Wednesday, September 4, 2019

A Mistaken Attitude Towards Originality

There are those who refuse to acknowledge the significance of another person's points unless there is something among them that is new--new in the sense that it has been unexplored or at least mostly ignored by previous thinkers.  While there are plenty of truths that have seemingly been ignored completely by historical philosophers and theologians [1], as well as a handful of truths I have sometimes only partially alluded to [2] which not even a single other rationalist has claimed to discover, a fact's importance is not determined by its popularity or originality.  A reluctance to embrace truths that have been widely communicated to the world ironically even interferes with the very goal of originality.

A common myth about originality holds that a person cannot be original without discovering something completely new, or perhaps something that has never become popularized or acknowledged by more than a select few--but this is only one form of originality.  Contrary to this false idea, discovering logical facts (or scientific laws) on one's own is also a manifestation of originality, even if those facts are not esoteric, previously unknown, or only known by a very small number of people.  Regardless, a given truth is important or unimportant because of its own nature, not because it is scarcely or widely known.

Each individual who genuinely pursues truth is capable of some degree of autonomous, rationalistic discovery of logical facts, regardless of how vital those facts are.  All that is necessary for this process to involve genuine originality is that a person's conclusions are their own: in other words, they do not accept the claims of others without personally analyzing them, and they could even recognize logical facts without ever conversing with another person or reading authors.  Originality of the first kind diminishes in frequency over time, but this second kind of originality is always accessible and always needed in one's pursuit of truth.

Only a fool denies that autonomy is its own form of originality, but it is even more foolish to think that truth is secondary to originality.  Anyone who is uninterested in a claim if it is not novel is not concerned with rationality, and thus may not be genuinely concerned with the originality that autonomy allows.  He or she very well might simply be set on merely impressing people instead of pursuing originality of either kind because of its inherent connection to truth.  Even if that is not the objective, such a person is only an irrational thinker at most.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-list-of-neglected-truths.html

[2].  While I have already written about dozens of key truths that no known historical philosopher ever even brought up, there are only around six logical facts I can think of that absolutely no one else has claimed to have ever realized prior to me revealing them--two of which I have openly addressed on one occasion each in previous posts, two of which I have just briefly hinted at, and two of which I have not mentioned here at all.  I will eventually release a series that emphasizes these facts one at a time.

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