SF Pensées: A Peer into a Cosmos of Starry Thoughts

Abstract

Written in the late 2000s in the city of San Francisco and then continuously updated over the following decade, this voluminous socio-philosophical essay represents a postmodern take on Pascal’s Pensées. Individual “thoughts” in it are codified, creating a mysterious array that the author compares to stars of the night sky, disconnected on the surface, yet bound to form an indissoluble and harmonious whole. As the author notices halfway through the essay, “every sentence here attempts to be a universe unto itself, a chain and a centerpiece at the same time, a symbolic proof that Nature is not a linear stream of events toward a predetermined aim in space and time, but a magical place where destination is present in every point of the journey, or, as Blaise Pascal imagined it, ‘an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere’”. The form of the essay is comparable to Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema or Fellini's Otto e mezzo, in a sense that it is being as unstructured as a myriad of stars scattered across the night sky, unlike “the overly orderly and polished progression of a clear-cut scholarly thought, uptight and repressed”. The treatise is divided to sections 0 through 13, each focusing on a particular theme, and employs the numerical structuring of passages in the style of Wittgenstein’s tractatus. The themes discussed include cognitive philosophy, creativity, behavioral aesthetics, world politics, athletics, poetry, spirituality, and others. The essay brims with references to pop culture and presents an indispensable accompaniment in learning about the contemporary culture of San Francisco, where the bulk of the essay was written, and beyond. It combines indie, DIY, auteur style of expression with traditionally theosophical points of view and critiques of modern science and academic lifestyles, yielding a concoction unique in style and content to the author. With over 700,000 words and 2,700 references, spanning the topics of science, technology, sports, medicine, corporate world, art, politics and culture, the essay inspires with its astonishing scope and ambition. In the current era of compulsory compactness and hyper-brevity of writings academic and popular alike, with its insatiable expansiveness and unbounded cross-connection between disciplines, the essay serves as a call for equally commodious expressions of thought in the scholarly domain. With its poetically performative character and neo-romantic spirit, the essay opens up the academic writing to freer and more belles-lettres contents and compositions.

Keywords: Art, Co-creation, Counterculture, Creativity, Ethics, Literature, Science