Intuition

by R. Buckminster Fuller

"...an expression of one of his most fundamental that humanity is suffering from a kind of cosmic near-sightedness, an inability to comprehend universal principles, due to our concentration on special 'parts'." Fuller was "philosopher, designer, cosmologist, adviser to heads of state and corporation presidents, and First Citizen of the Global Village."

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Poetry

210 pages

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor.

Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.

Buckminster Fuller was the second president of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.

Reviews

[Abhijeet Melkani · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up at around page 40 or so. What really put me out were Bucky's arguments against Newton's third law and his use of the word 'precession' both of which were completely incorrect.

He says that since Einstein discovered that there is no such thing as simultaneity we should completely do away with the idea that every action has a simultaneous reaction. What he misses out is that the action and the reaction are events taking place at the same space-time coordinate and so will be simultaneous for every inertial observer. In fact, they are not two different events but two aspects of the same event.

Further at some point he uses "precession" to mean the "surprise behaviour" of orbiting that two massive objects, which are not critically proximate (by which he means if they have a tangential component of velocity about their center of mass), exhibit when they fall into each other. Where as the conventional definition of precession is a change in the orientation of the rotational axis of a rotating body.

Fuller speaks like an oracle and continually tries to push his mysticism into science. [At one point, he is about to talk about the magical properties of the number 92 thinking there are only that many elements in Universe.] Synergetics is perhaps equally trash but at least it is poetic and mystical at parts.

[Maryann Rada · Rating 5 out of 5]

R. Buckminster Fuller's work is a notoriously hard egg to crack, but once you get into his head through his way of using language, you will find treasure. Intuition is a book of poetic reflection on life from this genius, and he takes you with him in a tour of consciousness and reality that may just leave you with some very new pathways in your neural network! Especially worth looking at is his translation of the Lord's Prayer at the end of the book, really a new way of approaching the concept of God. If you've read his other works, such as Synergetics or Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth but have missed this book, you haven't got the full picture of who Fuller was or how he thought.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some personal musings about creativity.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in 1972, which is the mid-to-late point of Fuller's writing timeline. Because of the way the book is printed (short lines, wide margins), one can read this book quickly. I wish the book spent more time on the concept of using comprehensive and anticipatory design science to distribute and effectively use resources in such a way that all humanity benefits, to the point of what Fuller describes as "the end of humanity's wants," which would in his opinion effectively end war. My favorite line, to this point, of the book was "For now we know scientifically that wealth consists exclusively of physical energy which cannot be depleted, plus intelligence's know-how, which can only increase."

[Jay Schneider]

I learned that I need to read it again

[Whoof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bucky gets it