The Nature of Order // Book One // The Phenomenon of Life

[droqen]

Regarding Christopher Alexander's
"
The Nature of Order,
Book One:
The Phenomenon of Life
"

~ The harmful industrial mechanistic viewpoint.

[droqen]

P10
Look at the yellow tower on the facing page. It has the smile of the Buddha, of life and simplicity. It moves us in the heart. I want a conception of order subtle enough to explain the way the yellow tower makes us feel.
...
the order which can be treated as negative entropy is too simple, and, for complex artistic cases, almost trivial. [emphasis mine]
...
It can account for low-level order ... but not for any complex order which is interesting ...

[droqen]

P3,4
someone asked me, How did you come up with the pattern language?
...
We assumed from the beginning that everything was based on the real nature of human feeling and -- this is the unusual part -- that human feeling is mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person. Of course there is that part of human feeling where we are all different.
...
Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same things. So, from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that fact, and concenrtrated on that part of human experience and feeling where our feeling is all the same.

[droqen]

Alright, Mr. Alexander, I'm with you, but tentatively.

He starts to get into other stuff in the preface, in later pages, that both resonates with me and provokes within me a great doubt. He says that there is a problem which arose as a result of what he calls the "20th century mechanistic view[point]", which is in short built upon the idea that facts can only be mechanistic, and that other things are strictly personal and private and cannot be facts.
I'm with him here, but tentatively.

He says that the idea of order which he presents must allow for aesthetic statements that are true or false.

I don't think we have access to objective data -- we don't have access to facts -- but what we do have is the phenomenon of perception, our phenomenal models, subjective data, and statistics. When Alexander says "Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same," there are always outliers. But I also agree that to a huge degree we can make claims about aesthetic appeal that are nigh universal. To describe a statistically accurate claim about a solution that works for "everyone" as a fact is erasing a thousand, a million perspectives. I'm not down with that.

But at the same time, I think there is incredible value in getting away from the idea that we are all individual, that we are divided into four, ten, twelve archetypes, in order to focus on the, as Alexander says, ninety percent where we tend to be identical. We run on extremely similar hardware, software, wetware, whatever.

I could use a word for these usually-facts about what it is to be human.

I expect Alexander will not give me this word, but given this context, almost a simple translational trick to allow his words to suit my particular perspective (or what to me is, I suppose, a more true way of conceiving of human information generally), I have hope that this book will deliver unto me great and deep insight.

[droqen]

P. 32, 33, under the heading 3 / A NEW CONCEPT OF "LIFE"
. . . we do feel that there are different degrees of life in things . . . this feeling rather strongly shared by almost everyone.
. . .
When we see waves in the sea, we do certainly feel that they have a kind of life. We feel their life as a real thing, they move us.
. . .
We often see a piece of wood and marvel at its life; another piece of wood feels more dead.
. . .
All I hope to do, so far, is to encourage the reader to begin thinking that this might not be merely a metaphor, or an anthropocentric view.

[droqen]

Define anthropocentric!
"regarding humankind as the central or most important element of existence, especially as opposed to God or animals."
"interpreting or regarding the world in terms of human values and experiences."

I'm still very interested in this book but I can see Alexander's perspective clashing quite hard against my own. He writes that we feel different degrees of life in things, and though I cannot ask him how he uses 'anthropocentric' (nor do I think that would necessarily be a fruitful endeavour were it possible), to me this can only ever be an anthropocentric pursuit.

He speaks as a human about human experience to humans about a feeling shared by humans: 'life'. This obviously can only revolve around an "[interpretation] or [regard] of the world in terms of human values and experiences." Alexander wants his concept of life to be objective, to be science. I want objective science to admit its inescapably anthropocentric foundation. This is not at all a bad thing. It is, I believe, wholly in line with Alexander's conception of life, rooted in human feeling. Science should seek to be alive.

[droqen]

P. 30
even though strictly speaking an ecological system is not alive, because it does not meet the definition of a self-replicating organism . . . [we call it alive.]
The mixture of natural and man-made which exists in any city . . . raises complicated questions of definition, which we have hardly begun to answer. . . we have obviously non-living systems mixed in with the living systems . . . clearly [the non-living systems] do have a vital role in the overall life of the larger systems. If we adhere to the purely mechanistic picture of life, we are stuck with preservationist adherence to ecological nature in its purest form --- just as ecological purists have in fact been stuck with the idea that they must keep nature "as it is," because this is the only way they can define clearly what they want to do. The moment we want to treat the more complex system of buildings and nature together, as one living system, we . . . no longer have an adequate scientific definition of what we are trying to do. For example, according to present-day biological terminology, a city is not a living system, even though it is often referred to as a living system by social scientists in search of a metaphor.

P. 33
. . . this might not be merely a metaphor, or an anthropocentric view.

[droqen]

Alexander speaks in terms of scientific definitions. But science is a living system, too: a complex mixture of non-living systems and living systems. He seems to miss the fact that science might be as dead or alive as a city. (Or maybe he takes it so for granted that he does not believe it worth mention: see the next quote, where he says "we experience degree of life . . . as a fact about the world"

[droqen]

P. 35
. . . we experience degree of life as an essential concept which goes to the heart of our feelings about the natural world, and what nourishes us fundamentally, as a fact about the world.

[droqen]

P. 40, under the heading 7 / THE FEELING OF LIFE IN TRADITIONAL BUILDINGS AND WORKS OF ART
. . . unconcerned, hand painted, repeating but not repeating, harmonious in their similarity, unworried in their inventiveness.

[droqen]

I feel the need to just repeat this by my own hand a few times. Unconcerned. Hand-painted. Repeating but not repeating. Repeating, but not repeating. Repeating but not repeating. Harmonious, in their similarity. Unworried, in their inventiveness.

Harmonious in their similarity, unworried in their inventiveness, repeating but not repeating.

repeating but not repeating.

[droqen]

repeating but not repeating. this phrase reminds me of so many things, so many things. first you can see that i am obviously repeating... I've been doing this when I write things now and then. I repeat things because I notice how it feels different and meaningfully different the second time, the third time. repeating but not repeating.

secondly. there was something i read long ago about a person who recited some mantra for an hour, the same phrase over and over again, but the writer said that the reciter said it 'differently' each time (even though it was the same) giving each utterance its own individual attention. repeating but not repeating.

thirdly. in ugly feelings, specifically quoted here,

""Scenes are magnified not by repetition, but by repetition with a difference . . . Sheer repetition of experience characteristically evokes adaptation, which attenuates, rather than magnifies, the connected scenes""

'sheer repetition . . . attenuates', each repetition does something different, something more, something less . . . and repetition 'with a difference' does something different still from that. in both instances: repeating without repeating. in the first, the human mind rejects the effect of the thing that repeats. repeating but diminishing. in the second, the human mind accepts the repeated effect of the thing that repeats without repeating.

repeating but not repeating.

[droqen]

P. 50
. . . the feeling of greater life does appear from time to time . . . during the 20th century. . . . In part, these examples feel alive because they are --- as far as possible --- concept-free. They are not based on images, or on ideas of reality, but instead they have reality itself coming to life in them in a free way. . . . the ordinary process of daily life, uncontaminated by ideas or notions of what to do, has unfolded in a way that . . . make us very comfortable, because we recognize them as genuine. . . . Since it is our main intention to make things which feel alive in our own time, it is these modern versions which must especially inspire us.

[droqen]

P. 60
These things are all beautiful, but they are all damaged. Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.

[droqen]

P. 60, 61
. . . the very great craft and subtlety of the great Isfahan mosque and its tile-work, where the outward perfection again hides the drunkenness, the careless abandon in the individual bits of tilework that allowed the artist, drunk in self, to make a free thing in the flowers he put in the glaze.
   What impresses us about all these examples is that they have a kind of blitheness or serenity, an innocent and simple quality. . . . Their easiness takes the breath away. . . . They have a simplicity beyond artifice.