All philosophy is synthetic philosophy. That is, it contains within itself the entire history of philosophy and all possible potentials. It is geschichte-verfolgt. There is nothing original and there is no traceable beginning nor end.
To conceive of an origin for philosophy would be a thankless task. In much the same way that past potentials cannot be conceived in linear history (nor do they exist within that actualised totality), there is no traceable path, that is an arborescent line which converges at a clear thought.
Historians like definitions which easily classify the complexity of 𝜏. Like the mechanical flow itself, they like to remove potentialities and enframe strict categories.
The popular consensus of today defines a period of Pre-Socratic philosophers. A name which, through implication, names Socrates as the originator of all philosophy--at least in the Western tradition--a consensus which allows Nietzsche and Wittgenstein to blame him with all the incongruities of Western philosophical thought.
But what of Heraclitus? Of Democritus and Leucippus? Of the Pythagoreans? Are they too not the originators of philosophy? Did the atomic theory, though conceptual, not lay the groundwork for quantum physics and modern science? Did the musical and mathematical work of the Pythagoreans not form a strong basis for Western music? What of Laozi and Zhuangzi? Did they not predate Socrates? Is their thought not still practiced and incorporated in other systems? What of Siddhartha? Did he too not predate Socrates? Or is philosophy only the impetus of Western intellectualism? Does the East not contribute to this genesis of thought, and if so, where, aside from Kant, does Schopenhauer gain inspiration?
You see now the fallacy of orgination, the trap of arborescent traces, the need to define convergence and beginning, the same linear enframement of our mechanical plane grafted onto our creative perception of history. Each of these philosophers were composites of experience, that is Laozi and Kongzi offered their philosophy as a remedy to the Warring States, as a treatise for peace and prosperity. Democritus was responding to Thales and bronze-shoed Empedocles. And Socrates, well, he was the birth of all of these--at least the Greek side.
To name one man as the genesis is to name one author of the Bible or one figure as the progressor of history. It’s a foolish pursuit, an Evolan fallacy. The Bible was a product of history not of authorship, and this is true in both the material and theological form--though theologians would name history as God.
So, if this is the case, how can philosophy have an origin? There is no point t in 𝜏 where philosophical thought began. Philosophy, in its Greek origination, means the love of wisdom. Did no one love wisdom before the Greeks?
It’s true, hunter-gatherer communities were certainly more concerned with food and shelter than ontology, but city-based civilisation predates the Socratic Greeks by nearly three millennia. And the thoughts of the Babylonians, Chinese, Indus peoples, and Egyptians are nothing to scoff at. Even they inherited ideas genealogically, not just so-called pragmatic practice either. It’s clear, for instance, from examining mythology from Europe and some of central Asia, that there was a Indo-Aryan-European proto-pantheon which helped shape the beliefs of the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Carthaginians, Goths, etc. This religion was certainly also a summation of many iterations and stimuli, impossible to isolate in a single origin.
This is the human passtime, thinking. We may trace philosophy back to the first ‘sentient’ human, but even that would be reductive. Are this human’s thoughts not a synthesis of the axions of the non-thinking ancestors and contemporaries?
Philosophy is synthetic, much like language. In a poststructuralist view, we can see philosophical concepts in a web, variable, moving, and connected by threads to countless other ideas, the Rhizome of thought forming an arterial system of influence and influences, flowing in both directions, converging only in an individual proposition at a moment, but the ideas in flux.
Philosophy is, after all, only how an observer interprets it. As a Nietzschean, you can either be a Nazi or Deleuze. Philosophy is the act of creaxion, using building blocks already present, and constructing your own fort. A worldview to live in.
Synthetic philosophy is this: philosophical thought, both in totality and individual instance, is geschichte-verfolgt, and contains within it all that has come before and that which might come, in the same way time t funxions mechanically. Theft is merely a redirexion of influence, a ripple in the pond. No thought is original. All is derivative. There is no origin. There is no conclusion. Self-propagation and self-cannibalisation. Transformation is the only allowance. We feast on the past for the energy of the future.
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
- T. S. Eliot
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