There are philosophical schools of thought, grand intuitions, and discovered intellectual formulations which we credit the totality of to the one individual who popularized the crowning articulation of the content. In this way, we make philosophers famous, scientists rise to the top of their fields, and and through their popularity the great thinkers become immortalized for their discoveries. We often credit those of a more celebrated nature, those who becomes influential and acquire fame through said discoveries, those philosophers, scientists, and great thinkers, with the totality of the content they produce. The truth is, all ideas, all seemingly new discoveries or original conceptions, have their roots in prior generations of thought. One may think a new philosopher has unique insight, when the causal chain from hundreds to thousands of years shows that an idea existed long before the newly publicized exposition of it. Often times it is merely a novel articulation, or a popularization of a pre-existing idea, which consciously known by the individual or not, that gets its association attached to these great thinkers and thus immortalizes their names. This doesn’t mean we don’t owe credit to the popularizers, the combiners of knowledge, those that put together the collection of generations of work into a single articulation, merely, we must recognize those situations for what they are, as being an accumulated effort, culminating in the insight of an individual. We owe any novel discovery to the historicity that precedes us and informs us to be led towards its uncovering.  We think Darwin “discovered” evolution, when hundreds conceptualized parts of the same ideas for hundreds of years before. I’ve found philosophers or psychologists who write endlessly about ideas where their exact form has existed elsewhere for hundreds if not thousands of years. Now it’s possible they came to the same conclusion without prior knowledge, it’s also possible they in good faith promote the idea without remembering to credit the original source.

Voracious readers and academic scholars have read hundreds of books, and henceforth develop their own works, without realizing the influence or causal nature of their current thoughts in the works of past writers. We notice such things occurring in our day to day life, we accredit our morality or actions to the individuals we are, as being a representation of ourselves. This is quite true, but only a partial painting of the picture. The influences and conditions needed to produce such individuality are vast and perhaps impossible to pin down in their direct influence, but they exist. Our moments are formed by forces which have evolved over thousands of years, our DNA, our parental and immediate circumstantial factors, our depth of knowledge into certain subjects, taught or introduced through causal chains older than consciously recollected. But it is possible to realize our condition, to transcend the contradictions between individual conscious moments, unconscious factors, and prior causes. We can include in our picture of our current actions, thoughts, speech, that it is itself a representation of who we are in the moment, yet conditioned by a causal chain of far reaching factors. The moment is in its facticity the universe expressing itself, not only in us as an individual, but in every part of us as pieces of the whole, and as us as the collection of parts forming an individual organism, itself as part of a whole reality. Where ignorance is a given in explaining any phenomenon, admittance of ignorance, and a general admission of the conditionality inherent in any phenomenal “uncovering” leads to a more truthful representation of reality, where we cannot give all the blame to ignorance, we can refrain from falsely accrediting the entirety of a conceptualization, in an ultimate manner, to ourselves, and recognize the broader structure to which we currently are only a small representation of.