Nonetheless, one is under an obligation to
read and
understand what others have said on the subject, if one wants to articulate
relevant thoughts on something.
I mean, it is okay to wax philosophical without restraint and footnotes when you are sitting on the porch, shooting shit and having a Penn Pilsner with your buddies. But if you want to contribute, you better read up, otherwise you will repeat somebody else's mistakes, in which case where does your originality and brilliance go ? Down the drain.
Consider now Plato and the traditional problem of the white horse archetype: is there an archetype for horses, or for white horses ? And in that case, why not for young white horses, and old white horses ? And in that case ... you end up having to populate the world of ideas with a copy of the material world, which pretty much screws you over.
This same paradox has occured to the Chinese equivalent of Platonists .
And it will hit like an Exocet any budding Platonist out there. So one should be aware of it.
Also, consider computers and client server systems. If you are not aware of history, all the bullshit about thin clients and "the network is the computer" will get you. You will believe it. You will think "original" thoughts about it.
But you know what ? Your father has been there and done that. A thin client is just a dumb terminal, and the issues are the same, and your father faced them in the seventies, and you better be aware of them, because they will come back.
Apply scholarship. Read. Study. In disciplines where there is progress, not to know what has occured to others condemns the thinker to irrelevance.