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October 08, 2006
R. Buckminster Fuller
What surprised me about these writings were how verbose they are. Fuller thinks very logically, and so tries to express himself very precisely. Like many other great thinkers, Fuller created his own words and vocabulary to help achieve this goal. Besides "tensegrity" and "dymaxion", Fuller proposed we use the the terms "sunsight" and "sunclipse" in place of sunrise and sunset "in order to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics." Other phrases like "Spaceship Earth" were meant to provoke a shift in peoples' thought about our place in the universe.
This coining of neologisms reminds of the idea from Wittgenstein and Korzybski that problems in thinking arise from problems in language.
Fuller connects the bicycle wheel to the Milky Way. It's an idea similar to what Rodchenko expresses when he writes that the forces of the universe operate the same way at all scales. I find Fuller's way of thinking very unique and inspiring- a mix of practical-mindedness with utopianism and a concern for those things which exist far in the future.
Posted by Andrew Doro at October 8, 2006 01:46 AM