Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

From Philosopedia.org

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (10 October 1873 - 30 December 1962)

The son of a medical researcher and a mother who overdose on pills eighteen months later, Lovejoy eventually became an American intellectual historian. His father turned from medicine to become a clergyman, and Lovejoy studied philosophy at the University of California, Harvard, Washington University, Columbia University, and the University of Missouri.

Dale Keiger, in a biographical essay about Lovejoy, described him as follows:

• Lovejoy was an idea man. Ideas were his stock in trade, specifically ideas about ideas. Intellectual concepts have histories, and this is what fascinated him: how the great ideas developed and mutated and combined and recombined and coursed from century to century. He was an archaeologist of the intellect, digging for the foundations of Western thought. A physicist of philosophy (though his preferred analogy to science was as analytic chemist), seeking to reduce systems, creeds, and -isms to their fundamental particles.

• In his most famous book, The Great Chain of Being, he examined the idea, derived by the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus from Aristotle and Plato, that all of creation forms a chain. The chain includes all that could possibly exist, starting with God, in an infinite series of forms, each of which shares at least one attribute with its neighbor in the chain. Lovejoy traced this idea through 2,000 years of intellectual history, demonstrating its influence on thought in the West. He follows parts of the Great Chain conception through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Liebniz, and Spinoza, pausing along the way to discuss Copernican astronomy and Kepler.

An important aspect of Lovejoy's work was his examination of how the meanings of words changed over time, and the effect those changes had on ideas. He'd take "nature" or "romanticism" and demonstrate how people used these terms without being fully cognizant of the ambiguities caused by shifting definitions. Lovejoy once subjected himself to interrogation by the Maryland Senate, when he'd been nominated for the state's educational board of regents. A legislator asked Lovejoy if he believed in God. George Boas recalled, "I am reliably informed that in reply Lovejoy developed at length 33 definitions of the word God, consuming 15 1/2 cigarettes meanwhile, refusing to be interrupted or ruffled, and ended by asking the committee member which of these meanings he had in mind when putting the question." As the story goes, no one felt inclined to ask him another question, and Lovejoy was confirmed. Unanimously.

Keiger continued:

• The history of ideas as conceived by Lovejoy was a methodology that required the contributions of scholars throughout the university. If you want to understand the thinking of Milton, said the professor, you'll have to venture into the history of science, because in the eighth book of Paradise Lost, Adam and the archangel Raphael engage in a discussion of 17th-century theories of astronomy. Be unfamiliar with the ideas of Copernicus and his successors and you will not understand Milton's references, or where his thinking came from. And if you really want to unravel all the ideas and influences expressed by Milton, he said, you need scholars of English, classics, the writings of the early Catholic Church, rabbinical and other Jewish literature, French and Italian literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. Plus a historian of science, a medievalist, a philosopher, and a historian of early Protestant divinity.

• Lovejoy knew right where to go for such a collection of scholars. In 1923, he and colleagues founded the Hopkins History of Ideas Club. The club was for "the historical study of the development and influence of general philosophical conceptions, ethical ideas, and aesthetic fashions, in occidental literature." Meetings were open to anyone. You needn't be a Hopkins professor. You needn't be a professor at all. Graduate and undergraduate students were welcome. Six times a year, participants would assemble in Room 110 of Gilman Hall and listen while a scholar read a new paper. Then the real fun began, as Lovejoy would lead the audience in probing, augmenting, and disputing the author's scholarship. The meetings drew writers, historians, philosophers, biologists, political theorists . . . anyone who thrived on scholarly dialogue.

• In the October 1962 issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine, Dorothy Stimson, a professor emeritus from Goucher College, recalled meetings at which 70 people would "sit in the smoke-filled air, listening with more or less interest to a scholarly paper read often nervously by even the most experienced of renowned scholars. Then they would resettle themselves in the stiff chairs to await the opening of the discussion. What would Professor Lovejoy say?"

• Macksey recalls an elderly Lovejoy who still enjoyed the fray: "He was a very bristly, independent mind. On occasion he really wandered, but on other occasions he could be quite fierce. It was entirely intellectual. I never had any sense of personal polemics. But it was something one always had to warn speakers about, that they would find this elderly man taking quite a bit of time to get a cigarette into his cigarette holder, and then he would ask a question, and it might come from anywhere on the map. He was someone who saw the intellectual life as a tussle. There were occasions at the club where the speaker figured if he'd gotten past Lovejoy's question, things would get a little smoother. George Boas could be quite sharp, but he had a very different personality. George was elegance itself, with sort of a Mozartian lightness and spirit. You didn't know you were being cut up. When you were cut up by Lovejoy, you knew it."

• Over the last several decades, his ideas have been contested, as he surely would have expected and welcomed. Some of his critics have argued, as Macksey puts it, "that the unit-idea was something that existed in the minds of certain investigators rather than in reality." Macksey believes that in the history of ideas, Lovejoy's greatest contribution was his method. "Even during a later period when people said, 'Wait a minute, we don't quite buy into this unit-idea notion,' [Lovejoy's work] catalytically became a source of new work. Where is the history of ideas today? I think that in many ways some of the issues are still very much debated, though later generations probably lack the assurance of Lovejoy and the integrity of his method. But the issues are still alive and being debated and that would have satisfied Lovejoy."

Peter H. Hare, of the State University of New York, Buffalo, has written that Lovejoy

• advocated critical realism, temporalistic realism, and a method of tracing ideas through history;

• was a dualist in epistemology, holding that there are "changes in certain physical structures which generate existents that are not physical . . . and these non-physical particulars are indispensable means to any knowledge of physical realities."

• thought that temporalism "is the metaphysical theory which maintains . . . the essentially transitive and unfinished and self-augmentative character of reality."

• regarded unit-ideas as being assumptions or habits which become "dialectical motives" when, vague and general as they are, they "influence the course of men's reflections on almost any subject."

• traced each unit-idea historically "through . . . the provinces of whether those provinces are called philosophy, science, literature, art, religion or politics."

• was an influential and courageous advocate of academic freedom.

Works by Lovejoy include the following:

The Revolt Against Dualism (1930)

Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935, with George Boas)

The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936)

Essays in the History of Ideas (1948)

Reflections on Human Nature (1961)

The Reason, the Understanding, and Time (1961)

Lovejoy was a Unitarian. He never married.