I’m not sure when I’ll get around to reading it, but I just ordered The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom.
The premise of the book sounds very similar to Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors”.
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The people I know who are most preoccupied with fending off influence and protecting their originality are the ones who haven’t even begun to liberate themselves from the influence of culture. These people tend to rethink what’s been well-thought and in fact, thought all the way through and out again by men who have accepted the humiliation of being taught.
The irony of intellectual pride is that it tends to make a thinker complacent and less likely to work and win less obvious knowledge. The disinclination to acknowledge one’s intellectual debt to one’s culture is the arrogance of youth. The extreme and uncritical valuation of originality of thought which makes the youth prefer to overlook his debt to the past is one of the more conspicuous symptoms of this debt.
Arrogance: ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin arrogant– ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare.
I am interested in the liberation from culture, but to the end of it’s substitution for systematics.
I don’t mind paying respect to my elders ;) but what do my elders respect?
I wonder…..and you may contend the point is irrelevant, Just as I might realize I have said something foolish mere moments after I’ve clicked *Submit Comment*, but couldn’t the inverse argument be made? and is it any less valid?
The people I know who are most preoccupied with the debt of youth to culture and defending the established are the ones who have only begun to liberate themselves from the influence of culture but failed to arrive. These people tend to toil endlessly in search for the new territory , honorably accepting , with humility the role of the student even while they fail to learn from themselves.
Humility taken too far might not be ironic at all. The thinker may be active rather than complacent , and he may ferret out less obvious knowledge, yet find he breaks no new ground and with growing contempt for seemingly less deserving who stumble on with (seemingly) no cause to explain how or why . The over determination to acknowledge ones debt to ones culture is the may be the apathy of age. It could be that the extreme and critical valuation of the established knowledge base which makes the elder prefer to overlook his debt to those in the youth who is in the best position to see with young eyes the new is one of the more conspicuous symptoms of this debt.
I wish to note the number of great thinkers to whom I often pay homage privately, but a few seem to be aware that the further they went the less they seemed to understand.
There seems to me to be a codependent relationship which exists between the responsibility to know thyself
and the difficulty of keeping up with this responsibility as thyself becomes increasingly more complex and difficult to know.
This is not Irony.
I’ll repost the email I just sent you:
All I’m saying is that there is a lot to learn from those who came before. That doesn’t mean to assume anyone is right before you’ve seen it yourself, but rather it means, as you put it, not to close any doors, especially not for the sake of originality. The exaltation of originality and the belief that this originality is best cultivated through exclusion of influence were both inventions of the 18th century and are an inheritance: an inherited disease.
Yes: Many conservatives I’ve met strike me as bitter and impotent, and motivated by irritability to discourage anyone who would like to create something new. I hate that spirit. However, there are also many worshipers of innovation who innovate in order to feel innovative, and these people are just as bad, because they undermine teaching. On the surface they avoid influence, but if you observe their behavior what they actually avoid is the feeling of having been influenced. A famous example: Freud stopped reading Nietzsche because he feared intellectual domination. What the hell kind of relationship with knowledge is that? He is more interested in the social by-products of knowledge than in knowledge itself. Universities have been ruined by this relationship to knowledge.
In the end for me faith manifests as willingness to listen and to experiment and to endure the anxiety of learning beyond what I am prepared to know. If I detect that sterile bitterness or that anarchic vanity in what I’m reading, though, I drop that writer immediately.
In just this single paragraph you have said so much that leaves me convicted within…thank you…I have some growing to do.