Actually, I’m glad you asked, Christian. Not only because it gives me an opportunity to pull out an old riff and work in my comfort zone, but because today’s study point gave me nothing to write about. That confession out in the open, I’m not really sure we can talk about “a philosophy” or “your philosophy” as much as a philosophical model that works within the general tradition of philosophy.
And in that sense of it, I would pull out, yet again, one of two (maybe three (golden eggs I’m proud of: Efficiency: that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the resources put into a given act and the resources gotten out. And the main source of that pride is the way it overlaps with all three members of my holy triad: Deleuze (w/ and w/out Guatarri), Rorty, and Zizek. But, in order to understand it, we first have to recognize that philosophy (along with every other discipline one might pursue (has always been dominated by one imperative: to get to know systems to the point of being able to work creatively with them. This, as far as I can tell, is the only means by which we advance or progress. And this, ultimately, involves working from the general systems involved down through the various subsystems to the individual actions of which a given system is composed.
And as far as I tell as concerns philosophy, our understanding of those individual actions has been pretty much been dominated by a Metaphysics of Power. Take, for instance, Spinoza’s notion of joyful and sad affects which is a matter of those individual interactions being a matter of overcoming the other or not. We also have Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s Will to Power. The idea, of course, is that, through the diverse attempts to overcome the other, it all levels out into the closest thing to perfect by addressing a multitude of diverse interests. This was the main thesis behind Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
Here’s my problem with it, though: it seems to me that if every individual act was merely a matter of one actor attempting to overcome the other, our whole system would have destroyed itself years ago in mad struggle to become “king of the hill”. It wouldn’t have leveled out as much as drawn into one most powerful thing.
Hence the Metaphysics of Efficiency. In this case, the primary mechanism by which everything works is a formula I have devised: Efficiency potential = Resources/expectations. And there is no need to do the math. It simply means that nothing decreases potential efficiency like lowering resources or increasing expectations while, inversely, nothing increases potential efficiency like either increasing resources or decreasing expectations.
And once you understand the implications of this, you start to see the diverse (maybe even universal (ways it can be applied. Just to give you a taster: you have to ask why drug addicts and the homeless seem to choose (or stick with (the life they do. But if you consider the formula offered above, you start to see that they see it more efficient to lower their expectations (as compared to the expectations of “normal” people (so that the resources available to them meet those expectations. And we can see it at the opposite pole with successful people who end up destroying themselves because the resources available to them can never meet the expectations they have. It even has literary applications. I mean if you think about it, many stories about family dynamics (think Death of a Salesman here (are about a coexistence of efficiencies (an efficiency in itself (compromised by one family member having higher expectations than the resources available to the system can meet.