Can I get to 2000+ on principles, without memorising positions?

2000FIDE

You'd have to memorise more principles than moves then lol

When I hear calculation, I understand that to mean looking at the current stage of a game and deciding your next move by predicting some moves ahead, and trying out different future moves in your mind, and making a judgement about which of them would be best for you to win.

You would still do that, but that would not involve memorising lines of moves or memorising positions.

Note:  I do understand that I cannot totally eliminate memorising things.

Haha.  True.  I was actually thinking of it as "knowing" the principles rather than "memorising"  the principles, but some principles would require "memorising", while some might be akin to common-sense (not so easy to see though, in certain instances)

That's incorrect.

#26
That is correct. Capablanca by his own account was often out of book as early as move 6.  His widow corroborated that he never studied and that he owned a few chess book but no chess board. He vehemently studied endgames.

A lot of people seem to have misread the OP. The OP doesn't mention openings at all. The OP asks about memorizing "positions" and "chains of moves."

I guess it should be said that, in any skill, sitting down with the goal of memorizing something isn't very useful.

In chess, most of the "memorization" is from study and playing games... but memorization isn't your primary goal when you study and play, it's a natural consequence of spending a long time with the game.

Strong players are strong because they have a lot of pattern recognition. This is why a GM can play a 50 board simul and win all 50 games. The GM isn't calculating more... in fact the GM calculates substantially less. By recognizing the key features of a position almost immediately, the GM can play quality moves almost immediately.

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Now let's talk about what the OP suggests in place of this. The OP wants to apply some ridiculously long set of principles. "Control the center, rooks on open files, doubled pawns are bad, etc etc"

First of all there's not enough time to apply a ridiculously long list.
Secondly, it doesn't allow for any nuance, and chess is full of exceptions to general principles.

There's the man, the myth, and the legend.

The man studied chess, and knew the openings of his day. "Out of book by move 6" is ridiculous... particularly because they played the QGD almost every game. Even if he were "out of book on move 6" at the beginning of the year, simply by virtue of having played and followed a tournament or match, he'd be booked up well past that.

And by the time he was world champion... I mean, this argument is completely ridiculous.

I am 2050 blitz and I  don't know each one principal from your list. There are more important stuff. I recommend this vid: http://adfoc.us/69123580849490

#29
Look at the Capablanca-Alekhine match. Alekhine was fully booked up, Capablanca played on his innate ability as always. What Capablanca knew about the Queen's Gambit was from experience, not from study. He was a genius who found everything over the board. Lasker said that he had known many chess players, but only one chess genius: Capablanca.

Or read his books. He discusses typical patterns. He practically invented the concept of pattern recognition. Even as early as the match with Corzo that spanned both sides of his thirteenth birthday, he was studying his own games and repeating positions deliberately so that he could offer an improvement. 

Being out of book on move 6, and facing an opponent who prepared better than you for a world championship match, are two different things.

As I recall, Capa owned books and studied them. The stories about his chess ability falling out of the sky and landing in his head like magic are just stories.

This is a good point. Players of that day played over the games of tournaments. They also did analysis of their games, published that analysis, and then other strong players reacted with their own analyses.

All strong players, of any era, spent a lot of time studying chess.

2000 in any format of chess, except maybe bullet, is impossible without having calculation skill and other things, you can't just follow principles

#33
What are your sources then? His widow wrote:
"In the years that I had known Capa he had never played in private, he had never practised, nor even had a chess set at home."
https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/capablancaolga.html 

I was also under the impression that was a bit of a myth. He talks about studying in his books. Since none of us were actually there, think we need Batgirl to settle this debate lol 

Time machine fuel is very expensive. I think she only works on commission

#37
In his 'chess fundamentals'
game with Marshall move 5: the reason was my total lack of knowledge of the different variations in this opening
game with Rubinstein move 6: I was trying to avoid the beaten track
game against Janowski move 9: the idea of this irregular opening is mainly to throw white on his own resources
game against Burn, move 5: my ignorance of the multiple variations of the openings
game against Chajes, move 4: not the most favored move
This further attests that Capablanca did not study opening theory. He did however extensively study endgames.

Grandmasters calculate less than the average club player.

You CAN, but it would be much harder if you didn’t study at least some theory (I assume you mean opening theory)