Vivek Haldar on Minimalism

The intellectual powerhouses of the Renaissance were not minimalists. They immersed themselves in everything they could find.

Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy

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I really enjoyed what Haldar had to say here in this article because he touched on issues that I deal with in The Picture and the Frame. It is the minimalist vs. maximalist debate. It is one I revisit again and again.

Minimalism and maximalism are two strategies. Haldar makes the point that minimalism is a great short term strategy for concentrating and getting shit done. In the long term, it fails because we need Renaissance type maximalism to generate new ideas which are really the combination of old ideas in new patterns. If you're going to be creative, then you need to be a maximalist.

Another blogger makes a minimalist defense:
Minimalism is a viable long term intellectual strategy

The problem with maximalism is that it runs into limited resources. Like Haldar, I admire the titans of the Renaissance. They made the world a richer and better place. Maximalists are firmly within the Aristotelian tradition of things. Minimalism smacks of asecticism and Platonism. It seems the choice is between clutter and emptiness.

I see this debate in other fields of endeavor. For mountain climbers, the minimalists are the alpinists while the maximalists are the expedition climbers. Each strategy has their comparative strengths and weaknesses. Which is better?

In music, you have the maximalist progressive music of bands like Radiohead, Yes, King Crimson, and the like. Then, you have minimalist compositions of a Brian Eno. Then, there is the straight up simplicity of bands like AC/DC, KISS, and the Foo Fighters. But in aesthetics, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I think the answer may lie in a third way. Like Aristotle, I think virtue is the mean between excess and deficiency. In this case, excess would be maximalism and deficiency would be minimalism. I will use music as an example.

Progressive rock sucks. Sometimes derided as "math rock," progressive rock groups like Yes and King Crimson and others made these larger than life symphonic rock opera type things with excessive notes and what have you. I've tried to listen to this music, but I end up just listening to the hooks on Roundabout. OTOH, Brian Eno's ambient work takes it in the extreme other direction. I don't think it is a coincidence that Eno worked with maximalist types like Robert Fripp. The result is that both types of music are pretty much crap. They are experiments and not much else. But, hey, this is just my opinion.

The belief of both of these groups is that if you add or subtract to the extreme, good things will result. But when I listen to the progressive and ambient music, I just don't like it. It just fucking sucks. Ulimately, people want to rock.

The one thing minimalism and maximalism have in common is that they are extreme. These are easy choices to make. Maximalism says toss it all in. Minimalism says throw it all out. Who is right? I think the answer would be neither one.

To continue with my music analogy, I always liked what Keith Richards said about AC/DC. They only had one song, but it was the best damn rock song you ever heard. The gist was their music sounded similar and broke no new ground or anything. It was simple and straightforward. And it just rocks. There are no extended solos and music theory here. It's just some guys playing and having a good fucking time.

KISS is another band in that simple mold. They auditioned Eddie Van Halen for the band once but decided that he was not a good fit for them. It wasn't that he was a bad guitarist. The guy was great. But as Gene Simmons put it, KISS was a meat-and-potatoes type of band.

Another story deals with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters who said that he learned the value of minimalism and simplicity from Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Punk rock was ultimately simple music. There is a lot of variety there but also a lot of heart and soul. And that is what great music has--emotion. Both minimalist and maximalist types of music are just fucking dead.

I'm a big believer in simplicity. Unfortunately, simplicity doesn't have a cool label like "minimalist" or "maximalist." But simplicity is hard. You can't make a rule for what is simple. It is that midpoint between excess and deficiency. This is why I proffered "essentialism" as perhaps a better term. You keep the good stuff but get rid of the bad stuff.

Minimalism is essentially neo-Platonism. I don't care for it. If there is a label I can jettison, that is the one I can live without. Platonism is world denying which is why so much minimalist art and design seems so damn cold. It is why the ambient music of Eno is just a bunch of musical tones. It is a sonic quaalude.

A maximalist is just an asshole in need of an editor. I think of this when considering the work of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon writes the textbook as novel. It is just damn awful. I'm sorry, but I could give a shit about those books. But I don't want to veer into literary territory and criticism.

What people really care about is the way you live your life. If you're a maximalist, you are going to own a bunch of shit and pursue multiple avenues of endeavor with all of them proving useless and wasteful. If you're a minimalist, you are going to obsess over owning one less item. If this all seems dumb, you would be correct.

People want simple. They don't want austere. This is why I keep going back to the Puritans. There's a lot to hate about the Calvinist tradition, but it is firmly in that post-Renaissance humanist way. The Catholics are home to both the platonist monks and the Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas. They had both hair shirts and gilded cathedrals. It was the religious/philosophical equivalent of bulimia with the binging and the purging.

Puritanism could be extreme in certain ways, but that tradition was both world embracing but also simple. It is this simplicity that appeals to me. I liked their hard work ethic, their simple dress, their clean white churches. They kept the good and tossed out the bad. Even the name "Puritan" referred to the "purity" these folks were trying to achieve. They knew what was good, and they went for it.

I find myself caught between these two poles of maximalism. As I have said before, I find maximalist ways to be wasteful. I find minimalism to be dead and boring. But I can do simple all day. I keep the good, and I toss out the bad. I think both extremes are just stupid, and I need to try and find a way to articulate this third way.

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