It’s remarkable what surfaces when one lingers deliberately in a given space. In this case, Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration has drifted into view.
As often happens, we find agreement in the opening movement and parts of the second, but part company in Act III. That’s where Dis-Integration begins. Like many before and after him, Dąbrowski tries to reconstruct atop a compromised foundation. This can only fail. The scaffolding may hold for a time, but reality has a way of reminding us it was never load-bearing. Eventually, the quake comes, and the structure folds in on itself.
Japan, of course, knows this. Earthquakes are not hypothetical there; they are assumed. Traditional builders worked with the instability, designing dwellings that could flex, even collapse, without killing their inhabitants. James Clavell’s Shōgun is not scripture, but it captures the principle: impermanence as an architectural ethic.
Then there’s kintsugi – the gold-laced repair of broken pottery. The break is not erased but acknowledged, even exalted. The resulting vessel bears the evidence of its fracture, made stronger not by restoration to an imagined wholeness but by visible accommodation of its failure.
If Dąbrowski had stopped there – if his ‘positive disintegration’ had remained a celebration of fracture rather than a prelude to rebuilding – we might have been entirely aligned.
Philosophics 