Using Our Emptiness; Organizing the space where will and planning take place.
By John Taylor; 2009 Aug 17, Kamal 17, 166 BE
I am contemplating a building system whose structures are designed to easily come together and be taken apart as the individuals within move around, and groups within grow, prosper or fail. The extreme difficulty of changing more than one building or property at a time has frustrated reformers from the beginning. Rene Descartes, for example, adopted his subjectivist philosophy after he grew frustrated with this problem. No reformer demolishes a whole town's streets and buildings, he said,
"rebuilding them in a different way to make the streets more beautiful; but one does see many people knock down their own in order to rebuild them, and that even in some cases they have to do this because the houses are in danger of falling down and the foundations are insecure. With this example in mind, I felt convinced that it would be unreasonable for an individual to conceive the plan of reforming a State by changing everything from the foundations up and by overthrowing it in order to set it up again ... And I firmly believed that, by this means, I would succeed in ordering my life much better than if I built only on old foundations and leaned on principles inculcated in me in youth without having ever examined them to see if they were true." (Descartes, Discourse on Method, F. E. Sutcliff, tr., Penguin, Middlesex, 1972, p. 37)
John Amos Comenius, who met and discussed his ideas with Descartes, was not so pessimistic. He held that it is not impossible to make the built world reflect reforms and improvements in the foundation of our ways of thinking. The trick is to concentrate on the same fundamental truths -- including world government -- while trying to be as flexible as possible in secondary matters. Along with Bacon, he also thought it important to be systematic in throwing out false and superstitious ideas. We need, in other words, a consistent philosophy for every world citizen.
"If we inquire into the cause of our confusions, we shall find that they are mainly due to the fact that our philosophies, religions, and political systems, like our opinions and our books, have hitherto been miscellaneous patchworks by various authors without any attempt to make them conform to the universal laws of harmony." (Comenius, Panorthosia II, Ch. 10, para 8, p. 155)
Comenius took the three factors mentioned here very seriously. In order to make our world reflect a consistent cultural vision, each and all will have to build from the ground up a consistent philosophy, religion and politics. Each world citizen will have a vote for each of these, and will therefore have to gain some original, direct experience in each of these basic human concerns. The mistake that Descartes had made was to separate body from mind as if one had nothing to do with the other, as if there were no "universal harmony" that abides in all things.
"The observation has recently been made by the distinguished philosopher Descartes in his `Discourse on Method',' that 'works taken in hand by different craftsmen who disagree amongst themselves cannot possibly be made perfect,' as for example in the case of a house which had its foundations laid by one builder but was completed by others adding different walls at different times, and similarly in the case of those ancient city-states which began as small unknown villages, but gradually grew into large cities with streets so winding and irregular that their position would appear to have been due more to the blind accident of chance than the deliberate choice of men with the gift of reason.
"He goes on to say `Much the same applies to the state of philosophy (and, we might add, of politics and religion), since haphazard ideas, expressed in speech or action or writing have been established or tacitly adopted, and are now accepted as valid without further amendment despite their various glaring deficiencies'.
"It is a fair verdict that by dabbling in particular theories or by handing them down as traditions, men of ancient and modern times alike have dealt with particular situations but have had no thought of universal Harmony. But now God offers us opportunities for thought, and unless we take them, and destroy all the forces of disorder and confusion, and try to establish all our affairs in order and harmony, we are guilty of ingratitude." (Id.)
As mentioned, every move and disposition of property in a Comenian order is determined by the interplay of these three factors, religion, philosophy (including science and education) and politics. Each citizen has a triple franchise, according to each "dimension" of decision-making.
In this sense, the thinking of Comenius was closer than Descartes was himself to his greatest innovation in mathematics, Cartesian coordinates. These coordinates map the location of any point in three dimensional space using three axes, x, y and z. In the same way as every thinking person needs to consider three factors in every decision, how it will work out according to known factors (philosophy), how it fits into eternal harmonies (religion) and whether it contributes to peace, order and security (politics). If every decision we made, both as individuals and groups, could be mapped out using this simple system of coordinates to determine where we are in relation to the needs, rights and decisions of others, our built world could indeed follow a single, universal harmony.
Descartes failed to realize the implications of his coordinates because he had driven a wedge between mind and body. Instead, they could have been used to map out the space between them, the space in which the will decides to act, the space in which social planning takes place, the soundscape in which the music of the spheres can be heard. As the Daoist philosopher put it:
"We fashion wood for a house,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes it liveable.
We work with the substantial,
but the emptiness is what we use."
(Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tzu, J. H. McDonald, tr., 11)
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