:: the alleyway ::
What “stuff” is that, that I might’ve read? A well-trodden philo path is Kant → Hegel → Marx, but then the French swapped out Hegel for Nietzsche and injected psychoanalysis into the mix, replacing Freud with Lacan and then going off the deep end with Deleuze-Guattari. That’s the rabbit hole I’ve been going down, with tools I didn’t have in the 1980s: YouTube and LLMs.
What actually happened is upon leaving Princeton I got swept up in the est stuff, Centers Network, NYC, which Dr. Kaufmann had said was interesting (he mentions est in one of his books), and it turned out Werner Erhard was following Buckminster Fuller, so I decided to look into that corpus more. As a math teacher (high school level), I found much in Synergetics (two volumes) to be valuable and useful to me (and the philosophy was pragmatic — the EPCOT buckyball, Spaceship Earth, was being built at the time).
Fast forward and I’m co-developing Cascadian Pragmatism, from Blake to Bucky, meaning we’ve absorbed William Blake’s own mythopoetic type of psychoanalysis (Swedenborg-informed) into the picture as an alternative to say Lacan’s. Kant → Swedenborg → Blake is an alternative lineage.
Bucky respected the difference Freud made in opening our minds to the invisible (the unconscious), outside the five sense, and admitted to a “subconscious demon” derailing / delaying his own holy grail quest in Synergetics, for a volume five in his pantheon.
The main benefit I’m getting from the recent epistemic foraging is I’m getting to map more “tunnels” (rabbit holes become tunnels) twixt Mark Fisher (Anglophone philo guy) and the continental stuff (postmodernism). I’m also getting more of a handle on David Foster Wallace, although admittedly that’s slow going. I just got Hannah Smart’s novel in the mail, Meat Puppets. She’s gonna be one of my guides on that score, as another YouTube influencer.
