KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA63 (Leslie / Rees)

Commentary 37 (to C30, Wood)

( ORIGINALITY )
by Adrian van der Meijden
21 February 2004, posted 13 March 2004

I'll comment to one point, that of originality. It's rather a case of ignorance, grounded in the belief that detail tells all and that context and background or theory has no relation to what *we* designate to be real. Rosamund Tuve, in a book on Elizabethan Rhetoric, hides in a footnote the comment that our antiquity was every bit as informed as we are. Academia has this grandiose ability to blandly ignore information it does not like. I learnt that when reading bibliographies with many titles missing that did not belong to whichever school of thought the author subscribed to. After all the permute of a set of concepts and assumptions has an only limited set of extrapolations. I also recall reading that when a bureaucrat seeks to control a situation new words are coined and here in NZ our monopoly Nanny State is hard at it. Meanwhile shall we elect Tweedledee or Tweedledum?

"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside." - Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.

Which quote, amusingly and otherwise, entails the same trick of dys-information, mainly, I fancy because education seldom includes a thorough grounding in history, nor, come to think of it, do essays. Literary plots go back to the oldest of myths and as to political ploys they are older still. Coleridge names three kinds of creativity: globally new, culturally stolen or revived and individually cyclic repeats, as when junior discovers sex. Or the public stands informed of something.

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Adrian van der Meijden