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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 1502829" data-attributes="member: 5990">First, you're arbitrarily redefining "originality" to make it fit your thesis.  This is the first problem I have with the many incarnations of the MasterPlot theory, the way it defines a "new plot."  OK, I say all plots can be fit in to one category:  "This plot is about something."  Tada!  There's nothing new under the sun, because that describes all possible plots.  It's a fundamentally empty statement because nobody really knows what "new" means in this context.Second, this whole thing is pretty obviously the same fallacy as the "end of physics" that was famously proclaimed at the end of the 19th century (right before Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics came along - whoops) and has been at various intervals before and since.  If we knew what the new things under the sun were going to be, they wouldn't be new.  Lack of knowledge of something does not imply that it doesn't exist or is impossible.  We can however look at the past development of literature and ask ourselves whether, when the statement "there is nothing new under the sun" first appeared, all plots were known already.Current scholarship gives dates for the composition of Ecclesiastes anywhere from the 10th century up to the 3rd century BC.  Novels had not been invented yet (arguably).  Flashbacks had not been invented yet.  Non-linear plots had not been invented yet.   High school sex comedies had not been invented yet.  Nearly all literature was still presented as if it was a retelling of actual events experienced by or communicated to the author.  In some sense, the concept of fictive writing had in itself not been invented yet (and in fact the better part of the world didn't have any actual writing at all).  I don't doubt that, with a sufficient amount of sophistic redefinition and wriggling and conflation of terms, someone could argue that the movie Memento is simply a retelling of the epic of Gilgamesh, but the simple fact is that much modern fiction would be baffling and unheard of to anyone living in 250 BC, even in its basic structure.  They barely knew what a plot was, much less all the different plots that have appeared up to the present day.  There was plenty of new stuff waiting to be invented back then, just as there is now.OK, you say, but maybe things have changed and, while the statement "there is nothing new under the sun" was in hindsight patently absurd in 250 BC, it is totally true now because modern people are so much more prescient than people were 2250 years ago.  In that case, there is something new under the sun - perfect prescience regarding the novelty of future invention.  Reductio ad absurdum.  The statement and the principle deny themselves.</blockquote>

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