Why is there no new thought anymore?

A new thought is inconceivable, it smells of déjà-vu,

Marcello Veneziani: What do you look for in a book and an author you recognize as a guide and master? Something that sets you on the path or brings you closer to the search for the essential. And instead, authors prevail, especially narrators, who must distract us, lead us into the inessential, the superfluous, into escapism or pure fantasy. Or into surrogates of the essential, between fallacious objectives, false idols, consumer fetishism, ideological conformisms. We undertake deviations from the path, escape routes, itineraries for tourists, diversions or fun. The author who teaches is instead the one who brings you back to the essential and reminds you of the things that really matter. Of him, of them, you can feel like an heir and a disciple. In search of masters, real, presumed and controversial, this new book of mine was born, published by Marsilio, which I have not by chance entitled Without heirs. About seventy portraits of authors, famous and lesser known.

If we were to indicate the giants of thought of the last century, the mind does not go to the philosophers, however great, who inhabited it, but to frank thinkers, such as Paul Valéry or Pavel Florenskij. How can we define them, these unclassifiable authors, who were not philosophers, academics, nor just men of letters, who are not studied in school and do not appear in summaries of the history of philosophy? Thinkers, or think-authors, authors who think and make people think . It is the only appellation that is appropriate for those who do not belong to a specific category, and recognizes both their singularity and the vastness of their knowledge that crosses various fields.

A philosopher, unfortunately, has become someone who has made universality a specialization, or rather, universality has made a university, that is, an academy, a profession, a career, a jargon and a theory for insiders only. A thinker is someone who embraces life with thought and tends toward the absolute, in a vision of the world, not in a system. Knowledge is not finalized or anchored to a chair. The thinker wants to understand the world and does not stop at the threshold of the sacred and prophecy, of science, art and life, closed in his philosophy; but he enters it as a scientist, as an artist, as a living being, in his versatile solitude outside of any academy or institution. And he casts "glances at the current world", as a work by Valéry is entitled, he penetrates the era he lives in and compares civilizations. Thinkers remain, so to speak, free, astral solitudes and wanderers of thought, at times clandestine; thinkers at times impersonal, bearers of an original, metaphysical knowledge. There are great and singular, original ones, but the greatest are universal and “original”. They give voice and thought to a tradition, to a civilization.

To understand life, the world and the human condition, the thinker intertwines knowledge and experience, he is not ensnared by a system and a lexicon, or stuck in a teaching course. The relationship between reality and truth, between the word and silence, becomes intense, direct, absolute in him, without interference, without abstruse languages, pure in the impurity of a living thought that is ready to transcend death and not to end with the work.

I think back to those authors and a question resurfaces: why is there no new thought anymore? Because it is not thinkable, it is not convertible into practice. Today the new suits the models of technology that bury the previous ones: new can be a smartphone, a tablet, an app, a video, a commercial. But a new thought is inconceivable, it smells of déjà-vu, like the last new thoughts that were born and ended throughout the twentieth century. What is new ages quickly and gives way to the newest. And then a new thought does not seem possible because everything already seems tried and worn out, and what was said is no longer valid in our days, almost as if it were expired, exhausted, betrayed. We ask a narrator to take us away from here, to make us see another life, or in any case with other eyes in another light. Instead, we ask a thinker to take us to the heart of things, to make us understand who we are and where we are, to give us the keys to enter the essential or to search for it, between freedom and destiny. Thought is a new sight, while philosophy is diminishing into a new blindness, supported by the white stick of technological innovation and guided by the wolf-dog of artificial intelligence, which is the only universal heir.

A new thought is not possible because a thought is not possible, it is no longer plausible, it does not arouse any real reflection. What does thought mean today if it does not involve an application, that is, practical consequences in leading one's life? There may be an emotion, an event, an access, but what is thought today, if not sterile, abstract, ineffable, unproductive conceptualization? Thus it becomes impossible to conceive the world, life, death and beyond. And yet, without new thought no birth of any kind will be possible.

Our civilization lives in decline and waiting for death rather than birth , until it can think the new. Which is simply thinking. Because every true thought is not ritual repetition, as prayer is, or mechanical repetition, like automatic reflex or technological process. Instead, it is novelty, critical reworking, originality in search of the origin. Thinking the new does not mean thinking what does not exist, creating from nothing, inhabiting utopia. But it means preparing for birth, for renewal, knowing that every true thought is a pregnant heir, is a renewed dawn that brings a sunset and the new morning will renew the eternal promise of a day that rises and then sets, completing its cycle. The new is the light of the morning that returns to dawn.

(Panorama No. 47). https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/e-necessario-un-pensiero-nuovo/