Arthur Lovejoy, the great chain of being and the day 1582 did not have: 10 October

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873, the son of a Boston doctor who had gone there for medical research and of a German mother, a daughter of the Baptist preacher Johann Gerhard Oncken. The mother killed herself when the boy was about eighteen months old; the father gave up medicine for the ministry. Lovejoy grew up in America, read philosophy at Berkeley and then at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce, never took a doctorate, and spent the last twenty-eight years of his career, from 1910 to his retirement in 1938, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where he died on 30 December 1962.

Those are the facts of a quiet life. What they produced was a discipline, a journal, a professional association and one book that every historian of philosophy has either read or pretended to. The discipline is the history of ideas; the journal is the Journal of the History of Ideas, which he founded with Philip Wiener in 1940; the association is the American Association of University Professors, of which he was a co-founder in 1915 alongside John Dewey; and the book is The Great Chain of Being (1936). A philosophy calendar has a further reason for pausing on 10 October, which is that in 1582, in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland, the day did not happen.

A method for following an idea#

Lovejoy's method rested on a decision about the unit of study. Philosophical systems, he argued, are compounds. To write their history as a sequence of systems, Plato then Aristotle then Plotinus, is to write the history of chemistry as a list of rocks. The historian should instead isolate what he called unit-ideas, the recurrent elements out of which systems are assembled, and follow each of them across the boundaries that academic life draws between philosophy, theology, science, poetry and politics. An idea first stated in a Greek dialogue might migrate into a Christian doctrine of creation, a seventeenth-century argument about the plurality of worlds and an eighteenth-century poem, changing its company each time and keeping its shape. The History of Ideas Club he founded at Johns Hopkins, and over which he long presided, was the seminar in which the method was tried out; the Journal was the method's institution.

The Great Chain of Being, expanded from the William James Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1933, is the demonstration. It follows a single complex of ideas for two thousand years. The first element is what Lovejoy named the principle of plenitude: the thought, found in Plato's Timaeus, that a good creator, being without envy, would bring into existence every kind of thing that could exist, so that the universe is as full as it can be. The second, from Aristotle, is continuity, the claim that between any two kinds of being there is an intermediate kind, so that the full universe is also a graded one, with no gaps. Put the two together, as Plotinus and the Neoplatonists did, and you have a chain running from God, through the angelic intelligences, through human beings, animals, plants and stones, down to the barest matter, every link necessary and every link occupied.

The chain, Lovejoy showed, did more work than any philosopher who used it intended. It underwrote the medieval cosmos and its hierarchies of rank; it gave Renaissance naturalists their reason to expect missing links and look for them; it sat behind the astronomers' willingness to populate other planets; it supplied Leibniz with the best of all possible worlds, since a world lacking any possible kind of being would be less than the best; and it furnished Pope's Essay on Man with its most quoted lines. Then, in the eighteenth century, it broke. If every kind of being must exist, the chain is complete at every moment and nothing can change; but the century had begun to believe that things do change and that the world has a history. The resolution, which Lovejoy traced in Schelling and the Romantics, was to tip the chain on its side and stretch it through time. Plenitude became something the universe achieves rather than something it has, and the great chain turned into evolution before Darwin had given evolution a mechanism.

The book remains the best account of how a metaphysical idea can shape science, ethics and taste while its users think they are only reasoning. It is also, by now, a book whose method has been thoroughly attacked. In 1969 Quentin Skinner's 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas' argued that there are no unit-ideas, only what particular people meant by particular sentences in particular arguments, and that to follow an 'idea' across centuries is to invent a continuity that the historical actors never had. The Cambridge school built on that objection, as we noted in our piece on Pocock and political languages; the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte, discussed in our philosophical history of the concept, reached a related conclusion by a different route. The quarrel is still open. What nobody disputes is that it is a quarrel conducted on ground Lovejoy cleared.

The founder of academic freedom who set a limit to it#

The second half of Lovejoy's legacy is institutional, and it has a complication. In 1901, as a young instructor at Stanford, he resigned in protest when the economist Edward Ross was dismissed for offending the university's benefactress, Jane Stanford. Harvard's president later blocked his appointment there, apparently on the strength of that act. In 1915 he and Dewey founded the AAUP and he had a hand in drafting the principles of academic freedom and tenure that remain the profession's charter in the United States. He was, for forty years, the man American professors turned to when a colleague had been sacked for an opinion.

The complication came late. In a short piece in the Journal of Philosophy dated 14 February 1952, with Senator McCarthy's investigations under way, Lovejoy argued that membership of the Communist Party was grounds for dismissal from a university post, since the Party was, as he put it, a matter of empirical fact, an organisation committed to the suppression of the free enquiry academic freedom exists to protect. Critics then and since have called this a betrayal of his own principle; defenders reply that it was an attempt to state the principle's own precondition. Either way it is worth remembering, in a decade in which the question of who may teach what has returned on both sides of the political divide, that the author of the rules thought they had an edge.

His strictly philosophical writing was a sustained defence of dualism against the fashions of his time. 'The Thirteen Pragmatisms' (1908) took his teacher James's movement apart into thirteen distinct and incompatible doctrines, and The Revolt Against Dualism (1930) argued that neither the new realists nor the pragmatists had shown how knowledge could dispense with a distinction between the mind's contents and the things they are about. He was never a system-builder; he was a man who wanted to know exactly what was being claimed, and by whom, and since when.

1582: the day that was skipped#

One more fact about 10 October belongs to a historian of ideas. In 1582 the day did not occur in the countries that adopted Pope Gregory XIII's calendar reform at once. The Julian calendar had drifted ten days from the astronomical year since the Council of Nicaea, and the bull Inter gravissimas corrected it by deletion: in Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Thursday 4 October was followed directly by Friday 15 October. Protestant and Orthodox Europe refused to take its dates from Rome. Britain and its colonies waited until 1752, when Wednesday 2 September was followed by Thursday 14 September; Russia held out until 1918. We told the story of the lost ten days in the entry for 4 October. The lesson for a series like this one is uncomfortable: a 'date' is itself a unit-idea with a history, and a philosopher born in Leipzig in 1646 and one born in Norwich in 1675 were counting their birthdays on different calendars. Lovejoy, who liked to know what was being claimed, would have wanted the footnote.

Also on the day#

Fridtjof Nansen, the polar explorer who became the League of Nations' first High Commissioner for Refugees and gave his name to the passport that let the stateless cross borders, was born on 10 October 1861 near Christiania, now Oslo. The question his passport tried to answer, what a person is owed when no state will claim him, has not become simpler. The series' entry for 4 October told the calendar story at length; on 11 October we take up Samuel Clarke, Hans Kelsen and a letter delivered to the White House.