Talk:Philosophy

This page is well written and I agree with its description as a user of the language. However, it's not clear to me that this is necessarily material for the encyclopedia: the page Toki Pona describes what the language is as a really existing phenomenon, but having a page about Toki Pona's philosophy begs the question of whether it has a philosophy at all. I have spoken to Sonja (pers. comm. June 10 or 11, 2023) about this question, and her take then was pretty much "it's just a language." That's obviously not a source that can be used in this page, but the point is to show that there's no obvious rule that Toki Pona have a philosophy.

I see two ways to go: first, move this essay to Menasewi's personal page, where I would happily point to it as an example of a synthesis of the theory of Toki Pona offered by pu. That seems pedantic, though, and makes the second option look better: this page should more generally explore the interaction between the idea of Toki Pona and the language itself.

For me the most interesting source here is https://web.archive.org/web/20070311222720/http://tokipona.esperanto-jeunes.org/about/why.html, an early (2007) version of the "why toki pona?" essay that eventually became the introduction to pu. I believe some form of this can be traced back to 2001, but this 2007 version is what I have archived. The most salient points that appear in earlier copies but disappear by the time pu arrives are her explicit references to anthropological primitivists Marshall Sahlins (https://web.archive.org/web/20070401113808/http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm) and John Zerzan (https://www.jstor.org/stable/42579549). This she repudiates now (pers. comm. June 2023), and the actual anthropology involved is perhaps dubious and romanticizing; but it was a huge part of my early exploration of the language, and the question of "what is the relationship between Toki Pona and 'primitivism'" is too important to leave out of the encyclopedia all together, I think. JPeton (talk) 16:39, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

A thing I've learned about recently: Moving an article to someone's userspace makes it so others cannot edit it (unless you have more rights than a regular user). So the article would become non-collaborative if that were to happen. Jan Ke Tami (talk) 23:29, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Good to know. Then I'd like to field adding discussion of the historical connection to primitivism along with current criticisms of similar ideas. This springs to mind: https://mimuki.net/thoughts/mapona/ JPeton (talk) 01:33, 11 November 2023 (UTC)