There are no more new ideas — and that's ok
Are there truly any new ideas, or are all modern "innovations" just repackaged versions of ancient wisdom?
I first read about Archimedes and his famous gold crown story in fifth grade. The king of Syracuse, Hiero II, tasked him with figuring out if a crown gifted to him was made entirely of gold. The king worried that the goldsmith had simply plated a cheap metal crown with a veneer of gold, but he wanted to ensure that the crown remained completely undamaged. With this declaration, Hiero handed the crown to Archimedes.
Archimedes worked on this question endlessly but couldn't make any progress on the solution. Flummoxed, he decided to mull over the answer while taking a bath. He submerged himself in the tub and, while fiddling with the crown, realized that the buoyant force acting on the gold crown would have to be equivalent to that of a pure gold nugget of the same weight. If he could accurately measure these quantities, he could solve the king's challenge.
Eureka! — I have found it! — he shouted, and then, utterly captivated by his potential discovery, ran into the streets naked. Supposedly.
This story has always held a special place in my heart as the model of discovery. It's a particularly romantic notion, where the thinker spends days and days pondering a particularly intractable problem and then solves the problem in an iridescent blaze of insight after days of intellectual battle.
Unfortunately, I've found this rarely happens in my life. What typically happens for me is that I will often think of an insightful new idea, do some preliminary research, and then discover that some 19th-century European philosopher has already chanced upon the same idea. Or I'll be thinking about a new idea, chat with a friend about it, and then I'm directed to the fact that the same idea has been expressed in an ancient Chinese text.
There was incredible frustration as I sat at my desk, furiously poring through my notes and lacking any new insight. There was anger with a dash of inferiority — I wasn’t able to create anything new or novel. For quite some time, I found this to be tremendously demotivating and I wrestled and struggled with this discomfort.
I was stretching myself as far as I could, pushing my intellectual bounds, yet all I grasped had already been created by others. I had issued myself a Sisyphean task and it continued to taunt me.
It wasn't until I realized that many of the most generative and insightful thinkers I knew, people I held in incredible esteem for their innovative thinking, also didn't have fundamentally new ideas. Many of these incredibly insightful ideas are pieces of timeless wisdom, recontextualized for our current society and environment. And there's an incredible amount of value in this approach.
It's similar to the approach we take towards studying history, illustrated by the historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood points out that studying history is essentially a reconstitution of past thought through studying surviving relics of thought. We juxtapose this past thought with the thought of the present, and we draw contrasts and comparisons to better understand our own times.
Our historical relics are those ideas we unearth from the past, from the legacy and heritage of the people before us. Our recontextualization process adapts these ideas to our current 21st-century environment.
There are no new ideas.
Or, more accurately, many "new" ideas are reformulations of existing ideas but interpreted to be maximally adapted for the current environment we all share. At the very least, even novel ideas and discoveries borrow from existing frameworks and developments — Newton's standing on the shoulders of giants idea comes to mind here.
Reflecting on this, I've found a certain degree of comfort in this new perspective. I've long held that there's maximal truth in domains where disparate ideas converge to common solutions, which is what these ideas demonstrate.
It means that we're all fundamentally human, and a core string connects us throughout time. Too often, we focus on what does change instead of concentrating on what doesn't change. What doesn't change, across all the different eras, various geographies, and a multitude of circumstances is that the core actor is human.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. That's because it's just different actors replaying the same play. Human psychology — including all of its miracles and deficiencies — will always be there. The context will change, and we will always need people to reinterpret the knowledge of the past to move us forward.
I feared unoriginality because I clung to an over-romanticized conception of what I thought intellectual discovery should have been. I ignored the wonder of stumbling upon ideas others had previously chanced upon. Instead of being disheartened by our converging thought processes, I should have focused on adding to the existing body of knowledge.
As Mark Twain pointed out: "When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his."
From this, my frustration morphed into excitement and optimism. It's reframing an individual goal of discovery to being a part of something bigger than me. It's taking other people's ideas and then thanking them by building their idea into the larger idea scaffold of human knowledge.
So, in homage to that ideal, I'll leave with someone else's idea:
"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." — Salvador Dali.