The One!

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In Praise of an Egotistic Philosophy

ego·tism
1 a: excessive use of the first person singular personal pronoun b: the practice of talking about oneself too much
2: an exaggerated sense of self-importance : conceit — compare egoism Merriam-Webster online dictionary

In other words, me, me, me, me, me!

Yes, so why an egotistic philosophy?

How can egotism - the practice of talking about oneself too much - be of value as a philosophy to a person and to mankind?

I remember my philosophy teacher five years ago saying how the "moi" can be despairingly irksome to others. Who can stand a person who breaks in every conversation - be it about the weather or a complicated relationship - by saying "I think that", "In my opinion", "in my case" or "it has been my experience"?

The "moi" becomes a threat to the harmony of a community as it pulls to much energy inwardly instead of productively using that energy externally. This is beautifully represented in Orwell's 1984 which brings forth a form of groupthink one must adhere to if one does not want to raise suspicion from the authorities and break social cohesion. As a side note, we can notice the "moi" is a threat as long as we are not in a capitalist society where knowing what a "me" wants can mean profit! ;)

I listened to a lecture given by French philosopher Michel Onfray about the XIXth century as the Century of the Moi. I found his ideas worth exploring.

He analyzes the XIXth century as being a time where two different - almost opposite - approaches to life existed.

• Social eudaimonism.
• To develop and contribute to a socio-economic system enabling the happiness of all is the ultimate project.
• Stuart Mill's social liberalism, Bentham's Panoptic capitalism, Owen's communist community, William Godwin's anarchist Protestantism, Bakounin's anarchist United States of Europe.
  
• Capitalism, liberalism, socialism, communism, anarchism.
• Plato's Republic. Social order is for the general interest, for the good of the people.
• Politics need to be there first for Ethics to develop
  
• Existential radicalism.
  
• The pragmatic concern of living a philosophical life is the priority. Universal solutions can only be found by first examining ourselves.
  
• Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer.
• Individualistic, Egotistic.
• Socrates's "know thyself",
  
• Ethics need to be there first for Politics to develop.
  

There undeniably exists an egotistic philosophical tradition. This is most obvious with the diary medium for expressing ideas. Marcus Aurelius - a favorite of mine - jots down his thoughts in his emperor's tent late at night during a military campaign. The result: beautiful meditations about life, ruling and virtue. Augustine, almost single-handedly founds Christian theology by writing his Confessions. Schopenhauer, at the age of 19, travels across Europe with his parents and writes a diary which contains almost the totality of ideas found in the rest of his work. One cannot forget Montaigne's and Francis Bacon's essays which seem to reveal truths about ourselves with each reading. Thoreau, the philosopher and "ecosopher"; his only company was himself, and he lyrically writes about individualism, society and nature, after a day of chopping kindle near Walden Pond. Sitting down to express our thoughts means we formulate them, give them structure and coherence so they can be written down. Insight about ourselves and the world follow.

More generally than writing a diary, egotism almost always precedes constructive thought. In Maieutics - the Socratic method of investigation - Socrates often encourages people to explore themselves, to face their inconsistencies and reveal perhaps a lack of integrity. By not running away from ourselves, we face painful reality and can mature our thought on our way to uncovering Truth.

Self-examination! How can anyone have a philosophical life without self-examination?

It is when we take the time to examine our suffering, our behavior, our responses, our feelings, that we can learn to develop empathy and a sensitivity to others by perceiving what is universal. Art is usually the result of self-examination. Philosophy is primarily meant to be lived not theorized. Analyzing the day gone by and sorting the information ("that was nice, that was bad"), improves who we will be tomorrow if we have the discipline. This is what philosophy as a daily practice is. It gives us awareness of what we do and whether it is good and bad for us and others, it gets us out of destructive ruts to create room for self-improvement.

I often clash with people who believe that it is a waste of time to try to create a change in the world by egotistically first focusing on ourselves. Sculpting a lifestyle as an embodiment of values seems ridiculous to them.

How can we know what to do for the general good, if we don't even take the time to learn about what is good for us? Know thyself, learn, grow and adjust. Be egotistical in that sense, make your main concern you.

Cultivate your lifestyle - with the same zeal as the dandy -, be brave enough to become congruent with your self.

Pee-Wee's Morning

The Bicycling Horticulturalist

To all skeptics! Horticulture without a driver's license is possible!

"Ryan Nassichuk builds food gardens for people. His bicycle and trailer are the sole transport for himself, tools, and materials - including soil and plants! This horticulturist also builds container gardens and composters. Tour a backyard garden in which a 6-week class of students filled raised beds with soil, compost and fertilizer, did succession planting, and built a low-cost composter. Recently Ryan has added free seed-sharing to his wisdom-sharing, while continuing to propagate food gardens throughout Vancouver. This man has a low ecological footprint — or should we say bike tire tread? [www.ryansgarden.com]"
-Peak Moment TV

Just sayin'...

Wwoof wwoof!

Dunno if Dan already told me about this or not...here it is anyway ---> organic farming meets couchsurfing :)

http://www.wwoof.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWOOF

super cool! I saw a brief segment about it on arte or france televisions (not sure) and I thought it looked pretty cool, especially 'cause you walk away with whatever knowledge the farmer imparted; in the case they showed the guy explained les vignes et puis s'en est suivi bien evidemment une seance de degustation :)

definitely something to be looked into! :)

oh, and dan what was that herbie hancock song i listened to at your place? chameleon?

(gonna have to edit this thing at some point, but i'm putting it up as is for now :)

Discover Herbie Hancock!

Dare to be Naïve! Discovering Buckminster Fuller

I must confess that until today, I knew almost nothing about Buckminster Fuller.

I briefly read about him months ago while trying to figure out what Unitarian theology was about. I learned that he was some sort of genial modern polymath - à la Benjamin Franklin - who could, to those familiar with Jungian typology, easily epitomize the "extraverted intuition + introverted thinking" type. I imagined him as a man who needed to understand everything with a rational approach while being guided by an internal compass pointing to a certain universalism. He was an American architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor, philosopher and visionary. [*] The rest, I discovered today thanks to my lunch meal.

I had to prepare my meal early this morning before going to work since I do not have the opportunity to leave for lunch. Going through an Ayurvedic cooking phase, I've been experimenting with Indian recipes which inevitably include clarified butter: ghee. I have been amazed preparation after preparation by the richness in taste and texture it provides and the way it releases the aroma of spices. Today's meal included ghee and quickly after eating, I felt that the ghee itself was somehow responsible for an unusual sense of calm across my body. Curious to learn about the presumed benefits of the elixir, I searched for information online and stumbled upon an article written by a fellow called Peter Malakoff. After finishing the article - and being converted to the use of ghee forever :) - the author intrigued me, and so wanting to learn more about him, I visited his website where I read his biography.

It turns out this man's life is nothing short of incredible! For the sake of comparison, I would say it is what Into the Wild's Chris McCandless's life could have been had he lived earlier, but just a little crazier. To return to the subject of this post, Peter Malakoff after writing a paper was granted a scholarship to spend a month with Buckminster Fuller. This is how the meal lead to learning about the man!

"That night Bucky spoke of the world of sailing and the world as seen by a man at sea. Indeed, much of Fullers terminology, the very words he used and the principles they represented, came from the nautical world. Think of the famous term he coined- 'Spaceship Earth'. He likened the world to a ship, which, he pointed out, is a closed and limited environment, not an unlimited one and always in motion. He pointed out how important it was to grasp and understand this.

He told us of many years ago he had spoken to a group of architects in New York City and had asked the assembled group if any of them knew how much the huge, many storied building they were sitting in weighed. None of them had any idea. Fuller found this to be a major oversight and a serious fault on their part. How could they maximize the potential that could come from building materials and structures if they were not thinking 'ecologically', if they did not know what the building weighed? How could they build something in accord with the operating principles of life, of spaceship earth?

Fuller, who had captained many a boat, said that 'On a ship, one always had to know how much weight was to be carried. It was important to know this if the ship was to be able to perform well on the water. It was this 'closed' or limited environment, similar to the nature of the world as a ship, that gave rise to the very concept of ecology. The very word 'ecos' comes from the Greek word for house or home. Ecology', he said, 'begins with the recognition of the closed or limited environment of the world. It is born of the realization that you cannot just dump your trash or waste into a river or an ocean and that it will just be washed away. We are on a ship, a spaceship and absolutely everything is and needs to be recycled, we need to know how much things 'weigh' and how they 'work'.

He spoke about 'cybernetics' which Bucky defined as the 'science of self-regulating mechanisms'. (Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the 'cyborg' or the self regulating organism. Think of 'cyberspace' as self regulating space). Bucky said that the word, cybernos, comes from the Greek word for the 'helmsman' of a boat. Bucky then made a startling statement, "A drunk cybernos makes less mistakes than a sober cybernos". I asked him how that could be . . . I didn't want to be in a boat or a car driven or steered by a drunk. He shook his head in agreement. I felt completely lost. Then he made his point, "Unless you make a mistake, you do not correct your course. Because a drunk does not make so many mistakes, he does less correction of his course and so his course is mistaken, he weaves his way down the road, or he hits something with deadly results. A sober man is constantly correcting his many little mistakes before they get big and his course is thereby true"

He spoke of 'synergetics', what Fuller called the behavior of a whole system not predicated on the behavior of its parts. He told us of chrome-nickel steel and how its strength is over 50% greater than the sum of the strength of its component metals. He spoke of gravity and how there was nothing in all the stuff of the universe that would predict it would be mutually attracted to another thing.

He spoke of the principle of 'precession'. Bucky told us how precession is the relationship that occurs between objects that are in motion. 'Imagine a top', he said. 'When it is set spinning, if you push it, it will go at right angles to the direction of your push. This is the same as the earth spinning around the sun. The suns greater gravitational attraction would pull the earth directly into itself, but since the earth is spinning it goes in a great elliptical circle around the sun'. Fuller said that the principle of precession is how life 'works'- A honeybee goes to a flower in pursuit of honey. The bee only wants the honey, but at right angles to the intention or drive of the bee, flowers are pollinated. The honeybee is not concerned with pollinating flowers. Bucky proposed that 'life happens at right angles or in a precessional manner to the 180degree straight ahead intentions of the bee'. He went on to say that it was exactly the same with a human seeking money or sex or pleasure or power. Life is happening at right angles to our desires. By recognition of this, he said, we can begin to design our lives to take into account precession and thus work with the nature of nature.

Finally, I remember that Bucky spoke of the word 'trimtab', what it was and what it represented. Fuller told us of how a large boat like the Queen Mary has a very large, many tonned rudder at the the very back of the ship. At the back end of that very large rudder is a very small rudder. When the captain wants to turn the huge main rudder in one direction, he turns the small rudder in the opposite direction. This creates a difference of water pressure or lower pressure vacuum on one side of the large rudder and the main rudder can now be moved with almost no effort; It is literally 'drawn' in that direction. Bucky said this represented the power of the individual to change the direction of the 'ship of state', doing what government and corporations cannot, by applying design science, by doing the 'right' intelligent action. Further, he pointed out how the action of the trimtab is applied when the bulk of the ship has passed, when it seems to have gone past the point of any change. Fuller died in 1983 and the epitaph carved on his tombstone says: "Call me Trimtab""

Concepts like these are precisely what drew me to physics - a chance to increase the focus of my metaphysical observation lens. Knowledge of natural phenomena should give general epistemic tools by the improvement of intuition. Ideas like precession and the trimtab are very poetic and reveal the richness scientific knowledge can bring to philosophy. Many of his ideas may not be new today, but were visionary then.