The (new) Great Thinker

The following is a story which stands beyond truth and untruth. It is simultaneously fiction and non-fiction and exists only in the moments you take to read it. As such, its meaning is your meaning, so looking for its meaning will lead only back to yourself. This applies not only to the foregoing…



The great thinker—the erudite and innovative information vacuum himself—progresses more profusely every single second he lives. Theories, equations, observations: everything he does grows exponentially. That is, until a time comes when his ideas can no longer be expressed to anyone but himself, within his own now ultimately-unique mental framework: his very own Ultimate Paradigm.

Even his most industrious adherents remain miles behind the great thinker’s ingenious novelty. And it is, after all, novelty of a kind; mere yet profound originality and complexity, never before seen (like everything, all the time) but consisting of all that has ever been (necessarily).

Over the course of thousands, perhaps millions of years, he grows utterly asocial. He can no longer relate to other beings directly, but nonetheless regularly releases mysterious publications detailing his now-considered mystical, esoteric doctrines. The few released can still only be genuinely fathomed by their creator, who continues working on some ever-progressing opus, ever combining ideas to forge more “veritable” refinements, more purified and brilliant extractions.

After millions, or perhaps billions of years, the thinker has become a stationary organism; physically, he goes nowhere. In previous stages he was confined to a town; this slowly shifted then to a street; then to a house; and finally, he reached a point where movements were no long practical: his ideas have now far surpassed the capacities of his fellow beings and the great thinker subsequently becomes fused to the earth—that is, physical movement has become completely superfluous to his raison d’être.

The organism (“he” has now become “it”) changes; it is no longer what we would conventionally call a human. Its vocabulary, way of speaking, guttural enunciation, etc., has become completely foreign and continues to diminish (in the eyes of the common perceiver) over time. It—the organism— long ago realised that the work it was so profusely dedicated to had always-already been a work pertaining to itself—all this life-form’s figuring, that is, all of “the great thinker’s” work, always ultimately pertained to it. Essentially, it had discovered itself as being, in a sense, the most refined form; as All Things, always presently in the moment of their ultimate expression. Necessarily, its work continued and thus its form continued to change. But this change was not, quite correctly, perceived as indiscriminate; that is, the organism no longer differentiated between progress and regress, but mysteriously apprehended itself as simply always becoming, but never being. This is not a graspable concept, because it is always-already changing.

An account of the change the great thinker, or “it”—the organism— underwent could be approximated as follows: It’s female and male aspects, both physically and psychically, became integrated and eventually diminished due to its socio-environmental circumstance and the ensuing developments, hence it’s becoming an “it”. Its thought eventually reduced to pure metaphor and analogy; there is nothing, it has perhaps noticed, that is not another thing. As such, the need for its own physicality, its locomotion, vocal ability, emotional existence, and so forth—such needs ceased. The corporeal body atrophied, very slowly of course, until eventually it became a rounded, blob-like figure. Once this form took shape it slowly shrunk, like a balloon (bear in mind that its size indicates neither evolution nor de-evolution, but perhaps revolution or merely chaotic, rhizomatic development).

The great thinker’s concepts naturally emptied themselves; they realised themselves as nothing and slowly began falling away, shedding what was inherently already-absent, a void mistaken for a distinction, everything-that-is mistaken for categories of “truth” or being in general; essentially, all things cancelled themselves out and nothing remained—except, of course, all things.

As such, one particular occurrence can embody the entirety of the ongoing process that is characteristic of the thinker: as their words slowly integrated one another, dropping some parts and keeping others, the words became, in and of themselves, omega points; that is to say that they were, to use a modern phrase, always-already the “cutting edge” in a semantic-linguistic sense. Their existence was always-already invested with all meaning. It could have been this point, or absolutely any other, which triggered the great thinker’s figurative satori; perhaps, indeed, the first time it could finally see its being slowly fall away into emptiness, into nothingness, until finally even its corporeality began disintegrating and descending downwards, into mysterious subatomic realms.

And so, smaller and smaller it became, slowly losing all of its conventionally-perceived intelligence, of course its cognition in any sense, its sentience, any vestiges of reflective thought, all the senses: like an ice block, which, despite being in the coolest shade, is still melting away, and will ceaselessly continue to become what it has always been becoming. It—the thinker-cum-organism—finally grew so small and so indefinite that one day, it itself became a subject of study.

The new greatest thinker, adorned with all the knowledge ever to exist, with knowledge refined meticulously throughout the ages, using the latest in telescopic technology, places the tiny particle—which now constitutes what is left of the original great thinker—beneath her lens. What the magnification reveals startles her greatly: the particle is everywhere at once, while at the same time being nowhere at all.

Immediately she, the new greatest thinker, begins to shrink—this time much faster than before.