Is there such thing as "Originality"?

2024, 01/21

A while ago, I noticed a discussion among the Bear community, which derived from Aco asking "what does it really mean to be original?" I have been anxiously and sorrowfully mulling this over for a very long time as well. However, recently I began asking myself, "is there such a thing as originality?"

I brought myself to this question when I realized that I had been teasing a lot with my online English speaking friends. I often say to them, "I'm going to steal these words / idioms / sentence structures from you!" Following that joke, I started thinking to myself, if I steal things, does that actually make me a thief? And if that is the case, am I allowed to say that every English word that I'm using is a product of my theft, or in other words, the product of my plagiarism?

Well, that actually makes a lot of sense, because to take the simplest example: As a native Mandarin speaker who doesn't travel abroad, when I talk to the majority of the people in my offline life, I never use the word I to refer to myself, but use the Mandarin word 我 instead, (except when there's an English teacher or an actual English speaker standing in front of me). I steal the word I when I think of and talk about myself in English, but what is "originally" mine is the word 我. So, what's truly "original" about this thief when she thinks and writes in English?

I'm still not sure if I'm truly a thief. Let's take sides here.

So, what does it mean to be original? To be honest, after reading all the Bear posts that joined the discussion, I haven't seen any of them that actually gave me an answer to this question. They pretty much all follow something kind of like the self-fulfilling prophecy: i.) what I write feels "unoriginal"; → ii.) I expect what I write to be "original"; → iii.) I find that it is hard for me to live up to this expectation; → iiii.) let's just give up on this idea of "original" writing, because no matter what, writing is a good thing. None of them has told me how I could restrain a feeling of meaninglessness when I find what I'm doing doesn't feel original—especially when I'm not writing completely "for myself".

To follow a tradition in philosophical or scientific writing, I think I need to offer a definition of the key concept(s) that we talk about. My dictionary says,

I don't bother to elaborate on why I've doubted that there is something completely "new" or "different from anything that has existed before". If you just do a little bit of research online, you will find that people have been debating over this for decades and centuries. Today, there's still heated discussion about creativity among creators, and among the people who work on copyright laws and infringement cases too. As my friend Minerva once told me, the students at ArtCenter have been exploring the boundary between the creativity of human beings and that of AI. Human beings and AI, who's the thief?

Back to the side taking, if you believe I am the thief, you will find that the creativity of my writing doesn't come from "originality". Instead, it comes from my "authenticity", and that's what enables me to not look like a thief. Authenticity is a mix of things that have already existed. Now, I've come to believe that a better mix of things is what we should go for in our creative works.

Lili said in her post that there are two ways to know where we are going—to either guide the wind or to follow a nice one. Still, when you choose to guide the wind, it's hard to say that what you're doing is "original". What you have not "discovered" yet isn't something that's actually "new", because it's already there. Only the action of guiding the wind, but not the wind that you guide, can be considered as "new"; yet, at the end of the day, you will find that guiding it is still "a chasing after the wind."

Thanks for reading! 😊

#the past