What is Synergetics? (New Essay By Dante Diotallevi)
This post is the Preface to an essay of the same title in honour of the 50th anniversary of Synergetics (Volume 1).
Read the full text here:
Synergetics (Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking) is Buckminster Fuller’s magnum opus. Published in two volumes, Synergetics was a collaboration between Fuller and E.J. Applewhite, a self-professed layman who organized the content of Synergetics while keeping it exclusively Fuller’s. Most of the text comes from Fuller’s public lectures that were recorded onto cassettes. When he wasn’t globetrotting, Fuller would go to Applewhite’s home in Washington and work in his sunporch. Applewhite tells their story in Cosmic Fishing: An Account of Writing Synergetics with Buckminster Fuller.
Synergetics Volumes 1 (1975) and 2 (1979). Photo credit: Richard ‘Struppi’ Pohl
‘Synergetics’ is also the name of the conceptual geometry developed by Fuller, which can be summarized as:
The integration of geometry and philosophy in a single conceptual system providing a common language and accounting for both the physical and metaphysical. [251.50, Synergetics]
Fuller believed he could teach Synergetics to children, which may in fact be easier than teaching it to adults. Children are curious about what they do not understand, making them the only ‘pure’ scientists. We naturally trade this adolescent gift of openness for the ‘wisdom to doubt’ as we mature. This wisdom is now failing catastrophically as scepticism has evolved into the very danger formerly posed by naiveté. In the 1970s, Fuller had anticipated the global collapse of trust that currently feeds conspiracy theories, fake news and xenophobia. Synergetics is a technological solution for a world in crisis but its technology is fundamentally conceptual. Its function is ‘to unify’ and thereby restore the proper balance to thinking from within its own context. The conceptual technology of Synergetics reveals a turning point where scepticism (as the danger) gives rise to a saving power - values for a faith that might actually stand a chance.
"If the book is nothing else, it is one of the most complex literary and pattern metaphors of the age. It is a rare and wonderful vision of a geometry of conceptuality: how to start from a new place – independent of Euclid, Descartes, and Leibniz, independent of size, independent of time.
In this book, Fuller is highly dogmatic, but never mystical."
E.J. Applewhite on Synergetics 1
Cosmic Fishing, p. 143
About the Author:
Dante is an independent scholar living in Canada. He holds a BSc. in Biology and an M.A. in Philosophy from Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario). You can learn more about his research into Synergetics on his YouTube channel.
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