In yesterday’s post I began a meditation on ways in which debates about intellectual property might be re-imagined so as to get beyond the entertainment industry’s simple conclusion that “theft is theft.”
To continue with that line of thought, in early-modern Europe the notion that using someone else’s music or ideas was a form of theft would have seemed very odd. By the seventeenth-century, we begin to find clear statements of the humanist idea that creativity builds on a bounty inherited from the past, or gathered from the community at hand. Sir Isaac Newton famously spoke of himself as having stood “on the shoulders of Giants.”
The phrase comes from a letter that he wrote to Robert Hooke in 1675, the context being a debate with Hooke about who had priority in arriving at the theory of colors. Newton manages to combine humility with an assertion of his own achievement, writing:
“What DesCartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colors of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
The sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote an amusing book, On the Shoulders of Giants, in which he shows that this famous phrase did not originate with Newton; it was coined by Bernard of Chartres in the early twelfth century, the original aphorism being “In comparison with the ancients, we stand like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” The image was a commonplace by the time Newton used it, his one contribution being to erase any sense that he himself might be a dwarf.
Newton’s self-conception aside, Alexander Pope’s praising couplet — “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; / God said Let Newton be! and all was light” — shows that in the popular imagination no humanist sense of debt to one’s forebears ever wholly replaced the older idea that divine forces were at work. At the same time, after the Reformation those forces were thought to be concentrated in certain heroic individuals, geniuses visited by a spark of celestial insight.
In a 1774 speech made during Parliamentary debates over literary property, Lord Camden offered an evocative description of how we should conceive of created work if we begin with the assumption that creative individuals have been touched by a “ray of divinity”:
“If there be any thing in the world common to all mankind, science and learning are in their nature publici juris [belonging to the public by right], and they ought to be as free and general as air or water. They forget their Creator, as well as their fellow creatures, who wish to monopolize his noblest gifts and greatest benefits…. Those great men, those favoured mortals, those sublime spirits, who share that ray of divinity which we call genius, are intrusted by Providence with the delegated power of imparting to their fellow-creatures that instruction which heaven meant for universal benefit; they must not be niggards to the world, or hoard up for themselves the common stock.”
Combining that Providential ray with his “great men” theory allows Lord Camden to move from individual talent to a wider, common good.
Figuring talent as among God’s “noblest gifts” also allows the link to all the other commodious gifts of creation, such as air and water. In Roman law those things whose size and range make them difficult if not impossible to own — all the fish in the sea, the seas themselves, the atmosphere — belong to a category of res communes, common things. To that list Camden is adding the fruits of science and learning (once they have been made public), and thus produces a frame that has descended into the present moment.
In a Supreme Court opinion from 1918, Justice Louis Brandeis declared that “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions — knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas — become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”
Lord Camden’s theological justification for treating ideas as if they were “air or water” may have eroded in the last 200 years, but the useful category of res communes still persists.
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Lewis Hyde teaches in the English Department at Kenyon College. Most recently, he edited The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau .