Why Humanity Desperately Needs a Theory of Ideas

It’s fun to dive into the twists and turns of Gunkel’s unique life path, but sooner or later you’re going to want some read meat. So Gunkel was a very unusual guy. OK. But what else did he do?

Today I’m going to begin the longish process of providing you with an explanation.

You see, ideonomy—the science of ideas (pronounced IDEA-onomy)—was more than just what Gunkel founded.

It was the culmination of decades of reading, thinking, and writing, and—if I may be so bold—an autistic-like special interest that impelled Gunkel forward from a very early age.

Now, I’m not saying Patrick Gunkel definitely had autism.

Some people who knew Gunkel believed it would be superficial to say he was on the spectrum because Gunkel also exhibited a profound emotional depth that, if you got to know him well enough, would eventually emerge.

What I’m saying is that, in general, autistic people tend to gravitate toward a particular subject matter and then develop top-to-bottom expertise in that thing, otherwise known as “geeking out.”

And for Gunkel, his special interest was a doozy.

As he recounted in his ideonomy manuscript “Personal Origins of Ideonomy,” at a young age Gunkel became fixated on:

What this means is that from a very early age, Gunkel was obsessed with the concept of being able to have all possible ideas.

Now I know this sounds kind of crazy, and it’s first of all important to clarify that Gunkel didn’t believe he could actually do this.

Rather, he was making a theoretical leap, establishing a conceptual goal that would have a profoundly significant impact even if the target could never be hit.

To put Gunkel’s approach to “all possible ideas” in context, first let’s step sideways and look at things from a mathematical perspective.

In mathematics—the most useful and generally relevant of any discipline—there’s actually no such thing as “all possible numbers” even though you would think, at first, we could represent this by using the infinity symbol (∞).

In fact, there’s an infinite number of systems we can use to represent quantitative values, and an infinite variety of ways to represent these values.

For example, all of the following represent number systems that can be infinitely extended:

Numbers are essentially an abstraction, you see.

They can be represented in the mind or on paper using symbols, but they do not appear anywhere in the world.

I’m bringing this up to demonstrate how a quantitative system that seems solid, concrete, and—well, scientific—actually crumbles into fuzziness the more you consider it.

You might think such a thing as “all possible numbers” is a conceptual reality for mathematicians but, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Does that mean all of science based on smoke and mirrors?

Of course not.

That’s because mathematics has taken logical principles and their corollaries and married them up to applied results in the material world.

With ideonomy, Gunkel wasn’t asking anyone to accept something that was not already acceptable from a mathematical perspective.

Specifically, Gunkel recognized that mathematics flows into applied scientific usages despite a halo of fuzziness that emerges at the theoretical level where human language begins to decouple from the natural world.

Just as Gunkel knew it was impossible to actually know infinity, he also recognized that mathematics could still do good work and even put infinity to use—in the case of calculus, for example—without having to know or define “all possible numbers.”

With this premise firmly in mind, we can now begin to begin the first of our eight-part exploration of ideonomy by looking at Gunkel’s theory of ideas.

How did Gunkel define ideonomy?

This often comes up when people are trying to figure out what it is, and I’ll save you some time by saying right up front that none of the concrete definitions Gunkel provided were sufficient to understand what he was alleging, what he did, and what he wanted to do but couldn’t.

According to the MIT website:¹

Clear as mud, right?

I know this went right over my head the first few times I read it.

Well, perhaps future Gunkel scholars (if any exist) will do their own analysis and come to their own conclusion.

At this time, however, my own long investigation into ideonomy has led me to break Gunkel’s science down into eight primary elements. Gunkel would have hated this. And yet, you’re not left with much of a choice when you are confronted with his original compact definitions—like those above—which are virtually meaningless without a great deal more context.

We already discussed what Gunkel meant by having “all possible ideas” and that this was a theoretical rather than practical formulation.

But what about the “laws” of ideas—what are those?

Gunkel talked about the laws of ideas as if they had been already proven. And in his mind, they already were. But this was one of the greatest breakdowns in Gunkel’s ability to communicate effectively.

A theory of ideas can be extracted from Gunkel’s writing, but it’s absolutely crucial to have this underpinning—even a hypothesis to test—before one can begin to do any work that any peer community would ever accept as scientific.

During our 8-part exploration of ideonomy, we will rely on Gunkel’s document “Definitions of and Metaphors for Ideonomy” instead of his compact definition.

In this document, Gunkel does his usual list-making jujitsu and provides a list of “Twenty-Five Things Ideonomy Might Variously Be Categorized As” as well as “Ninety Brief Or Metaphoric Definitions of Ideonomy.”

While this isn’t the definitive source of information for all aspects of Gunkel’s science, it’s in my opinion a very important document to help understand what Gunkel was on about, and quite suitable for an overview.

And in this document, we can see, Gunkel refers to ideonomy as both “a theory” and “a proposal.”

This suggests Gunkel was aware that his work was only preliminary and that others would have to do the hard work of validation in the future.

What’s more, in Gunkel’s related list of 90 metaphors, he refers to ideonomy as a “‘Natural Science’ of Ideas.”

This means that, fundamentally, Gunkel’s theory of ideas recognizes ideas—no matter how you define them—as natural objects, i.e., fundamental data with properties and dimensions that can be scientifically studied.

Where do ideas exist?

Where do they live?

Gunkel called the realm of “all possible ideas” the ideocosm, a sort of additional layer to the universe that may have some precedent in the term “noosphere” or “sphere of mind” as developed by philosophers, including Pierre Telihard de Chardin, toward the beginning of the 20th century.

On page 16 of his Definitions and Metaphors document, Gunkel wrote:

You can see, right away, that Gunkel is not shying away from a correlation between mathematics and ideonomy with his reference to Kurt Göedel, an influential 20th century logician and philosopher.

Göedel believed that numbers really exist in a timeless realm, and that mathematicians discover truths about this realm rather than inventing them.

Göedel’s concept is known as “mathematical Platonism,” a reference to the Platonic concept of the Forms.

And although Gunkel’s theory of ideas differed substantially from Plato, the concept of an abstract realm that contains information about numbers, mathematics, counting systems, and the like, would no doubt be a critical domain within Gunkel’s ideocosm.

Certainly Gunkel believed one of the purposes for ideonomy was to discover and extract ideas from the ideocosm, discovering truths rather than inventing them—much as Göedel felt about mathematics.

Ideonomy is deep.

Really deep.

And this post only lays out the faintest outline of a true theory of ideas as described by Gunkel.

Many thinkers and authors since the time of Plato and probably even before have sought to develop a theory of ideas.

For Plato, it was his famous “Theory of Forms” referenced above.

For C.S. Peirce, it was his semiotic system of signs, objects, and interpretants that was intended to help explain how meaning is conveyed.

But what’s important to note is that, in addition to these and other conceptualizations of ideas, no academic community has ever congealed around, and agreed upon, a theory from which to conduct empirical testing.

As an example, check out a 2023 book called Towards a Science of Ideas in which over a dozen authors discussed how to define ideas and what a “science” of them might mean.²

What these authors didn’t seem to realize was that Gunkel, as founder of ideonomy, pointed a clear way forward in the 1980s and that his approach has never been understood and recognized by dozens of academic communities that have needed it.

To return to the headline of my article, humanity desperately needs a theory of ideas.

Yet scientists have never acknowledged that ideas can yield to study despite the fact that we see the impact of ideas every day in real time, with political battles being won and lost, economies rising and falling, and bizarre memes like “67” going viral and taking up the brain-space of elementary school students much to the disappointment of their math teachers.

It’s time for the scientific community to finally recognize that ideas can be the subject of empirical study.

We can start by hypothesizing that Gunkel’s ideocosm, i.e., the universe from which all possible ideas can be derived, is as real as (and part of) our own universe.

Once scientists can make this deductive leap of faith, the rest will take care of itself.

And in future issues of this newsletter, I will lay out for you exactly how Gunkel saw this happening.

References:

(1) https://ideonomy.mit.edu/intro.html

(2) https://www.vernonpress.com/index.php/book/1545