"Something Borrowed" is a brilliant essay penned by Malcolm Gladwell, which I only came across yesterday evening in a crowded cafeteria over a cup of iced coffee. I call it brilliant because since I read it I could not stop thinking about the concept of originality. The essay discusses issues of plagiarism and intellectual copyright, all interesting stuff, but one phrase at the end of the essay triggered my train of thought: "chains of influence and evolution".
This phrase captures the notion that all of our thoughts, ideas and creations are influenced and inspired by thoughts, ideas and creations that we have been exposed to at some point in our lives. True that we have never been able to prove the notion of causality, that things are caused by other things, but empirical experience seems to suggest that there is a causal progression in the way humans behave for the most part. Yet, we define the word original as "a primary form or type from which varieties are derived". It seems to me that everything we think of, design, create, invent is a derivative - there is a causal chain leading to it. There seem to be no 'primary forms'. Does that mean that axiomatically nothing can really be called original?
The one exception to the nothing-is-axiomatically-original notion would be the first idea I should suppose, because that truly was a first. So that implies that there is a "God-idea" from which all other ideas are derived. So what was the first idea we ever had?
