What is the shape of an idea?

Becoming an ideas designer

Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the connection between digital design and critical theory.

I use this newsletter to explore the ideas that drive my own platform, called Clusta, for developing new ideas. If you’d like to see how I use Clusta, here’s how I developed this article. If you’d like to try it yourself, you’re very welcome to sign up.

"Every colour we think of has a shape and every shape a colour"

Nagarjuna

In the philosophy of mind, there is a concept known as the ‘hard’ problem, which refers to our attempt to understand how the mind and body connect.

I always found the naming of this concept amusing - the idea that within philosophy, an area of study quite famous for its lack of concrete answers, there lies a distinctly ‘hard’ problem, amongst a comparatively easy (yet still unsolvable) set of quandaries.

But this hard problem can be extended further, to describe the barrier we perceive between what is abstract and what is discrete.

Something discrete is a box. A real box, which we can count the sides of, and measure the length.

Something abstract is a memory, a sensation - an idea.

We cannot count their sides, nor measure their length, although we certainly try. The existence of the hard problem itself comes from an attempt to categorise the full anatomy of a conscious being. You may be familiar with Descartes (‘I think, therefore I am’) - he is attributed as the first philosopher to define this separation between mind and body, and consequently created the hard problem we have been stuck with since.

This goes some way to understanding the paradox of this separation, whether it be mind and body or discrete and abstract. We understand to some degree that ideas are abstract, and yet we see the very real impact they have on the world around us. Whether this be feats of architecture, political movements, a remarkably effective vacuum cleaner, the products of ideas surround us wherever we go. It is not that these supposedly opposing forces don’t connect, it is that we don’t understand their connection.

We cannot count the sides of an idea, but we know they exist. In philosophy, the study of existence, or being, is called ontology. Ideas exist, and so we can (attempt) to understand their ontology.

Representation

Whilst we may struggle to grasp the shape of ideas themselves, through art, literature and academia, we have a rich history of representing ideas in order to communicate them. We cannot measure an idea, but we can count the pages of a book.

The book is one of the longest standing artefacts of ideas, and Foucault provides my favourite quote on the ontology of the book:

“The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”

- Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

Whilst it may seem that the book is pulling ideas into the realm of the discrete, Foucault argues here that the opposite is happening: the ideas within the book are extending the ontology of the book, into ‘a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences… a node within a network.’

It seems, at first glance, the best way to understand the shape of an idea is to represent it in discrete form. But perhaps the discrete is more abstract than we think.

Relationism

Julian Baggini provides what I think is the most accessible description of relationism in his excellent book How the World Thinks, and I highly recommend reading the full book. But I will attempt to paraphrase:

When you look at the label on an item you buy from the supermarket, you will see the set of ingredients used, and the amounts of sugar, carbohydrates, fat etc, which we often use to judge the health value of an item. However, depending on the combination of ingredients, or elements, which make up an item of food, these elements might be more or less healthy.

A certain amount of sugar can be found in both an apple and a chocolate bar, but we recognise their health benefits greatly differ. This is because of the relationships between the sugar and the other elements that make up the apple and chocolate.

The concept of relationism pushes this to its very limits at an ontological level. Nothing in the universe exists in isolation, anything and everything we can think of depends on anything and everything else in order to exist.

Every colour has a shape, and every shape a colour.

It is easy to comprehend something abstract existing as relationism dictates. Ideas are the epitome of this, their existence made up of connections, references, nodes in a network. But relationism argues that everything, even a box or a book, falls into this definition of existence. Books need paper, that need trees, that need water, that need an atmosphere, that needs a healthy planet, that needs climate scientists, that need books.

A box needs the fundamental laws of physics in order to maintain its structural integrity. You get the idea.

The shape of an idea

To understand the ontology of an idea, we have to understand the ontology of one thing that is made up of many things.

My favourite writing on this is Deleuze’s concept of the ‘multiplicity’ in A Thousand Plateaus. Let’s jump off the deep end:

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows).”

- Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

You’d be hard pressed to describe anything Deleuze has ever written as a light read, this probably doesn’t buck the trend. Let me extrapolate what I think is most interesting about what he’s saying here, when it comes to the ontology of ideas:

The structure of a multiplicity, as Deleuze describes, is something where the content and structure are the same. To add or change the content of a multiplicity is to change its structure. To change its structure, you have to change its content.

We don’t have spaces to express ideas that combine structure and content. The world today exists in the image of the spreadsheet, the database. We create columns, and we insert rows into a table with the information defined by those columns. Even the book, the essay, the monograph, whilst much less rigid, demands a linear argument, a story, point example analysis.

For us to construct ideas in their image, we must create information which is both content and structure, column and row, and have their value as these be defined by the relationships between them.

And if we can construct ideas, we can design them.

Anyway, here’s how I designed this article: https://app.clusta.live/rhizome/spark/a3527fbb-346c-4fcd-b4c5-e9f3bc71c31d

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