ARTHUR
LOVEJOY: FOUNDER OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS MOVEMENT
1873 - 1962
Philosopher
Paul J. Kuntz states in an American
National Biography
article that although Lovejoy allied himself with the
Unitarian movement, his view of human nature was closer
to Reinhold Niebuhr's estimates of human sinfulness. This
Johns Hopkins Magazine
article identifies him as a physicist of philosophy.
Tussling
with the Idea Man
By Dale Keiger
In photographs, Arthur Onken Lovejoy does not look playful.
According to those who knew him, he was of slight build.
But in a portrait from the Hopkins archives, he seems physically
imposing.
An imposing figure, but one who wrote the following: "Whatever
other definitions of man be true or false, it is generally
admitted that he is distinguished among the creatures by
the habit of entertaining general ideas."
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.
Arthur Lovejoy was born in 1873 in Berlin, Germany, where
his father was conducting medical research. When Lovejoy
was 18 months old, his mother killed herself by an overdose
of pills. Her husband responded by abandoning medicine and
becoming a minister. He wanted his son to take a clerical
collar as well, but Arthur was more interested in a rational
basis for theology, what he termed "a quest for intelligibility,"
so he studied philosophy and comparative religions at the
University of California and applied the techniques of a
historian to his intellectual pursuits. He was hired by
Stanford in 1899 but quit two years later when the president
dismissed Lovejoy's colleague because the latter's politics
had offended a trustee. Harvard's philosophy department
wanted him, but President A. Lawrence Lowell blackballed
him as a troublemaker. (Lovejoy would later co-found the
American Association of University Professors, perhaps confirming
Lowell's worst fears.) Johns Hopkins University, apparently
not so easily scared, hired him for its philosophy department
in 1910.
Never married, he lived in a second-floor apartment in a
house on 39th Street near the Homewood campus. Hopkins humanities
professor, Richard Macksey, who knew him in his later years,
recalls, "It was the quintessential bachelor scholar's
establishment with books all over the place. I could never
figure out if he ever went to bed because the bed was completely
covered with books. I think he slept in his chair."
Lovejoy was a philosophy professor but didn't like what
he considered artificial disciplinary lines. So he founded
his own Hopkins interdiscipline, the history of ideas. His
colleagues George Boas and Gilbert Chinard made their own
significant contributions as Hopkins became known as the
center of this sort of historical philosophical thinking.
When
Lovejoy looked at ideas, he saw aggregates. He believed
that philosophical systems, political creeds, and big ideas
about life and God and meaning all could be disassembled
by a Lovejovian historian into building blocks that he called
"unit-ideas." These units, he said, were passed
down and used in new combinations by generation after generation
of thinkers. He wrote, "...most philosophic systems
are original or distinctive rather in their patterns than
in their components." That is, past a certain point
in history there were no new fundamental ideas, just new
ways to combine these unit-ideas. To tease out constituent
units and understand their recombinations, the historian
had to surmount disciplinary boundaries because ideas don't
care about academic disciplines. They go from astronomy
into poetry, from theology into politics into literature.
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.
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."
Arthur
Lovejoy died in 1962.
Robert Grudin, formerly of the University of Oregon and
author of the book On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought,
notes, "You can imagine the enormous power and value
that's been added by the [dialogic capabilities of] the
Internet over the last 10 years. If a similar revolution
could take place within the disciplines of a university"--if
they could return to Lovejoy's interdisciplinary ideal--"universities
would be much more effective places both for scholars and
for students.
Abridged by courtesy of Johns Hopkins
Magazine, April 2000.
Photos courtesy of the Ferdinand Hamburg, Jr. Archives of
the Johns Hopkins University.
Arthur
Oncken Lovejoy Chair in History
Arthur O. Lovejoy,
professor of history at Hopkins from 1910 to 1939, is
credited with the introduction of the interdisciplinary
academic area known as the history of ideas. He founded
the Journal of the History of Ideas and established
the Hopkins History of Ideas Club. Professor Lovejoy was
the first chairman of the Maryland chapter of the American
Civil Liberties Union, and his opinions often appeared
in the editorial pages of the Baltimore Sun. He
also was a founder of the American Association of University
Professors and a strong proponent of the right of faculty
members to teach unencumbered by ideological restrictions.
Unitarian
Note
Perhaps the
most impressive demonstration of the history of ideas
movement is the publication of Philosophers Speak of
God, by Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, published
by the University of Chicago Press in 1953. The book grew
from a course entitled "Ideas of God in the Great
Systems" taught by Lovejoy's fellow Unitarian, Charles
Hartshorne, to
students including William L. Reese, who elicited his
professor's interest in coauthoring the book. This history
of ideas not only includes a systematic classification
of ideas of God but a presentation and critique of theistic
and atheistic ideas throughout history in both the East
and West.
"Lovejoy,
Arthur O.," American National Biography (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
The Great Chain of Being by Arthur O. Lovejoy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1970).
