Preamble with a Few Explanations

Since the death of R. Buckminster Fuller in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven, the record of his prodigal career as a writer, artist, designer, and philosopher continues to be widely recognizedand even celebratedout of all proportion to the notable paucity of serious critical evaluation of his work.

It is not my purpose in this introduction to correct that imbalance. I have not acquired the academic credentials for such a task, and besides, as his longtime collaborator, I could not muster the necessary detachment.

So many of the discoveries of synergetics remain undiscovered by those very mathematical and scientific disciplines to which they would appear most relevant. But are they relevant? Will there ever be a synergetic accommodation with the psychologists and the particle physicists and the topologists? Can Fuller s claimed discoveries be reconciled with the latest accepted picture of reality as described by the various branches of physics? Maybe only the beginnings of answers will be found in this dictionary, but at least it exhaustively documents Fuller s proposal of a whole new field of study: a geometry of thinking and a geometry of physical reality.

This dictionary represents the first comprehensive documentation in one publication of all the major avenues of Fullers thinking since they were first anticipated in his Nine Chains to the Moon of 1938 (Fuller 1938). Here is the full array of the themes and concepts of his half-century of writing and lecturingincluding many propositions that remain to be tested always expressed in his own words but organized in a way to help the inquisitive reader pursue his own explorations. Hundreds of the entries herein are unpublished table talk and ephemera now in print for the first time, while roughly a third of the entries trace their way back to the primary source material of Fuller s dozen or so books published since 1938.

Though the systematic arrangement of the dictionary is inescapably analytic, it aims to be expository rather than critical. I organized it as an instrument to help the two of us write the Synergetics books. My hope is that it can serve as a tool for students and critics to make their own assessment of his work and thus reinforce the recognition of his achievements with the weight of discriminating examination.

At this point Fuller might tell us in his sometimes simpler words, “Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”[^1]

This Synergetics Dictionary was developed primarily around Fuller s system of synergetic geometry as later incorporated in Synergetics and Synergetics 2 (published by Macmillan in 1975 and 1979). But as a dictionary it goes well beyond the geometry to cover the full range of his original strategies of economic accounting, tensegrity engineering, energy harvesting tactics, individual and group psychology, Dymaxion airocean world map, and world game patterns of industrialization, and their ultimate synthesis in one grand scheme that he termed design science (q.v.).

For Fuller it was all one gestalt book that never quite got published one endless lecture with slidesa mosaic of his engineering blueprints, his allegorical lithographs, his lecture transcripts, his economic polemics, and his geometry. It was a frustration for him that his two Synergetics books were not fully comprehensiveparticularly in the omission of his almost desperate lifelong commitment to the geosocial revolution (q.v.), his hallmark strategy of making the world work. The current Garland edition enables me to make public amends for the first time by placing his synergetic geometry in the context of the complete body of his work and his program. For Fuller mathematics is intensely relevant to the evolution of humanity.

The obituary of R. Buckminster Fuller that ran on page one and continued for six columns in the New York Times of 3 July 1983 made no mention of his magnum opus Synergetics although these two volumes are his chief literary accomplishment, his most original work, and constitute what I believe is his major legacy to posterity. Synergetics has gone through many printings and is available in both hardcover and paperback. It has a devoted following of readers young and old. But the Times failed to mention the workwith apparent impunity because it has received a dearth of recognition from academic specialists in the fields it presumes to explore, and because of the peculiarity and difficulty of its language.

In fact it has been easy for many otherwise responsible people to absolve themselves from paying attention to Fullers work solely on the grounds of the inaccessibility of its style. Perhaps I should not have expected others to share my intrigue with that mode of expression: I would prefer to collaborate with a difficult writer who might need more help than an easy writer, and Fuller could always be counted on to come up with drafts that were complex to the point of obscurity and devoid of the least risk of banality.

Although Fuller declared that he was striving for a style expressing the most accurate and comprehensive observation of experience[^2], he ended up with a wholly new and unfamiliar and often polysyllabic vocabulary of his own invention. At their best his descriptions achieve a kind of poetic combination of feeling and abstractionphysical sensations merging into metaphysical patterns. Because it verges on a prose poem I describe Synergetics as a literary rather than a scientific work. In fact when we started to collaborate on the project in 1969 he had an impulse to write the whole book in blank verse or at least with unjustified right margins. The manuscript as I discovered it after years of gestation had the first two chapters in verse form. Fuller agreed to my suggestion that these chapters had an integrity of their own, and with the invaluable guidance of Bill Whitehead at Doubleday I helped him prepare them for separate publication as Intuition in 1972.

Synergetics is a book without genre. It proposes no less than a geometry of thinking and a geometry of physics. It deals with questions of geometry and philosophy through an exposition which does not conform to the conventions of mathematicians and philosophers. Fullers descriptions reintroduce those very subjective properties and sensory impulses that have been eliminated by classic science from formal descriptions in physics. He rejects the established disciplines of the universities by ignoring them; in their place he imposes his own self-discipline and his own way of thinking in a deliberate attemptas artists do to change his generations perception of the world.