simplicity, minimalism

Thinking about simplicity this morning.

Spinoza's Ethics begins with God or Substance because God is the simplest conceivable thing. Everything else is built up from substance, is a complication of it. What requires a great deal of effort on Spinoza's part (i.e., what calls for his geometrical method of axioms, propositions, and proofs) is getting us to apprehend substance in its absolute simplicity by short-circuiting the theological confusions we bring to the text.

Moving the opposite direction, science begins with complexities of phenomena as we experience them then whittles these complexities down to far simpler causes, principles, and laws.

Life is more complicated than non-life. Disorganized energy and matter is simpler than organized matter. Existence is simpler than what exists. Stars, galaxies, black holes, and so on - all far simpler than we are.

Minimalism in art - to clear away the complications that obscure the art itself. Thinking about all of this while listening to Alvin Lucier's composition Clarinet from Still And Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, which is about the "beats" created when a clarinet gently warps its pitch away from a single, steadily-pitched drone.