit., page 150.

  46. John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion, New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

  47. N. Goren-Inbar ‘A figurine from the Acheulian site of Berekhet Ram’, Mitekufat Haeven, volume 19, 1986, pages 7–12.

  48. Francesco d’Errico and April Nowell, ‘A new look at the Berekhet Ram figurine: Implications for the Origins of Symbolism’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 9, number 2, 1999, pages 1–27.

  49. For the beads at Blombos cave, see: Kate Douglas, ‘Born to trade’, New Scientist, 18 September 2004, pages 25–28; for the ‘flute’, see: I. Turk, J. Dirjec and B. Kavur, ‘Ali so v slovenjii nasli najstarejse glasbilo v europi?’ [The Oldest musical instrument in Europe discovered in Slovenia?], Razprave IV, razreda SAZU (Ljubliana), volume 36, 1995, pages 287–293.

  50. Francesco d’Errico, Paolo Villa, Ana C. Pinto Llona and Rosa Ruiz Idarraga, ‘A Middle Paleolithic origin of music? Using cave-bear bones to assess the Divje Babel bone “flute”’, Antiquity, volume 72, 1998, pages 65–79.

  51. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 115–117.

  52. Ibid., page 127.

  53. Mithen, Op. cit., page 174.

  54. Ibid., page 175.

  55. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, volume 1, London: Collins, 1979, page 17.

  56. The Times (London), 17 February 2003, page 7. New York Times, 12 November 2002, page F3.

  57. International Herald Tribune, 16 August 2002, pages 1 and 7.

  58. Stephen Shennan, ‘Demography and cultural innovation: a model and its implication for the emergence of modern human culture’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 11, number 1, 2001, pages 5–16.

  59. Oppenh
eimer, Op. cit., pages 112–113.

  60. Mithen, Op. cit., page 195.