On Plagiarism
“Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.” *
Obviously, it is difficult to ‘create new knowledge’.
Asking this of every apprentice, every novice, is a fool's errand. Of course the errant undergraduate consorts with the essay-writing robot. His *actual* intelligence is telling him that he knows nothing - correctly - in which recognition is his actual wisdom, and in which he is of course transhistorically the ally of Socrates. And, it is telling him as well that if what the task asks is ‘artificial’, why not fight fire with fire? In other words, where there is a circus, send in the clowns.
The so-called “production of knowledge” as a *proof of potential*, at the very outset of a career of learning, is a farce. There is nothing new under the sun. When it comes to the outsize armies of undergraduates our civilization is now producing, in the ‘satanic mills’ of ‘elite overproduction’ (Blake meets Turchin) - the order of the day should lastingly be:
an *encounter* with existing knowledge
( … the proper term of study for which is a lifetime. - Plato)
and:
an openness to this being a “transformative experience” (L. A. Paul)
Education is a sapiential psychotechnology for metanoia.
(“What did you call me?”)
Education is conversion to truth.
Education is preparation for participation in conversation.
For some large swathes of intellectual history (and not necessarily in its most recondite, navel-gazing outskirts, but rather in certain of its richest pockets of productivity and conviviality), the done thing for making a contribution was to produce a commentary on a well-known and widely accredited canonical, standard work. Often this took the endearingly self-effacing form of simply taking on the nom de plume of the *original author*, so that there are examples of *generations* of development all being lovingly attributed to an authorship with a *single name*. Or, if not this, then at least homage as rite-of-passage. Shall we listen to you? First let’s see what you have to say about the existing sentences of Lombard.
So where is “plagiarism” here? Compare this culture of deference, humility, and respect for the vastness of what has come before (versus the smallness of oneself), with one of its contemporary alternatives: the culture of “publish or perish”, a.k.a. flogging the dead horse. Or, criticism rather than commentary, a.k.a. looking it in the mouth.
Of course history is real, unprecedented things occur, even in the minds of scholars, and in addition to timeless search there is certainly timely re-search, as a valid exercise. I acknowledge creativity and its value. I say not that the production of new knowledge is impossible, but that it is uncommon. Authentic erudition is a scarce resource.
It is in this environment of largely unattainable benchmarks, this paradigm of novelty, and most of all this triumph of the deliverables (as opposed to scholarship on the model of a Quaker meeting: stay silent and recollect until such time as you are authentically moved to speak something valuable from the heart, a “message from the spirit”) that the current conversation surrounding plagiarism takes place. I am less interested in the careers of individuals than in the culture of mindboggling ‘productivity’ (papers written never to be cited), the “tyranny of metrics” (Muller), the “reign of quantity” (Guenon) - *clearly* leading to a drop in quality, a scraping of the barrel’s bottom, a gnawing the dry bones of the buffalo of ideas, and a kind of snake-eating-its-own tail critical frenzy to be the first to draw up new charges for old culprits, long asleep in their graves, or else, in a different mode, to find out new ways to skin a cat evermore. With funding annually renewed. ( … by bartleby the grantwriter, who would, in truth, ‘prefer not to’… )
The enterprise of the university is *by no means* bankrupt, however much the incumbents have or have not lost their way. The universe of the unknown remains in the same infinite proportion to our knowledge as it has always, perennially been. Saith Schrödinger (yes, he of the cat):
For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours?
And so, the project of self-understanding (gnothi seauton, which was just auto-corrected to ‘gnocchi season’, which is about as apt a ‘commentary’ on our culture as is perhaps needed…) continues apace, wherever it might. And so far I have not touched much on ‘Science’ but glancingly - but assuredly there too, mountains of understanding remain to be climbed. Although, here is the astronomer Robert Jastrow:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
This must necessarily be followed by:
"The fundamental questions of theology have been passionately considered for at least three thousand years. It is not only insufferable arrogance to think that one can begin theologizing in sovereign disregard of this history; it is also extremely uneconomical. It seems rather a waste of time to spend, say, five years working out a position, only to find that it has already been done by a Syrian monk in the fifth century. The very least that a knowledge of religious traditions has to offer is a catalogue of heresies for possible home use..."
And so you see, among other things, that often a simple acquaintance with what has been said before is what is necessary and sufficient for insight. The last quote is Peter Berger’s, in A Rumor of Angels, and it is one of my favorites. I need not add much.
* The epigraph quote above is by Thomas Sowell.
Very interesting... The path to knowledge is imitation, that is what I have found out also. Building up from first principles, if you are a novice, is a sure way of getting stuck.