Per my Graph Theory 2025, you get a lot of Nietzsche pictures in those slides, which is meant to spark wheels-turning commentary, as we exercise cultural fluency. His reputation tends to be clouded, as between his time and ours comes the whole Third Reich chapter, which he did not live to see.
Another guy pictured in said slides: Walter Kaufmann, my Princeton professor. His name was widespread on softcover Nietzsche in the English language. Kaufmann was keen to rescue Nietzsche's philosophy from the taint of what was to come after, which isn't that hard a job once you look into things.
One of Nietzsche's well-known works is The Will to Power. The style is aphoristic, a style I like and admired in Norman O. Brown's Love's Body. So how do I link Nietzsche's will to power to anything Bucky?
I'm prompting myself to generate an answer, which I think is pretty obvious: Fuller had a strong sense of some teleological pressure, a cosmic will shall we say, pushing humanity to make a success of itself, sometimes in spite of itself. In older more archaic language we might speak of God's will.
But wasn't Nietzsche all about the death of God as a viable belief for a lot of people, sort of marking a new era, and wasn't Buckminster Fuller obviously a deist and some would say Unitarian or at least Christian?
I'd say he radically renounced received beliefs as a part of his 1927 crisis, and he went his own way after that, but not in the direction of disbelieving in God. He was one of those with an overwhelming sense of teleological pressure, as I've mentioned. A will to power.
Another connection is in Nietzsche's expressions of admiration for the Transcendentalist Emerson. Nietzsche's Zarathustra character owes something to Emerson according to some commentators.
Keep in mind Fuller’s consistently aligning himself with Einstein’s views with respect to divinity, with the latter in turn aligning with the views of Spinoza. Fuller was no big fan of “organized religion” and did not experience an anthropocentric God behind humans’ proclamations of property rights.
Shifting gears a bit, one of my recent meetups featured the h3-py system, Uber's hexagonal matrix geographic layer. What would it take to feature anything Dymaxion via some type of Uber-like dashboard? We've seen some prototypes in the movies, in science fiction. The hexagonal matrix is a trope.
The idea in this meeting was to marry hexagonal tiles to the bevy of rules and regulations associated therewith, such that a Yamhill, Oregon farmer might call up building code requirements for her property, easily. Some properties will have a designated floodplain area, whereupon new structures may not be built.
City planners in some well-served offices may already have an approximation of the above, for their centers of focus. Legal codes and GIS come together over time whenever various projects and undertakings are being considered. To what extent this amalgamation is software abetted is the variable in question.
These topics hearkened back to my dreams of a hexapent grid with the Pentagon building, on the Potomac, one of the twelve pentagons. Given some n-frequency class one icosasphere, sized just that way, with one pentagon juxtaposed evenly with the building itself, not including the parking lots, where would the other pentagons be, around the globe? At the center of the Pentagon garden: that Bucky prototype that used to be there, or something like it, to complete the motif.
