Where have I heard that before, Squeers?

"… it's a nice illustration that thought is never original or independent…"

Because I have had heaps of original thoughts and ideas only to have them spoilt later by finding out other minds had got there before me – but in my mind and time-frame of reference, I hold the patent.

As for, "… dialectics. I often wonder at what it precludes." The answer would be – not very much that is useful.

It would be a world and an existence best exemplified by the answers to: "How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?"

Now this is getting interesting.

I've just looked up some stuff in Koestler's "The Ghost in the Machine" on this very subject. He writes of forms of self-repair - biological and mental - describing the creative process as a "draw back and leap" process:

"... the decisive breakthroughs in science, art or philosophy are successful escapes from blind alleys, from the bondage of mental habits, orthodoxy and over-speciaisation. The method of escape follows the same undoing-re-doing pattern as in biological evolution; the zigzag course of advance in science or art repeats....A quick glance at the evolution of astronomy will make the "zigzag pattern" clearer. Newton once said that if he could see further than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants....He adopted Galileo's laws of free fall, but rejected Galileo's astronomy. He adopted Kepler's planetary laws, but demolished the rest of the Keplerian edifice. He did not take as his point of departure their completed "adult" theories, but retraced their development to the point where it had gone wrong. Nor was the Keplarian edifice built on top of of the Copernican edifice. That ramshackle structure of epicycles he tore down; he kept only the foundations. Nor did Copernicus continue to build where Ptolemy had left off. He went back two thousand years to Aristarchus. All great revolutions show, as already said, a totally "paedomorphic" character. They demand as much undoing as redoing."

"From Pythagoras, who combined arithmetic and geometry, to Newton, who combined Galileo's studies of the motion of projectiles with Kepler's equations of planetary orbits, to Einstein, who unified energy and matter in a single sinister equation, the pattern is always the same. The creative act does not create something out of nothing....it combines, reshuffles and relates already existing but hitherto separate ideas, facts, frames of perception, associative concepts. This act of cross-fertilization--or self-fertilization within a single brain--seems to be the essence of creativity..."

Intellectual autogamy… An excellent example, Poirot.

In the universe – which is the experience of my mind as I have experienced it – that "self-fertilization within a single brain" was first thought of by me.

Now I know, never having read The Ghost in the Machine, that Koestler got there earlier in the timeframe of the external universe we (apparently) share.

More than the science of quantum physics can be spooky.

This is Garstang's Diagram:

http://analytikainc.com/blog/2011/04/07/garstangs-theory/

which represents his theory of the progress of biological evolution by paedomorphosis. Koestler applies this theory also to "ideas":

"...The emergence of biological novelties and the creation of mental novelties are processes which show certain analogies. It is of course a truism that in mental evolution social inheritance through tradition and written records replaces genetic inheritance. But the analogy goes deeper: neither biological evolution nor mental progress follows a continuous line....Neither of them is strictly cumulative in the sense of continuing to build where the last generation has left off. Both proceed in the zigzag fashion indicated in this diagram. The revolutions in the history of science are successful escapes from blind alleys. The evolution of knowledge is continuous only during those periods of consolidation and elaboration which follow a major break-through, Sooner or later, however, consolidation leads to increasing rigidity, orthodoxy, and so into the dead end of overspecialisation...."

I've used the "zig-zag" metaphor and the "Lost Patrol" analogy myself to describe the dialectical vagaries and predilections of thought. The Lost Patrol always ends up somewhere but its trails through the desert are obsessive, meandering routes, driven by the mentality of the thinkers within a mindscape of perhaps infinite possibility. We're never objectively inclined, but subjectively driven and biased according to the foundational-delusion of freedom and rational integrity—a nice paradox. According to Boethius, “You can never impose upon a free spirit, nor can you deprive a rationally self-possessed mind of its equanimity”, but this is giving more credit to the worried animal than the goad
The resort to reason is (originally) not indicative of a free spirit, but an harassed one, driven from corporeality into flights of fancy. According to Nietzsche, reason is the delusional refuge of the “inner-self”. Modern rationalism has its roots in religion—the rationalisations of the oppressed—progressed from flight and denialism to fetishism. What I said about religion encouraging an “eccentric separation of body and mind that's nothing less than deviant”, is arguably yet more true of “disinterested reason”, which is a kind of asceticism of disembodiment, enchanted with its diversions.
Indeed, reason has constructed such cathedrals in the air its now akin to religion in its perverse meditations and devotions to itself—to the elaborate, artificial world of the mind it’s created, at the expense of corporeal “reality”.
I'm not against reason, I’m wary of its procrastinating “progress”—of its etymology and tendency to conceit.
According to Christian missionary William Swan,
“Means should be taken to excite in them [Mongolians] a spirit of enquiry. The people should be taught ‘to think’ [to flee the body!], and to consider this as their undoubted privilege. When they learn that freedom of thought [sic] and action in religious matters is their inalienable right, their eyes will then begin to open upon the deceitful maxims of their own priesthood”.

Reason comes after the fall; it’s the mean refuge of the exile cum castles in the air.
Graham was right to allude to Paradise Lost—never had!

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Dear WmTrevor,

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I think I see what you mean about original ideas.

I find it impossible to count the number of ideas I have had since I was born. It all started out at conception. During the long months of gestation in my mother's womb and after birth, while I was a baby and a toddler, just about every single idea I had was original. My mind was like a supercomputer churning out millions of fantastically original ideas at enormous speed.

I must have been a genius in those days.

As I grew up and went to school there were more and more repeats or simply variants of previous ideas. The number of original ideas began to thin out exponentially until they eventually became an extremely rare exception.

Now that I am old and a grandfather, I don't seem to have any original ideas any more. Just old, used-out ones, I guess.

As I look back, my whole life seems to have been just one huge downhill slide. The lines on my Garstang’s diagram don't zigzag any more. I'm afraid they have remained despairingly flat for several years now.

I guess I have left originality far behind me and entered the final phase of my life where I no longer have any need of it.

I now advance at a moderate pace like a blind man with his cane, feeling his way with utmost precaution, hoping that perhaps,one day, I'll somehow manage to approach that ever receding horizon called wisdom.

It's my last resort.

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