On the Principle of Self-Repetition

Why do thinkers repeat themselves? Why is what's considered a literary flaw not necessarily a philosophical flaw? If we understand learning as evolution rather than learning that reaches a specific conclusion, then philosophy itself is a learning system, where each philosopher is another stage in learning, or another direction for an evolutionary branch. And unlike a linear story, in evolution there's crucial importance to replication, and in learning there's immense importance to repetition - for internalizing the idea and learning to use it, turning it into a tool, and finally into a part of you. In other words, ideas undergo a technological process, where the tool becomes part of the person

When the world is your mirror, you see yourself everywhere  (Source)

It's true that there are thinkers who repeat themselves (to put it mildly). But the very act of repeating themselves is what shows what's important. It's not superfluous. It shows what preoccupied them and what they considered their main innovation. Someone who writes their insights only once might cause them to be missed. People don't grasp the importance of things on first reading.

There might have been an early Kant who wrote Kant in one page, concisely, but no one understood its importance and so it was lost. What distinguishes Kant is not that he was the first to think Kant's thoughts, but that Kant was the first to understand the importance of Kant. Therefore, self-repetition is not incidental, but essential, to the great thinker. One rabbi told his wife, who complained that he always repeats himself: I've learned that there are two types of thinkers - those who repeat themselves all the time, and those who have nothing to say.

The story of Adam [the first man] wouldn't be so powerful if the entire Bible after it wasn't about not being Adam. If there were many stories of Adam besides the serpent, then this story would be much less powerful, so it's not just the story itself, but the lack of repetition, and its position at the beginning. The serpent's head gains its importance from the long serpent's tail behind it, but there's no point in aspiring to create a snake composed of a chain of snake heads. Then they wouldn't be as strong as the one head. In philosophy too, sometimes the introduction is the most important part, hence there are many introductions, and it even comes from the same root: [in Hebrew] kedem [ancient] Eden, ancient sages. Hence the importance of who preceded whom in an idea, because he is the snake's head that starts the chain, and the struggle for precedence.

In other words, an idea gains its importance from its place in the system, for the knowledge of all researchers who retroactively find every later idea in ancient or early writings. Because what's important is the position in the system. That is, it's not just important what was said, but also who said it, meaning what is its position within philosophy - its systematic form and not just the content. This doesn't refer to power relations, meaning a factor outside the system that nullifies it and turns it into a mere facade, but on the contrary - to a systematic structure, meaning importance only to what's within the system and in its own tools, when it judges content as a living system.

A valuable argument: it establishes itself as connecting two traditions, for example Kant, because in philosophy such a union is considered valuable, for certain philosophical reasons and other metaphilosophical ones. A worthless argument: it's power-hungry, and therefore cynically unites them to control the end of both. So why didn't someone else do it before him? The first argument establishes the content in form and connects them, and the second subordinates the content to the form and empties it.

In conclusion (yes, the conclusion is also important, showing what's important in the system) - philosophy too is a legal system, and one can even point to its split into two separate legal systems, as in the era of rationalism and empiricism and even more so, between continental and analytic. The Nazi tragedy is that despite German orderliness, the dominant philosophy there is not analytic but continental.