originals and copies

A VERY RICH POST by Levi this morning on originals and copies. I was going to paste one of his paragraphs here, but I’m not sure which one I like best. The entire post is thought-provoking, and in my opinion quite on target.

OK, here’s one that makes good sense in isolation:

“From the standpoint of repetition or iteration, Berkeley is an abject failure. You’d be hard put to find many iterations of Berkeley in the form of followers or those who carry the Berkeleyian flame. Yet Berkeley is far more devious than that. Berkeley persists not by getting his work copied– though somehow he manages to do that too –but by forcing others to respond.”

And here’s another:

“This is why arguments to the effect that ‘thinker x already did y’ are generally facile. They are a form of trumpery that strives to assimilate each repetition to brute repetition…”

I would point out that pretty much any thinker can be made a victim of this sort of charge. My least favorite, which often occurs among analytic readers (including good ones: see both Rorty and Okrent) is the trope that Heidegger’s insights were all anticipated by Dewey, so that as a result Heidegger’s main value beyond Dewey is merely that he did the legwork of thousands of pages of historical interpretation.