Do Not Ask "Has It Been Said?" but "Has It Been Heard?"
How to avoid the death of a creative life.
I doubt there is any question more destructive to creative and philosophical work than asking, “Has it already been said?” Indeed, I wonder this all the time as I work, but I have also found that there is no way to answer this question unless I read everything. The notion is unfalsifiable, and so considering it paralyzes me, and yet the notion also seems worth considering. I mean, who wants to write something someone has already said? Not me, but it also feels important to write.
I’ve had lots of experiences of writing something that I thought was new only to find out that other people had already published on it. This was discouraging, but it also occurred to me that the whole reason I thought my ideas were worth writing is because I thought they were worth writing, which was to say I had never heard them before. Realizing this, it occurred to me that things changed if I asked myself a different question: “Has it been heard?” Suddenly, my work no longer felt like a potential waste, for I had reason to think the idea hadn’t been heard (I certainly hadn’t) — I could perhaps help someone discover it.
There are ideas I’ve been spent years on that I’ve later found in Hegel, Hume, Žižek, etc., and this could have discouraged me out of writing had I not changed my metric. I was in the business of “helping people hear what was not yet heard” versus “creating something new,” and that changed everything. Critically, it also felt more observable and falsifiable to tell if something was heard or forgotten. I couldn’t read everything to know if something was “new,” but I could get a far better sense if a given idea was part of “the conversation.” I could read stories online. I could overhear people talk. And all that could provide me with a strong sense of if “an idea had been heard.” This metric felt much more solid and a source of confidence, while the question, “Has it already been said?” proved an infinite source of anxiety, which had the power of rendering entire projects meaningless if I later found out someone indeed “had already said it.” But if the point of a work was to help people “hear,” then I could still add value even if there were others who already thought what I thought. The work would not be in vain. The writing would still be worth doing.
Similarly, if we approach books again, “Has this already been said?” we probably won’t read, but if we ask, “Has this been heard?” the answer is probably “no” for us (otherwise we wouldn’t be holding the book for some hopefully intrinsic reason). We don’t worry then if we are going to hear ideas that we’ve already heard before but read to hear this book and what it says. We don’t worry about wasting time; we worry about listening. Our disposition changes.
This shift in thinking also helped me in philosophy, for there is something unique about “philosophical progress” that must simultaneously “return to the old” to think the future. Philosophy seems to progress by a strange “weaving together” of pieces that makes it seem like all we ever do is recover “the true reading” of a past thinker, which again makes it seem like “we never say anything new.” But if we think in terms of “has it been heard,” then indeed, we have reason to write, for it clearly hasn’t been heard — that’s why we’ve come to think it might be something we need to write on.
“Has it been heard?” was a question that changed my entire orientation to writing and reading, and furthermore removed reasons for me not to write or read. I recall when I used to think that asking, “Has it already been said?” was wise. Now, I cannot imagine how much that question would have cost me had I not learned to ask instead, “Am I helping it be heard?” Even if there are no bad questions, there are still better ones.
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