Flat pack philosophy circle

A project with an aim of creating a safe, shared, public space for philosophy, The Circle combines contemporary principals of accessible open source design with critical thinking. Here there is no ownership, no self, no opinion – only a love of wisdom. There is also no test – wisdom need not be attained, but it must be the goal.

The Circle is an experiment in small publics, not dissimilar in intent to the collective dynamic of the amphitheatre, but without the gladiators and ritualistic slaughter. The Flat Pack Philosophy Circle brings people together and is agile, portable, easy to replicate, and/or improve and/or alter, all with room for vastly different results – even failure. The Circle should exist outside state-made rules and regulations that control what should be public space, while also providing necessary protections for the singular, private body.

The genesis of the idea is wholly selfish. I’ve not long returned from London, where I was studying postgraduate continental philosophy. I was captivated by the image – the fantasy – of black turtle-necks, chesterfields, Hannah Arendt, chain-smoking. I went with high hopes for mind-blowing conversation, but I’m afraid to say, didn’t find what I was looking for. I wondered were the formica desks disrupting our flow? Was the fluorescent bar lighting too austere? Were our laptops a barrier? Or perhaps a shield for the uncomfortable, sanitised formality of the classroom?

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The Circle, as a shape, has precedence. Alcoholics anonymous, group therapy – on TV we’re shown its potential to elicit vulnerability in the most hardened men. Here, people can admit fallibility, ask for help.

Contemporary culture aside, there is all of about nothing new in this idea that a circle is a shape that can make stuff happen. Aboriginal elders sit in circles, officially for law, more casually for yarns. Progressive primary schools introduce children to yarning circles and encourage open conversation – not only teaching kids how to speak in a group, but more importantly how to listen. So I’d stop here and now and presume the project utterly redundant were it not for the fact that I for one can’t sit on the ground cross-legged for more than five minutes without going numb. I may crave a closer connection with the earth, but a circle that requires people to get down on the ground on grubby city streets – bad knees, hips, pencil skirts all proving a challenge – in reality we’d exclude too many.

Given our manufactured environment, we need a manufactured solution. So while we’re tampering, why not tamper to an end?

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Over time I’ve grown wary of the meddling potential of politics and gone looking for alternatives. Increasingly I’ve landed in philosophical territory, finding insight in the philosophers and players operating outside organised, existing structures. Anyone who’s known me for a long time will know I wanted to believe in politics as a vehicle for change. But politics as it is, is broken.

Politics now is absolute, or as capitalism’s lapdog – neutered. It has teeth, but lacks balls. You choose a position and occupy it. It’s politically necessary to commit to one over the other, or one over all others. But this political rigidity is counter-intuitive to the organism. Politics silences uncertainty when we should be allowed at all times to ask the question. It’s uncertainty that allows us to remain agile and adapt to the shifting landscape around us; and we should remember that people, communities and the needs of the populace are organic and ever-changing.

The beauty of philosophy isn’t in the knowing, but in the process of acquiring knowledge. In an age of answers: of “just google it”, philosophy prioritises the gap, where if we sit for a time, we experience osmosis between our conscious and unconscious selves. A love of wisdom is about asking uncomfortable questions, providing a safe space for not knowing the answer, and resisting the temptation to fill the awkward pause.

The dialectical – a term used in formal philosophical study to describe a way of thinking, really just means two-way. It’s a useful communication tool with a slow, tic-tacking forward propulsion, a type of progress impossible in modern politics which on account of commitment instead demands finality and elevates individual ego, opinion and “belief” above collaborative processes.

Similarly, while the individual publishing potential brought about by personal, distributed wireless technologies is remarkable, my ego and your ego are probably wasting the opportunity on self-styled promotional assertions and virtual assignations. We’re left with a need for something more human, something that promotes questions rather than answers, something that asks for more than mere “eyeballs”. As is too often seen in the political and online space – without a human, humanising presence – grace, humility and empathy are absent.

I recently heard British writer and philosopher Kenan Malik on Radio National speaking at the Byron Writers Festival on an absence of and yearning for “ethical concrete”. He attributes its absence not only to a past loss of faith in god, but a present loss of faith in human beings. I quote him here:

“We’ve lost faith in our own capacity to think through our problems, to define through discussion and dialogue, what is right and wrong. And it seems to me that the loss of faith in human beings is far more critical than the loss of faith in God. It’s the loss of faith in human beings that makes it seem as if there is nothing there for us to turn to when we can’t decide what we should do. We’ve lost faith in our own capacity – not just as individuals, but collectively – to make decisions.”

Without an appropriate space or place to talk we’re unpractised at genuine engagement, we lack perspective on the other, on alternatives, and we’re unable to face our own chasms of perception. In which case, given a noisy pre-packaged, ready-made conviction, we might be inclined to cling to it – no questions asked. Polarisation and Populism make sense in this context. Not that I’m claiming a solution to those big P problems in one small p project, but what if we gave people a space for a renewed humanity that didn’t look like the spaces that have come before?

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Picture pews and an altar. Seats and a lectern. An audience and a stage. These structures promote one person to a position of importance. And while there are some people worthy of the title: teacher, guru, sage – who may have wise, thoughtful things to say – what happens when not? The platform, by design, has unleashed a right to posture and broadcast unchecked opinion and we can’t reverse the effect by simply de-platforming select individuals. It won’t redress the dichotomy of for and against, left vs right, good vs evil, Australian vs un-Australian. We have to instead shatter the platform and engage on a different plane.

Am I naïve to see potential in a different design? Am I naïve to see potential in people period? I imagine that here, I’m at least among people who recognise a connection can be drawn between behaviour and design – so could The Circle make its contribution? I put the question of this new space to you, because to realise the project requires collaboration. I’m not a designer, I can’t use CAD, I don’t know which lightweight materials bear the highest load. I’m not a psychologist, I’m not even a real philosopher – I just like thinking and talking, so here’s how an early chat on the Circle played out with my friend Clayton…

I said: Let’s say it will be a democratisation of the form, fully portable, cheap and open source. Taking the best of what ikea introduced to the world and turning it into something useful. Furniture for everyone! Something circular. For an age of platforming and de-platforming… It is, the anti-platform.
He said: So, is it about sharing writing/critique/ideas?
I said: Kind of. But it’s kind of not about anything. It’s about space – a small agora.
He said: What is ‘a small agora?!’
I said: Or, more akin to AA.
He said: My name is Clayton, and I like Hegel?
Me: Yeah, but a bit more street.
Him: Yo, Clayton here, Wittgenstein gets me every time.
Me: No, no name dropping. I hate name dropping.
Him: Hi. My name is Clayton. Why did we make God?

And I thought, yes! He gets it! It just might become a thing.

I love questions like what was the first god and what did it do? But what I’d most like to know is, what is the last question? Is it always, well, what’s the meaning of life?

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Mine is a punk philosophy. There’s a reason I didn’t graduate. The regulation and rules, the canon – even the prescribed reading outside the canon, which created a new canon of non-canonical texts one must read – didn’t sit right with me. And there I come up against a paradox. I totally get rules, I get that they can be necessary, I even like some rules, I can’t help myself but follow the rules and find myself wishing others would do so more often, so this thing we call life would be more pleasant.

But then when I’ve travelled to places in Asia, Africa, and southern Europe – more organic, less regulated – I see humanity spring from the streets and I mourn what we’ve lost in lanes and health and safety regulations.

I do realise there’s a risk of romanticising what for others may be borne of necessity, but surely there is something we can learn from a thriving energetic frenzy of inter-activity. I love spaces that are borderline public/private: like air-conditioned office lobbies and carparks. And I love the way in places with large populations, their boundaries are infringed. I cherish public space and I make sure to spend time in public spaces lest they take them away. But I often find I’d like a greater variety and flexibility of options for embodying that space. The single, unfixed green seats in the Paris Jardin de Luxembourg are a perfect example. They are always on the move. Positioned in groups both big and intimate, moved into the shade in summer, into the sun in winter, they are rearranged for games of chess, cards and impromptu performances.

Perhaps the bike-share experiment proves we Melburnians can’t be trusted with furniture that’s unfixed, lest it all wind up in the Yarra. So for now, I opt for the occasional park bench, or tiered stepped seating, and despite being in public, remain mainly in solitude. Whether sitting in Federation Square, or on the lawn in front of the State Library, I do so with others, flanked, blinkered. And while there’s value in simply sitting, enjoying the sun, or looking at a blade of grass, what if I were to want more from idle time? Sure, I could talk to someone at random, others do, but we have a word for that, for them.

Is it only the unwashed who want for conversation?

Have we resigned our gloriously inefficient thinking selves to the system? Are we so owned we have nothing left to give for free? This is where I get to the nub of why the Flat Pack Philosophy Circle might be important. I work, we work, and despite them telling us that all our jobs will soon be gobbled up by robots, we’re working more than is good for us. Even when we don’t have a job we work, because capitalism requires it. We work at finding a job, we work at justifying our jobless existence – it’s time consuming and exhausting. Capitalism requires efficiency and production, but the more efficient and productive you are, the less relevant you become, and the harder you have to work at being efficient and productive.

It’s a great myth that there is any such thing as “getting ahead” with a view to “taking a break”. The notion you might want to work on your own humanity, or improve and nourish our human communities goes completely unrecognised. So as a people, we don’t and can’t progress.

Having said that, I’m not convinced I’m really doing this with some deluded notion of a greater good. It simply satiates me to think about it, so there’s that. And then maybe there’s a handful of people who’ll find it entertaining for five minutes, for lovers of philosophy, maybe five minutes more.

So at its most basic, what is it? What am I suggesting?

Well, motivated by my minimal skill-set and inspired by the cunning of spontaneous street-food vendors in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, a quick search on Ali-baba delivered numerous results for plastic stools – a solution that can’t be beat for price and scalability. Add to that a length of rope, and even I can fashion some kind of fastening to loop the stools together for easy portability.

Anyone for philosophy?

For no skills, a quick trip to Footscray, and for less than $30, this is the bar. It’s a low bar. And I implore a designer to do better.

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When I picture the Flat Pack Philosophy Circle, it’s a little more sophisticated. I originally considered flat pack a possible solution, drawing parallels in experience between your first furniture purchase and philosophy 101. Flat pack v1.0 took the two-dimensional plane and challenged the general populace to realise a third dimension. Shipping and cost-cutting convenience was accepted as a problem-solving rite of passage by a mass audience eager to see the fruits of their labour on display. Of course, given the broken relationships left in its wake, I’m now leaning toward something mechanical, modular, something that in my mind looks simultaneously mid-century modern, but titanium tough, lightweight and high-tech. It unfolds from something the size of a brief case at the touch of a button, or it can be deployed by pulling a concealed chord in a backpack.

When we can 3D print bridges and buildings, couldn’t we take this technology and marry it with one of the oldest arts?

Maybe. But you may well ask, what’s the point, and where is the philosophy?

Here’s another chat, this time with my friend Damon, after sending him the first draft of this presentation…

I said: I hope it’s kind of interesting… that maybe someone might find it interesting.
He said: Well you’ll need to get rid of the ‘no self, no opinion’ line early on. That’s ridiculous!
Me: Ridiculous because it could never happen?
Him: ‘No self?’ That’s enlightenment baby. Good luck.
Me: Ok, but ‘no opinion’ is alright isn’t it?
Him: Well how the fuck are you gonna interact if you don’t have an opinion?

Which raises the question: How do you get people to engage philosophically? What happens to opinion? What about bullies and bullying? How much behaviour can The Circle itself really hope to shape? Does The Circle require a moderator? Should The Circle operate as a public service attaché to a philosophy professorship? And at what point does answering a question with another question become annoying, throwing us back onto conversational terra familiar: GOT season 7 etc. Opinion! Hyperbole! Speculation!

It might be that the philosophically inclined among us must take the initiative and step out into the world to offer this Socratic service. Like the guy who simply wanted more hugs, “free philosophy” could at least get us some ethical action.

Essentially, I want to create a space where we can dial down the melodrama and engage with the wisdom itself, the wisdom of uncertainty, the wisdom of inquiry, and the wisdom of possibility.

Whether we start with a philosophical tenet and draw on it in a way that helps us understand something we’ve experienced, witnessed or misunderstood in day-to-day life. Or we start with a problem and unravel it using a philosophical framework, is open to debate. The most important thing is that we give ideas time to breath before we get our knickers in a knot, and that we give people the opportunity to realise some of the opinions they hold dear are not necessarily valid after all. It’s said that Socrates liked nothing more than to leave a man in egoistic ruin. We can’t possibly all hope to employ Socratic irony today so skilfully as to upend and undress he who shouts loudest, but we could model a new way to engage that removes the fuel the media currently provides.

I run the risk now of this going pear shaped as I’m going to use James Damore, he of Google Memo infamy, as an example.

You may know him for his memo (but at ten pages I don’t know how many people actually read it), you may know him from the media reaction (too much oxygen, too little analysis), you may know him from the counter reaction (courted by crazed neo-liberal bullies, who then leveraged the hype for their own agenda) you may know him from the industrial action that followed (google sacked him, which nicely played into his conviction he was right). You may not know him at all – sure the story blew up – but it had all but disappeared in a week because some other story was hot on its heels. So if not James Damore, you may know a white, nerdy IT guy like him. Because let’s face it, there are a lot of white, nerdy IT guys. But there are also nerdy Indian IT guys. And after Australia’s outsourcing craze of the last decade, there are so many Indian IT guys, that they may be nerdy or not. Like James Damore, it’s less likely you know a woman who codes, but they exist. It doesn’t follow that because you don’t know one they don’t, or won’t, or couldn’t or can’t. For all you know, it could be that they can’t be arsed. Which is to say, you don't know. Either way.

I’m loathe to grant him further consideration than is warranted, particularly because he and his paper are plainly unremarkable, but it’s an example that highlights how a philosophical approach could temper a reaction that serves to only ingrain flawed thinking.

The lost opportunity with a guy like this is not to recognise that he is thinking and that he’s engaged in something that resembles a thought process… My wish was someone would have said: You’re thinking James, but you’re wrong. Steering his thinking in the right direction by challenging his thought process and asking the right questions could even be useful and precipitate change.

I vouch for philosophy because I think it has the potential to abstract a person’s capacity to have one thought follow another, from the content of their thoughts, and the limits of their experience. Subsequently challenged, it can create a distance between a person and their views, which is exactly the space we need to create, to live an examined life.

The Flat Pack Philosophy Circle is just one tool we could use to further that examination.