Less and More

For as long as I've been interested in philosophy, I have been drawn to the extremes. It's hard not to be. Whether it's the story of Thales making a big bet on the production of the olive presses that made him rich or Diogenes the Cynic naked and crass when he met Alexander the Great, these stories, among other things, teach us that ultimately we'll be called to take an extreme position to validate our life's worth.

I'm starting to question that position. I'm moving away from the minimalist state of "less is more" and the maximalist aim of "more is more" to a more balanced "less and more" perspective.

The main driver of this change has been my discovery of philosopher Susanne Langer. I'm reading Philosophy in a New Key and it's radically changing how I thought about the value of all symbolic activity. When Langer tells the age old story of how we became the rational animal, she doesn't do what countless others do, which is to misinterpret a symbolically rich and developed state as a primitive one.