Travellers who find themselves astray in some forest must not wander now this way now that

My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I could, and to follow no less constantly the most doubtful opinions, once I had determined on them, than I would if they were very assured, imitating in this travellers, who, finding themselves astray in some forest, must not wander, turning now this way now that, and even less stop in one place, but must walk always as straight as they can in a given direction, and not change direction for weak reasons, even though it was perhaps only chance in the first place which made them choose it; for, by this means, if they do not go exactly where they wish to go they will arrive at least somewhere in the end where they will very likely be better off than in the middle of a forest.

René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (Penguin Classics, 1968) pp. 46-47

Beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge

Having learnt from the time I was at school that there is nothiing one can imagine so strange or so unbelievable that has not been said by one or other of the philosophers; and since then, while travelling, having recognized that all those who hold opinions quite opposed to ours are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many exercise as much reason as we do, or more; and having considered how a given man, with his given mind, being brought up from childhood among the French or Germans, becomes different from what he would be if he had always lived among the Chinese or among cannibals; and how, down to our very fashions in dress, what pleased us ten years ago and will perhaps please us again before another ten years are out, now seems to us extravagant and laughable, I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge, and, nevertheless that the assent of many voices is not a valid proof for truths which are rather difficult to discover, because they are much more likely to be found by one single man than by a whole people. Thus I could not choose anyone whose opinions it seemed to me I ought to prefer to those of others, and I found myself constrained, as it were, to undertake my own guidance.

René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (Penguin Classics, 1968) p. 39

Language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed

By means of poetic language, waves of newness flow over the surface of being. And language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed. Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 222

Forests reign in the past

Who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest? History is not enough. We should have to know how the forest experiences its great age; why, in the reign of the imagination, there are no young forests. [...] In the vast world of the non-I, the non-I of fields is not the same as the non-I of forests. The forest is a before-me, before-us, whereas for fields and meadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all the different phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialectics of the I and the non-I grow more flexible, I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forests reign in the past.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 188

The sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams

A nest-house is never young. Indeed, speaking as a pedant, we might say that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting. For not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back to it, the way a bird comes back to its nest, or a lamb to the fold. This sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years and, through the dream, combats all absence. An intimate component of faithful loyalty reacts upon the related images of nest and house.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 99

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space

Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world. The problem is not only one of being, it is also a problem of energy and, consequently, of counter-energy.

In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 46-47

Through permanent childhood we maintain the poetry of the past

The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting.

[...]

The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.

[...]

It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 15-16

In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time

At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being's stability – a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to "suspend" its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.8

The house shelters daydreaming

If I were asked to name the main benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.6

An entire past comes to dwell in a new house

An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.5

Only those who have learned to curl up can inhabit with intensity

After having followed teh day-dreams of inhabiting these uninhabitable places, I returned to images that, in order for us to live them, require us to become very small, as in nests and shells. Indeed in our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxxiv

Poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom

The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at short range. But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents on the intense life of language.

Thus, along with considerations on the life of words, as it appears in the evolution of language across the centuries, the poetic image, assa a mathematician would say, presents us with a sort of differential of this evolution. A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language. It awakens images that had been effaced, at the same time that it confirms the unforeseeable nature of speec. And if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship of freedom? What delight the poetic imagination takes in making game of censors! Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced fredom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxiii

Work should not be glorified

The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward. The epiteths thrown at homeless beggars, the demonization of those on the dole, the labyrinthine system of bureaucracy set up to receive benefits, the unpaid 'job experience' imposed upon the unemployed, the sadistic penalisation of those who are seen as getting something for free – all reveal the truth that for our societites, remuneration requires work and suffering. Whether for a religious or secular goal, suffering is thought to constitute a necessary rite of passage. People must endure through work before they can receive wages, they must prove their worthiness before the eyes of capital. This thinking has an obvious theological basis – where suffering is thought to be not only meaningful, but in fact the very condition of meaning. A life without suffering is seen as frivolous and meaningless. This position must be rejected as a holdover from a now-transcended stage of human history. The drive to make suffering meaningful may have had some functional logic in times when poverty, illness and starvation were necessary features of existence. But we should reject this logic today and recognise that we have moved beyond the need to ground meaning in suffering. Work, and the suffering that accompanies it, should not be glorified.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 125

The history of capitalism is the history of the world's population being transformed into proletarian existence

While work is common to every society, under capitalism it takes on historically unique qualities. In pre-capitalist societies, work was necessary, but people had shared access to land, subsistence farming and the necessary means of survival. Peasants were poor but self-sufficient, and survival was not dependent on working for someone else. Capitalism changed all this. Through the process called primitive accumulation, pre-capitalist workers were uprooted from their land and dispossessed of their means of subsistence. Peasants struggled against this and continued to survive on the margins of the emerging capitalist world, and it eventually took violent force and harsh new legal systems to impose wage labour on the population. Peasants, in other words, had to be made into a proletariat. This new figure of the proletariat was defined by its lack of access to the means of production or subsistence, and its requirement for wage labour in order to survive. This means that the 'proletariat' is not just the 'working class' nor is it defined by an income level, profession of culture. Rather, the proletariat is simply that group of people who must sell their labour power to live – whether they are employed or not.. And the history of capitalism is the history of the world's population being transformed into proletarian existence through the advancing dispossession of the peasantry.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 86-87

Alienation is a mode of enablement

The overall aim must therefore be picked out as an unrelenting project to unbind the necessities of this world and transform them into materials for the further construction of freedom. Such an image of emancipation can never be satisfied with or condensed into a static society, but will instead continually strain beyond any limitations. Freedom is a synthetic enterprise, not a natural gift.

Underlying this idea of emancipation is a vision of humanity as a transformative and constructible hypothesis: one that is built through theoretical and practical experimentation and elaboration. There is no authentic human essence to be realised, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organic wholeness to be achieved. Alienation is a mode of enablement, and humanity is an incomplete vector of transformation. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 82

Emancipation is not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, 'synthetic freedom' recognises that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless. Under a democracy, for example, we are all formally free to run for political leadership. But without the financial and social resources to run a campaign, this is a meaningless freedom. Equally, we are all formally free to not take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer. In either case, various options may be theoretically available, but for all practical purposes are off the table. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom. As Marx and Engels wrote, 'it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means'. Understood in this way freedom and power become intertwined. If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons. Achieving this involves at least three different elements: the provision of the basic necessities of life, the expansion of social resources, and the development of technological capacities. Taken together, these form a synthetic freedom that is constructed rather than natural, a collective historical achievement rather than the result of simply leaving people be. Emancipation is thus not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul, but instead a matter of constructing and cultivating the right attachments.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 79-80