1001: Ideas That Changed the Way We Think

Introduction By Robert Arp I am a philosopher by training, so, as philosophers seem naturally to be attracted to ideas of any kind, it makes sense that I would be the editor of a book like this one. The word “philosophy” is derived from the Greek words philo, meaning “love” or “desire,” and sophy, meaning “wisdom” or “knowledge.” Philosophy is therefore the “love of wisdom,” and an important way to attain knowledge is by exposing yourself to plenty of ideas. But what exactly is an idea? The English word is a direct cognate of the Latin idea, which is derived from the Greek ίδέα. The Greek word ίδέα is itself a derivation of the Greek verb meaning “to see.” Ancient Greek philosopher Plato used the word “idea” to refer to “Forms”—unchanging, perfect, ideal things of which everything in the universe was a better or worse copy. There was a Form of human, a Form of cat, a Form of tree, even Forms of justice, beauty, and goodness. The Forms were real, existing things, and a person had to use their mind to reason, think about, and understand them, especially when philosophizing. Plato’s definition of an idea might strike us as strange, because for him ideas were extra-mental things “out there” in reality—not visible to the eye, but knowable by the mind—whereas nowadays we think of ideas as concepts or images that exist, at best, in a person’s mind. Nonetheless, Plato’s concept of an idea was influential in Western history for many centuries. In the Middle Ages, medieval Christian philosophers and theologians—who borrowed much from the theories of Plato and his prize student, Aristotle—used the term “idea” to refer to an archetype of some thing that existed in the mind of the Christian God. According to this view, before God created the universe and all that it contains, He had the idea of the universe and all that it contains already in mind. It was also around this time that the word “idea” began to be used interchangeably with the Latin words conceptio (conception), conceptus mentis (mental concept), notio (notion), verbum mentale (mental word), and species intelligibilis (intelligible species). By the seventeenth century and the birth of what is known as Modern philosophy, “idea” no longer referred to some Platonic concept existing outside of the mind. Rather, it had taken back its original Greek connotation of “to see.” For example, René Descartes noted that “Among my thoughts, some are like images of things, and it is to these alone that the name ‘idea’ properly belongs.” He also wrote that “idea is the thing thought upon.” By the time that John Locke penned his influential An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, the word “idea” had assumed a purely mental association: “the word ‘Idea’ stands for whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks. I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about when thinking.” Locke envisioned ideas to be objects of thought, a definition that was taken up in the twentieth century by the U.S. philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler (who cofounded the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas in Chicago in 1990). However, Adler added the caveat that an idea must be a common object “being considered and discussed by two or more individuals.” In his short article “What is an Idea?” (1958), Adler maintained that “freedom and justice, war and peace, government and democracy might be called ideas or objects of thought.” He contrasted this “objective” definition of an idea with a “subjective” definition, wherein an idea is understood to be an individual’s own conscious thought or perception. Adler’s notion of an objective idea was most clearly expressed in his classic work The Idea of Freedom (1958) in which he described five different conceptions of freedom and traced the discussion of them among philosophers throughout history. Today, the word “idea” has several connotations and denotations, many of which are aligned to these historical conceptions. For example, the first two definitions of “idea” that are given in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary are: “a transcendent entity that is a real pattern of which existing things are imperfect representations,” and “a standard of perfection (ideal),” both of which have clearly been informed by Plato’s Theory of Forms. In line with Descartes’s description of ideas as “images of things,” an idea can also be considered a perceptual image, or a picture in a person’s mind of something, including a sensation that has been “called to mind” through memory. For example, imagine the Eiffel Tower: the “picture” that this conjures up in your mind is an idea. These mental images do not always have to be fully formed, however: an idea can also be thought of as a more general “mental impression.” A good example of an idea in this sense is Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Unless you have a clear knowledge of physics, you probably have an inchoate notion in your mind that special relativity has something to do with E = m c 2, motion being relative, and objects traveling at the speed of light. You therefore have some idea or impression of special relativity, but it is vague, rudimentary, and obviously not as complete as the idea of special relativity in the mind of a person with a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. Another understanding of an idea is as a concept. The words “thought” and “idea” are often used interchangeably by people, as are the words “opinion” and “idea.” These concepts, thoughts, and opinions are frequently referred to in terms of being understood or formulated, conveying the sense that the ideas behind them are clear in the speaker’s mind. Examples of this type of idea include “digestion,” “cost-benefit analysis,” or “gravity affects all material bodies in the Earth’s atmosphere.” There is an intimate connection between understanding a concept, being able to formulate a thought, and having knowledge. The most knowledgeable people in certain areas of study often have a solid understanding of the ideas that comprise that field. An idea can also be read as synonymous with a goal, end, aim, or purpose—“I took a job with the idea of getting some money together,” for example. Or it can be a concept in a person’s mind that might be so abstract as to not be imaginable in a picture-like form, such as the idea of what constitutes the process of reasoning. In the following pages, you will find 1,001 of the most important ideas that have ever been imagined, conceived, and articulated throughout the course of recorded history. These are 1,001 ideas that changed the way we think. Various dictionaries all describe thinking as a process that utilizes ideas in some way—to plan, predict, pronounce, produce, and numerous other activities—which is a straightforward and commonly understood notion. It is a simple fact that you cannot do any thinking without ideas! So many ideas have changed people’s way of thinking, with their impact ranging from small groups of individuals to entire societies and even the whole world. You would not be reading this book right now were it not for Johannes Gutenberg’s ideas of mechanical movable type and the printing press so as to “spread learning to the masses” in the fifteeenth century. And you would not be reading anything at all if the ancient Sumerians had not had the idea to design pictograms and an alphabet some 5,000 years ago. It is possible to organize and classify ideas in many ways. In an attempt to be sensible and economical, the ideas in this book have been placed in one of the following categories: Philosophy; Religion; Psychology; Science and Technology (including mathematical ideas and inventive ideas); Politics and Society (including education ideas, legal ideas, and economic ideas); and Art and Architecture (including music ideas and literary ideas). In the text for each idea you will find a description of exactly what the idea is; an account of its origin (who or where the idea came from); a quotation that uses, or is about, the idea; and a brief explanation of why the idea is important. 1001 Ideas That Changed The Way We Think is ordered chronologically, but it has not always been easy to establish a definitive date for when each idea first appeared. Generally we have used the earliest recorded instance of the idea, or the date that the first work containing the idea was published. Time periods for each chapter have been simplified into the following historical eras: Ancient World (2,000,000 BCE to 499 CE); The Middle Ages (500 to 1449); Early Modern (1450 to 1779); Late Modern (1780 to 1899); Early Twentieth Century (1900 to 1949); and Contemporary (1950 to present). You will notice that a good many of the titles of the ideas in this book appear more like an invention, mechanism, device, contraption, or even a process, activity, or system—such as the Kinetoscope (an 1890s machine that magnified looped film for a viewer), the telephone, the map, the magazine, the encyclopedia, or even waterpower, groupthink, nuclear fusion, and breakdancing. It can be hard to divorce these ideas from their aforementioned uses, but the authors have tried to present the idea behind the invention, or the idea that gave birth to a process, or the idea that acted as a catalyst for a system, rather than simply describe what that invention, process, or system does. You will also notice that there appear to be numerous principles, laws, rules, theories, or hypotheses in this book. In these cases, the principles, laws, and the like are themselves the idea. Examples of this type of idea include the uncertainty principle, the second law of thermodynamics, the greenhouse effect, presumption of innocence, the Ten Commandments, and, one of my personal favorites, Godwin’s Law (coined by Mike Godwin in 1990), which states that if an online discussion continues long enough—on any topic whatsoever—someone in the discussion will inevitably make a comparison to Adolph Hitler or the Nazis. I hope that you find as much joy in reading these 1,001 ideas as I did when the contributors submitted them to me to edit. As a final thought, I will leave you with a quotation from a speech given in 1963 by the United States’ thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy, that I recall from a class on the U.S. government during my teenage years: “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.”