What is an idea?

We often hear that someone “has good ideas” or is “an idea person.” Ideas are valued as agents of change and progress, yet our means of measuring success only work with physical quantities. Ideas cannot be measured. Especially ideas that do not issue in new physical things or processes that can be measured. Some great ideas can be proven to be physically false—“all men are created equal” had no physical, historical evidence whatsoever to call on. Yet it changed the course of a country. We are so preoccupied as a culture with quantities, and measurement, and things, that we allow ideas to fade into the background without much notice. Terry Deacon calls this to attention in his book Incomplete Nature by beginning with the idea of absence—the mathematical notion of zero—and showing how absence and incompleteness drive our thinking processes. So in a sense, we don’t think enough about thinking, which creates all measurable new technologies and business models and artworks and . . . you get the point.
Only products and solutions are valuable in this culture. Once you have written a book, it may reach people—possibly. Once you have patented and created a working model of a new idea, it may be seen as worthy. We give lots of money to science research because it often issues in physical devices that may do some good in the culture. Of course it also issues in dangerous, even evil, devices for use in war. But the humanities are not well-funded because they deal with ideas, not things. Funny. Since ideas always come before things. William Carlos Williams said “no ideas but in things”—and was wrong. If that were the case, we would run out of things to think about pretty damned quick. Airplanes, and skyscrapers, and atomic bombs, and satellites would not exist. All of these were ideas first. “What if . . .” someone said, and imagined something that was not present in the physical world.
In much the same way, our lives are shaped by ideas. What if I became a doctor? What if I left my spouse and went on a long trip to explore new places? What if I call in sick today and lounge and read? What ifs become I wants over time, and the absent thing—a profession, a future hope, an unshaped need, becomes something to aim for—it becomes a sense of incompleteness that can drive us toward a new course of action. Ideas exist in the world of imagination—they are, as Gregory Bateson claimed—“no things.” Yet they are essential to everything we do and everything we are. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the cultivation of ideas, to creative thinking, to developing our capacities to do these no-things well?
Rhetoric, according to Kenneth Burke, is “symbolic action.” It plants seeds of ideas in the minds of readers or listeners that may grow and develop into motives. While it may not stir immediate response, it creates “frames of mind” that may generate the sense of incompleteness that creates physical action in the world. Speaking, Writing, and Reading are not machine processes. They are dances of interpretation and experience. Our experience is felt directly at the best of times, but usually it is contained within a web of “pre-existing codes of decision” that have been shaped by our families, our educations, and our professions. Why do we teach students to write five paragraph themes? Because it doesn’t require the difficulty of generating meaningful ideas. And generating ideas is difficult. Much easier to live within the field of ideas already presented to us—the ideology of our times and our culture. Innovation becomes the work of a select few, and most innovation involves the making of new machines or the production of entertainment for the bored population in need of stimulation. Art is the business of making new ideas real, too. But it does not produce labor-saving devices or artificial hearts or other immediate gratifications. Art, music, history, philosophy, literature—are all fields of ideas. At their best they create new and valuable ideas while preserving the best ideas that humans have produced over time. They also caution us against the dangers of bad ideas. This was Arnold’s view of the academy in the nineteenth century. “Culture” for him was great and striving ideas. Where has culture gone now?
The yoked imagination is the limited ideation of business, or the bending of all ideas toward mechanical progress, or the negation of ideas that threaten existing structures. We can imagine, but only within the field of what is accepted as “possibly real.” Who determines that? The bosses of the world, and the institutional systems of the world, and the physical demands of the infrastructure of the world that we created with ideas in the first place. Like Plato, we create ideas (for him, writings) and tell those that follow how dangerous ideas are. Hmm.
The dance of mind—being the animals we are, with language to boot. Our extended mind can impoverish us unless we know how to use it well. Discipline and purpose and what they mean. Not control, but direction. Not end-definition, but commitment to processes. Zen is correct here: follow your practice. And choose your practice well. Not to get something in particular, but to have the joy of making over time.