On the Notion of 'Beginnings'

The beginnings of this sentence that I am typing now were made even before I typed the word 'the', that is, the first word in it. The reason why I am typing it in English (and not, say, in Spanish or Tamil) is because I happened to go through, in my childhood, a process of learning this language. In one proximate sense, therefore, the beginnings of this sentence were made in my childhood when I learnt the English alphabet. One cannot yet, however, pinpoint the beginnings there, for the English language exists only because over a long period of time countless numbers of human beings have been speaking it so that it has today acquired the form which is, more or less, regarded as 'grammatical English'. Consequently, one has to shift the 'point of embarkation' even more backwards in time, and say that beginnings of this sentence were made sometime around the 1700s when 'modern' English began to emerge on the linguistic scene.

And, yet, we are still not quite there. A few minutes spent in browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary will reveal that almost every word in that first sentence is derived from some classical language such as Greek or Latin; the very word 'beginning' enters our vocabulary sometime around 1470 AD, and the word 'word' around 1462 AD. Therefore, in typing that sentence I am drawing from a rich source of linguistic, grammatical, and philosophical vocabulary into which several streams have flown from directions I may be unaware of.

So far, my comments have been largely of a 'philological' nature, but let me now change gears somewhat. There is an obsessive notion in several circles of 'academic' as well as 'non-academic' life that whatever is said, spoken, argued for, or written must be New. We often hear people forwarding their views with labels such as 'original', 'ground-breaking', 'earth-shattering', and 'foundation-shaking'. Rightly so. For unless we wish to be doomed to the inanity of tirelessly repeating verbatim what has been handed down to us, we must continually re-examine, re-evaluate, re-envision, and re-contextualise whatever we have received from our traditional sources of authority. Precisely therein lies a great danger, though, the danger that we develop such an infatuation for this drive towards innovation that we unwittingly lapse into making the fallacious association of 'novelty' with 'truth'. Consequently, some notions get swept under the carpet with the claim that these were first put forward in the 'Dark Ages' (with the implicit assumption that they must therefore be 'false') and others get paraded as transparent 'truth' simply because they are being put on display Now.

It is for this reason that we need to be reminded that it is quite difficult to make 'absolute beginnings'. A close examination of the thought of most people who claim to have made such beginnings will show that they have taken on board a huge baggage of conceptual and linguistic resources from the older tradition which they otherwise claim to have rejected. Beginnings we must nevertheless make, but when we have ended, we must go back to where we have started from, not this time to repeat what we had said earlier, but to say it with different words, to think about with new concepts, and to judge it from within our new perspectives.