How can you distinguish an original thought from one that is only the resultant of a set of received ideas? From the moment an idea is written down it cannot be revisited, at least if the aim was for it to be original, it becomes an end instead of a beginning. Every utterance having been a probe into the unspeakable, which fails to the degree that it succeeds. You always fail to be original, but every failure is an additional foreclosure which raises the stakes. Is there what is needed for an original thought to arise? The event no matter how trivial is absolutely distinct, unprecedented, and yet what comes out of it falls short because it is addressed to a generic other. To see something without preconceptions, without the reference to received ideas? Only if thought were a kind of seeing instead of a striving for intelligibility, for a legibility addressed to a god-like thou. A thought does not crystallise from a cloud of ideas but from a cloud of words. You are a freedom that chooses to express that freedom in a limited way, necessarily incomplete, not quite making sense. It is not the speaking that needs to be new but the hearing.
Friday, 5 January 2018
How can you distinguish an original thought from one that is only the resultant of a set of received ideas? From the moment an idea is written down it cannot be revisited, at least if the aim was for it to be original, it becomes an end instead of a beginning. Every utterance having been a probe into the unspeakable, which fails to the degree that it succeeds. You always fail to be original, but every failure is an additional foreclosure which raises the stakes. Is there what is needed for an original thought to arise? The event no matter how trivial is absolutely distinct, unprecedented, and yet what comes out of it falls short because it is addressed to a generic other. To see something without preconceptions, without the reference to received ideas? Only if thought were a kind of seeing instead of a striving for intelligibility, for a legibility addressed to a god-like thou. A thought does not crystallise from a cloud of ideas but from a cloud of words. You are a freedom that chooses to express that freedom in a limited way, necessarily incomplete, not quite making sense. It is not the speaking that needs to be new but the hearing.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.