On "Minimalism": An Ambiguous Concept

Many times I saw and heard the terms "minimalism"/"minimalist" associated with the general idea of owning or using or containing the least amount of stuff possible. This article is devoted to discussing these terms themselves. Some other time I might write about applications of minimalism in certain contexts.

Considering some of the choices I made, I sometimes thought that maybe I am a minimalist. My operating system of choice is ArchLinux, which allows you to build your software environment from scratch: when you finish installing the system itself, you only have the basic black terminal. This means you install as you go only the programs you really want and need. I rarely buy new clothes, and only do so when the ones I wear become noticeably damaged or dirty. Same approach for devices and appliances—I take good care of everything so I can avoid throwing them away and buying new ones.

Nevertheless, "minimalism" always seemed unclear to me. It suggests the idea of reducing something to the minimum, but it's not specific enough. In college, we studied optimization theory, where the goal is to find the minimum (or maximum, less commonly) of a function subject to some constraints. Since then, when hearing optimizations being casually mentioned, I got in the habit of questioning the rigor of this usage: how do we measure the "goodness" or fitness of possible solutions?

In high school, we used MinGW to compile C++ programs. The name stands for "Minimalist GNU for Windows", which is not quite clear. Although, once you read about it, you understand that the idea behind this project was to port to Windows the minimal set of GNU tools such that people could build native C++ applications, which makes sense. A more ambiguous usage is how the ranger developers describe their program: "It provides a minimalistic [sic!] and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy." Do they refer to the lack of graphics? Well, it's a text (console) interface after all, what else could we expect? Maybe they meant a minimal set of features? Definitely not. As a ranger user, I can attest the interface offers plenty of features.

Hence, I believe "minimalism" should be always qualified in a way that makes it clear what is desired to be minimal. For instance "computational minimalism" could mean "using the least computational resources (hardware and software)". Technological minimalism could mean either "the least amount of technology", "the least advanced technology", or maybe a combination of both, so we still have some ambiguity here. Going back to the clothes example, I could call myself a "garment" minimalist, but I can think of variations here as well: having few clothes in general; or having few types of clothes but potentially many of each type (say 10 blue T-shirts but no other colors).

Now, the least amount of something is zero; the least advanced technology is simply doing it by hand; the least amount of clothes is to just go out naked. Therefore, the constraints that we impose when determining the minima are also crucial, to the extent that two people could declare themselves "foo-minimalists" while deciding upon wildly different degrees of foo. Let's consider myself and my first employer of about 8 years ago. We can be described as computational minimalists (for more or less the same reasons): I choose to install software that is as simple and with as few dependencies as possible; my medical enterprise employer wanted the software we were developing to have as few dependencies as possible too. However, my constraint is that the software should be available in the official Arch Linux repositories, or at least in the user repository, while my employer had a policy of including only third party software which had some form of paid support available. Of course, this greatly reduces the range of options, but I think was a sensible decision given the strong safety and reliability requirements of medical software.

In conclusion, "minimalism"/"minimalism" can be somewhat useful descriptors if they are sufficiently qualified. However, given their relativity, one should not rely on them when accuracy is important. Instead, one could be explicit and say "I strive to keep foo to the minimum, while making sure that bar is satisfied and baz remains at a reasonable level."

In his post titled "maybe i am minimalist after all", Benjamin Hollon went a different, maybe more interesting path, but limited himself to the "owning fewer things" aspect: he elected to replace "minimalism" with "intentionalism". In this way, he wants to emphasize not the pursuit of reducing something, but rather the importance of making choices deliberately, of having a reason and a purpose for things that one acquires. In turn, this will lead to fewer stuff as well. Ironically—I have to say—his approach is more prohairetic than the one presented on this very blog!

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• Domains: Philosophy