The Hovering Guru and Worldly Loom

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Lyle—the cat-tongued, sweat-licking Lycra-clad guru who perpetually hovers over the towel dispenser and who himself dispenses life advice as he licks foreheads and biceps—says often to young tennis players fraught with issues of identity, popularity, and the politics of their competitive institution: “the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old.”

I agree with the Lycra-clad man.  In my view, there are no original ideas that arise in 2024 because the world is very, very old.  When I took History of Ancient Western Philosophy three years ago, we went through the rolodex of the western ancients: Plato, Aristotle, and numerous Hellenistic thinkers.  It was then that I realized how deeply unoriginal my thoughts about life were, and how the questions that afflicted me about how I ought to be living my life were equally as pesky over 2,000 years ago.  And not even that, but they had already been so extensively and eloquently discussed.  

Before I had read Alfred North Whitehead’s words, I’d already agreed with him that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.”  Note there, however, the implication of citation.  

Etymologically, plagiarism comes from the Latin plagiarius, or ‘kidnapper,’ which itself derives from the Greek plagion, which means slanting, sideways, oblique.  

Plagiarius obviously denotes badness: to kidnap, take one’s prized entities away illegally, by force.  It holds both an assertion of propriety, you have taken what is mine, and that you have not done it in an agreed-upon way.  

Plagion adds another dynamic to the word’s meaning.  I think of Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —” But plagion is not that.  Dickinson’s underlying condition of truth-telling is what’s missing from the obliqueness of the plagiarist.  Plagion seems more to highlight a moral slanting, a deviation from, as it were, an ‘upright’ standard of intellectual interaction.  This misunderstanding, misuse of words, language, and ideas, seems not to be, in fact, a question of ontological originality. 

Because even now, I say my already-said sentence to make a point about the already-saidness of it.  And it’s likely that that point itself has already been said, too.  Just because the sentence I’m saying has been said countless times before I’ve said it, and I don’t attribute it to its original sayer does not entail that I’m plagiarizing.  Or at least in any meaningful way.  Remember, the universe is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old.  And humans’ troublesome tendencies are as old as we, as a species, are.  

In the Protagoras, Plato has Socrates talk about how pleasures that are close to us intuitively seem to be the best ones as opposed to those far away.  He compares that evaluative process to an optical illusion: Much as our eyes create appearances that deceive us from the true shape of a tower far away, so does our mind’s eye confuse the true value of proximate and distant pleasures because of their apparent difference in ease of achievement.  He says that’s a mighty deception by which we all seem to be easily swayed.  

There are three other jointly, nefariously ubiquitous forces that Plato tells us obfuscate our ability to accurately discern the value-content of propositions, decisions, and actions: fame, wealth, and reputation.  

Returning to Wallace, Lyle’s counsel about the universe comes when he’s speaking to Lamont Chu, a boy plagued by the desire to be more successful, the measure of which for him is fame. More specifically, Lamont wants to be more famous than Michael Chang–a non-fictional tennis player known for the fact that he was the youngest man in history to win a singles major at the 1989 French Open.  Lyle follows up his adage of age with: “You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its [the universe’s] oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.”

Infinite Jest is all about cages–which ones we choose for ourselves and how, if at all,  we discover or weld doors to escape their enclosures.  Cages, I’d say, are modern-day Platonic caves.  We get stuck in them because the hard thing is to go beyond its threshold.  Or maybe, if by 2024 it appears that there are no new things, is there even a beyond to go to? 

Another cage of the modern age, I’d say, is convenience.  With a society that appears to value productivity above all, we are always seeking and providing ways for ourselves to do things more efficiently.  Google Assistant, Siri, ChatGPT. Is plagiarism one of the short-cuts to which we resort when we feel the fundamental squeeze of stress?  Does it have to be a more ontologically or morally significant act than a feeble resort to complete yet another to-do on that despairingly ceaseless list?…

When you google “why is plagiarism bad?” There are generally, three responses:

(1) You are taking someone else’s intellectual property: that is, you borrow and use the work that someone else has done.  We value people’s labor, and to claim it as your own does not fit into our social paradigm that we ought to earn our achievements.  You may profit financially from this other person’s work, which is also unethical.  Time is money.

(2) You may get caught, which is bad for your reputation: self-explanatory, though philosophically interesting given Plato’s rebuke of reputation as a misprioritization of motivational force. 

(3) You hinder your own critical reasoning skills: by using someone’s work, you don’t go through the steps we all go through when writing to learn.  That’s really the developmental kicker.  Pedagogically, it seems punishment is still necessary because students need to write that first shitty paper, that first terrible lab report, or unfocused reading response.  As Hannah Arendt says, humans are defined by vita activa.  We do the things, then we learn from the doing.  If we cop out of doing—out of undertaking what my professor and interlocutor, Justin Clark, calls the “worthwhile burdens”––then we likely won’t learn about the beyond-the-cage or know how to begin to question its existence.  Every piece of writing is an opportunity to learn more, even if it’s not an opportunity to reinvent the wheel—to employ a much-said, unattributed(able?)  phrase.  

Plagiarism does indeed strike the bitter chords highlighted by Justin and E.D. Huckerby: a plagiarized work holds for its author a removal of their authenticity and imbues in their work and its readers a lack of progression in artistry.  We need to write to learn, to figure out the cage’s geography.  But maybe not all uses of someone else’s words are plagiarism.  And maybe, in the interwovenness of it all, some of us are bound to trip over the existential threads and knot-up the loom.  While we may not find ways to untie them, we may find that they make an overall more interesting mosaic of humanness to observe.