NYT: What's the Big Idea?

Questions for Peter Watson
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: December 11, 2005

Q: Your ambitious new book, 'Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud,' claims to chronicle all the major ideas in the world since the invention of the hand ax two million years ago. Are you trying to be a polymath?
My wife says I am the know-it-all from hell.

How does one go about deciding which ideas to put in and which to leave out? As they say, even taxi drivers have ideas.
Yes, taxi drivers have ideas. They have ideas about how to get from Eighth Street to 81st Street by missing the Midtown traffic. But what we are talking about here - let's be sensible - are ideas that have an impact on the lives of many people. We're not talking about just little ideas, are we? On the other hand, not all big ideas are good ideas. In fact, most big ideas are probably terrible ideas.

What do you think is the single worst idea in history?
Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.

But religion has also been responsible for investing countless lives with meaning and inner richness.
I lead a perfectly healthy, satisfactory life without being religious. And I think more people should try it.

It sounds as if you're starting your own church.
Not at all. I do not believe in the inner world. I think that the inner world comes from the exploration of the outer world - reading, traveling, talking. I do not believe that meditation or cogitation leads to wisdom or peace or the truth.

Then I don't understand why you would want to write a history of ideas, since inner reflection and dreaminess surely count at least as much as scientific experiment in the formation of new ideas"
To paraphrase the English philosopher John Gray, it is more sensible to look out on the world from a zoo than from a monastery. Science, or looking out, is better than contemplation, or looking in.

If that were true, how would you explain a novelist like Virginia Woolf, whose achievement was based on the rejection of the panoramic outward view in favor of inner sensibility?
The rise of the novel generally is a great turning in. But I don't think it has given a lot of satisfaction to people. It has not achieved anything collective. It's a lot of little personal turnings that lots of people love to connect with. But these are fugitive, evanescent truths. They don't stay with you very long or help you do much.

You strike me as deeply unanalyzed. Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?
I was a psychiatrist. I left because I thought Freud was rubbish.

Where did you train?
The Tavistock Clinic in London. I left in the late 60's because I thought Freudian therapy was a waste of time. I don't believe there is any such thing as the unconscious or the id.

In that case, where do you think ideas come from?
I don't think they come out of daydreaming. Everybody who has had a great idea or made a great realization has been working very hard at it, and they often have failed many times. You don't go from nothing to a great idea without doing a lot of work.

I find I seldom have ideas away from my desk.
That is because ideas come from other ideas. I used to sleep with a piece of paper by my bed. But I never had an idea in bed. The other thing I noticed is that when you are out to dinner and you have a good idea and write it down, the next day when you're sober, it's terrible.

Perhaps if you went out less, you would have better ideas.
I think the interesting thing in life is not having an idea, but realizing it.