No More Secondhand God
I am just sitting here for one of the many reasons that people find themselves passionately isolated. — opening of the title poem (April 9, 1940)
A volume of "writings and verse" first published by Southern Illinois University Press in May 1963 (with the essay "Topological Hierarchies" copyrighted 1959). Fuller calls the pieces "mental mouthfuls and ventilated prose… which may be poetry also." Their distinctive metered-prose form arose in 1936, when a corporate research director found Fuller's forward-research report incomprehensible as prose but lucid when read aloud in intuitive "doses"; two poets confirmed it was, unavoidably, poetry.
Structure
Eight chapters span more than two decades of Fuller's thought, prefaced by his statement of philosophy:
- No More Secondhand God (1940) — the title poem, written to discipline communication tools that might make democracy more effective against rising dictatorships; it proposes daily/hourly "telephone voting" by democracy, an idea Fuller says later evolved into two-way locally beamed television.
- Machine Tools — first stanzas published in Fortune's Christmas 1940 issue alongside Charles Sheeler paintings; on machine tools as "extra-corporeal extensions of total man."
- The Historical Attempt by Man to Convert His Evolution from a Subjective to an Objective Process — a 1948 Christmas greeting updating his "Universal Requirements."
- Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage — the inventory of prime variables governing design science, first written 1928 and revised to govern astronautical architecture.
- The Fuller Research Foundation, 1946-51 — reflections occasioned by his Harvard class of 1917 and pre-WWI education.
- A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (1956) — prompted by a day with Dr. Jonas Salk, who recognized the phrase as "an exact description of my work."
- Introduction to Omni-Directional Halo (1959).
- Omni-Directional Halo (1960).
Core ideas
- Man as anti-entropic function. Fuller's "continuing philosophy" assumes that, counterbalancing the entropic, randomizing expansion of universe, there must be "a universal pattern of omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness and that man is that anti-entropic reordering function of universe."
- An intelligently designed universe. He posits "a comprehensive intellect magnificently greater than our own" that has "anticipatorily conceived" the generalized principles that interact as universe — the "secondhand God" of the title being the inherited, dogmatic mediation that Fuller rejects in favor of direct apprehension ("here I see God… in the instruments and the mechanisms that work reliably").
- Conscious participation in evolution. Most of the body's coordination (heartbeat, hair growth, cell division) is subconscious; man is unique in his "progressively conscious participation" in evolution, and should consciously invest discovered principles in designed "pattern strategies."
- From idea to mechanical advantage. Ideas come readily to all; translating them into theoretically effective design, then into operating structures, then into forms society can adopt, each demands greater self-discipline.
- Wealth as forward capability. "Happily realized augmentation of forward capability is all that we mean by wealth." A chain — intellect paces the individual, who paces science, technology, industry, economics, everyday life, and finally politics, whose job is to digest the resulting problems.
- Obsolescence of nouns. His 1936 reorientation renounced "things," "solids," "particles," "straight lines," "surfaces" — "utter obsolescence of 'nouns' and survival only of verbs."
Significance
The collection is the canonical statement of Fuller's metaphysics and the origin point of the phrase "comprehensive anticipatory design science." It links his technical resource-and-housing work to a theological-philosophical claim about humanity's role in an ordered universe, and preserves the experimental verse form ("ventilated prose") that became characteristic of his public voice.
See Also
- 50-years-of-the-design-science-revolution — documentary record of the same design-science program
- tetrascroll — later fable extending the same synergetic/geometric philosophy
- Southern Illinois University (Southern Illinois University) — SIU Press, which published this collection
- Jonas Salk (Jonas Salk) — virologist whose biophilosophy parallels this human-prospect writing
Sources
- no_more_secondhand_god.md — full extracted book text
- no_more_secondhand_god/index.md — project index
- no_more_secondhand_god/ — source project root (EPUB, MOBI, PDF, scans)