KNOWING THE IDEA FROM THE CONCEPT

I am as guilty as anyone of having used the two terms almost interchangeably-- and by "anyone," I mean a number of philosophers, ranging from Hume to Cassirer, who use either one or both terms inconsistently. Yet, the root associations for each word still continue in demotic usage. The archaic Greek etymology stresses that an "idea" is something one sees, and in demotic use this is reflected by the proverbial trope of a "light bulb" blinking on when one gets a new idea. Indeed, comics-creator Carl Barks played with this common visual trope by giving his genius-inventor character Gyro Gearloose a little robot "helper" who had a light-bulb for a head.

In contrast, though there's no standard sensory trope associated with "concept," said word does trace its lineage back to Latin, where the word connoted the physical conception of every human being within the womb. And for human beings, the birth of a new living thing is by no means as quick a thing as the act of seeing, so I tend to think of "ideas" as simple notions that may or may not prove useful, while "concepts" are ideas that have been worked out more thoroughly in terms of real-world applications. I would not be surprised to find that this or that philosopher has used these two terms in ways opposed to the way I choose to use them, but that's my choice nonetheless. At least part of my preference stems from my readings of Cassirer. particularly the frequently raised topic of how "theoretical thought" descends from the earlier and more expressive form of "mythical thought." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides this handy summation:

Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is a concern for the more “primitive” forms of world-presentation underlying the “higher” and more sophisticated cultural forms – a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the mythical view of the world lying at the most primitive level of all. For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations of “symbolic meaning” now have an independent status and foundational role that is quite incompatible with both Marburg neo-Kantianism and Kant’s original philosophical conception. In particular, they lie at a deeper, autonomous level of spiritual life which then gives rise to the more sophisticated forms by a dialectical developmental process. From mythical thought, religion and art develop; from natural language, theoretical science develops. It is precisely here that Cassirer appeals to “romantic” philosophical tendencies lying outside the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition, deploys an historical dialectic self-consciously derived from Hegel, and comes to terms with the contemporary Lebensphilosophie of Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Max Scheler, and Georg Simmel – as well as with the closely related philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

As an example of my own imperfect use of at least the term "idea," in one April 2021 essay I attempted to identify the different types of tropes underlying the two abstractive potentialities:

In literature as in other cultural forms, all potentialities express themselves through processes of discourse. The discourses of “lateral meanings” deal with concrete subject matter—that of what sensations the subject experiences, and of the subject’s emotional reactions to those sensations. In contrast, the discourses of “vertical meanings” concern themselves with abstractions, with the didactic making use of “ideas” while the mythopoeic makes use of “symbols.” For the sake of argument, I will treat both ideas and symbols as if they existed as discrete monads, which is not the way either are experienced. Both ideas and symbols are best expressed in the form of typical story-tropes. Levi-Strauss was pleased to term these tropes “mythemes,” conveniently ignoring how such monadic forms were dispersed throughout all forms of human communication, not just myth.

Whenever I thought about the matter, I wasn't entirely comfortable with my opposition between mythopoeic "symbols" and didactic "ideas," particularly when I'd specified that neither of them were experienced as any sort of monadic entities. I'm now specifying that any "idea," as I use the term, is primarily a symbolic construct, given that it functions to describe a base relation between one or more symbols. In contrast, a "concept" is primarily a didactic construct, since the one who conceives it is attempting to give it a more developed form, with one's own mind providing the analogue to fetal development within the womb. So in future, whenever I refer to the types of tropes favored by either the mythopoeic or the didactic potentiality, I will speak of the former as "idea-tropes" and the latter as "concept-tropes."

I can't over-stress the importance of "the idea" as a mental construct that is first and foremost expressive rather than rigorously logical. Some ideas, as noted above, form the basis of developed conceptual systems, a familiar example being the mutation of the Judeo-Christian "idea" of "the believing elect" into a more didactic form, such as the socialist "concept" of the rise of the proletariat, which is, at least in theory, more responsive to real-world considerations.

I will conclude with an example of the sort of impractical symbol-play one encounters with pure ideas taken from my recent review of SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE. I wrote:

As poor as the script is, I can see some potential in the basic imagery here, which is the only reason I gave QUEST a "fair" mythicity rating. Superman attempts to get rid of Earth's nuclear weapons by tossing them into the sun. In rude poetic terms, the weapons "get even" by spawning their own champion who journeys to Earth and almost kills the hero. 

I assumed that I should credit writers Konnor and Rosenthal for the final form of the script, and that Chris Reeve was only responsible for the base idea of tossing nuclear weapons into the sun. Reeve's initial notion would be a fragmentary idea-trope by itself, probably derived from the opinion that a hero from a destroyed world might be proactive about preventing the destruction of his adopted world. Konnor and Rosenthal may have been given the basic idea of providing a framework for an "imperfect duplicate" of Superman by someone else, but I speculate that they would have elaborated Reeve's one-note idea into a slightly more elaborate framework of idea-tropes. It's not a didactic concept, given that at no point do the writers claim that the weapons are "angry" at Superman for "killing" them, and since they cannot act, the villain Luthor must be responsible for spawning Nuclear Man. Another didactic development of the idea-framework might have also intimated that the sun was pissed off at the hero from dumping all of these weapons in its maw, and thus the solar body is also complicit in spawning Superman's nemesis-- though once again, Luthor has to provide all the heavy lifting for any inanimate objects. Even Luthor's mode of creating Nuclear Man, that of using a hair from the hero's head to make the duplicate, embodies a symbolic idea, though as I recall Konnor and Rosenthal don't even attempt to invoke the still-nascent science of cloning to make the genesis of Nuclear Man more "logical." Frankly, the original comics-method by which Luthor birthed Bizarro was more forthright. But I can't claim that the method itself displayed any mythic idea-tropes, even though Bizarro himself did, as discussed here.

I will probably explore the process of concept-formation, as opposed to idea-formation, in a future post.

ADDENDUM 1-28-2022: Roughly six years prior to this essay I addressed some similar developmental formulations in A PAUSE FOR POTENTIALITIES, where I said:

Now, I agree with Jung's comment that "ideas" are developed out of what might as well be called "images" (Kant called these lesser elements "notions.")