The Real Nature of Human Feeling
There is a way of understanding order which is general. It is a view of order which helps us understand natural beauty and the life in buildings. It is a view which changes our cosmology.
Christopher Alexander assumed the real nature of human feeling —
that human feeling is mostly the same, mostly the same from person to person, mostly same in every person.
—Christopher Alexander 1
We do feel that there are different degrees of aliveness in things. This feeling is shared by almost everyone. Christopher Alexander tried to honor and respect the reality of this shared human feeling.
The Mechanistic World-Picture
How can we improve a situation when the causes of destruction are so deeply rooted in society?
Christopher Alexander came to believe that we are struggling with a conception of the world that essentially makes it impossible to make buildings well. Our effort is affected by the picture we have of things, the picture we have of the world. We have in us a world-picture that is essentially mechanical in nature, a mechanist-rationalist world-picture. It has entered us like an infection. It affects the way we think. It affects our values, our seeing, and our actions. The nature of order that lies at the root of the problem.
Everything in the world is governed by orderliness. Nature — all of it is orderly. But we do not have a language for the presence of order we so clearly feel. How do we create order? What nature of order do we put in? Our assumptions about order enters explicitly in what we create.
What is the order itself? The harmonious coherence which fills and touches us cannot be represented by a mechanism.
Yet it is this harmony, this aspect of order, which impresses us and moves us when we see it in the world.
—Christopher Alexander 2
The mechanistic view of order always makes us miss the essential thing. The beauty and order we see cannot be expressed mechanically.
The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes. His idea was that if you want to know how something works, pretend that it is a machine. It is a convenient way of thinking, something we do to reality in order to understand it. It is not how reality is. A world built only out of mental machines has no feeling of value in it. Value has become a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world.
The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world.
—Christopher Alexander 3
The Nature of Deep Order
The real nature of deep order depends on what we recognize as being able to be true or false. In the world-view of Descartes only statements about mechanisms are factual. In the world-view Christopher Alexander is presenting, statements about the relative degree of life, degree of harmony, or degree of wholeness — statements about value — are also factual. They play a more fundamental role than statements about mechanisms. This is why the view of order which Christopher Alexander presents involves a change of world-view.
Within a world-view in which statements about value are not allowed to be considered as potentially true or false, statements of value are only statements of arbitrary and private opinion. The main philosophical assumption which underlies Christopher Alexander’s arguments is that statements about value can be true. This extended idea of truth is not only objective, but is also directly linked to people’s feelings.
What we need is a sharable point of view…so that we can work together — not by confrontation and argument — but because we share a single holistic view of the unitary goal of life.
—Christopher Alexander 4
Christopher Alexander believed that we need a new view of the world which intentionally sees things in their wholeness, not as parts, and which recognizes life as something real. The relative degree of harmony, or life, or wholeness are basic aspects of order.
The Broad Conception of Life
Christopher Alexander looked for a broad conception of life in which each thing has some degree of life. What he meant, in general, was that every single part of the matter-space continuum has life to some degree.
…we experience degree of life as an essential concept which goes to the heart of our feelings about the natural world, and which nourishes us fundamentally, as a fact about the world.
—Christopher Alexander 5
Life exists as a quality. What we feel as life happens just as much in a building as it happens i a biologically living system. Life is a quality of space itself. Life, which we experience as the sun in the face and the wind in the hair, is something which has been removed from our picture of the world.
The quality of life includes us, as human beings. A place which has the deepest life is one in which I reach a deeper level of life inside my self…
—Christopher Alexander 6
The quality of life is a pervasive one. The difference in degree of life that we discern is not subjective, but objective. In order to understand life as a phenomenon, Christopher Alexander defined something he called wholeness and centers, the building blocks of wholeness.
…the wholeness is made of parts; the parts are created by the wholeness.
—Christopher Alexander 7
After many years of thinking, Christopher Alexander believed that he was able to define the wholeness of a given situation in mathematical language. The general idea is that wholeness in any part of space is defined by the coherent entities that exist in that part of space, and the way these entities are nested in and overlap each other.
The entities are features of the space itself. They are physically and mathematically real. We may think of these entities as parts, or as local wholes, or sub-wholes. They are often created by the wholeness. Each one of these entities exist as a local center within a larger whole. We experience it as a center. It is a phenomenon of centeredness.
There is a mathematical reason for thinking of the coherent entities as centers. The centers always become centers as a result of the configuration as a whole. They are focal points in a larger unbroken whole. The wholeness in any part of space is highly fluid. It changes continuously through time. The centers are formed within the wholeness. The whole is not created out of them. They are modified and adapted by their position within the whole. They are similar, but different.
Wholeness always exists, whether the place is good or bad, lifeless or alive. But the degree of life which exists at that place also comes from the wholeness. Life comes from it. The unfolding wholeness might one day be understood as underlying the entirety of everything we know as nature. Centers exist throughout the natural world. It is real physical organization. The strength of any center is a measure of its organization. The stronger the center, the more powerful its impact on other centers.
The Fifteen Fundamental Properties
Christopher Alexander began to notice that buildings and objects which have life have certain characteristics. He identified those examples which had greater life or wholeness — judged by the degree of wholeness they induced in him, assuming what he felt was real, reliable, and shared with others.
Christopher Alexander identified fifteen fundamental properties. They occur repeatedly in those artifacts which have life. They also occur repeatedly throughout all of nature. The fifteen properties are interdependent. This interdependence seems to contain a hint of something else, which somehow lies behind the properties.
The fifteen properties are rough approximations of some deeper structure, some deeper order. This deeper order is something which allows the fifteen properties to emerge from it. This something is some kind of field in which centers create wholeness and wholeness intensifies centers. Wholeness occurs in space as an attribute of space itself.9
Update 2022-10-01: Text below added.
Christopher Alexander’s fifteen properties appear again and again, at every scale, in nature. The specific centers can often be explained as a result of mechanical processes. However, these mechanical explanations do not explain why the properties appear over a wide range of scales. They appear at both microscopic and macroscopic scales. The fifteen properties are the ways in which centers sustain each other’s coherence.
The appearance of these properties is linked to the stability and robustness, of the world.
—Christopher Alexander 10
The fifteen properties represent fundamental ways in which space can create structure that is capable of having interactions with other structures. The properties are responsible for the robust and practical character of nature. They arise because of the character of living structure. The properties come from an evolving morphology which works.
The repeated appearance of the fifteen properties and their role in creating life in space suggest a view of all of nature as living structure. These structures appear in all natural structures.
…nature as a whole — all of it — is made of living structure.
—Christopher Alexander 11
The living character of living structures is what Christopher Alexander calls the living character of nature. Each wholeness which comes into being in nature preserves the structure of the previous wholeness. All of nature is unfolded wholeness-preserving structure. Unfolding wholeness creates living structure.
Update 2022-09-28: Text below added.
A New View of Nature
The concept of wholeness depends on the idea that different centers have different degrees of life. Every part of nature has its wholeness and degrees of life. The relative degree of life in different parts of matter is a fundamental feature of reality. Different centers have more or less life. Material structures in which centers have more life are inherently more valuable. The harmony of life is something to rejoice in and to protect.
Value, emerging as a deeper life in the wholeness of the world, turns out to be a fundamental aspect of nature itself.
—Christopher Alexander 12
Often our actions are att odds with the wholeness of the world, and our own wholeness. Our actions may reach deeper of value by increasing wholeness, or they may break down value by destroying wholeness. Life will increase, or decrease, according to the degree of wholeness that is upheld, or not. Actions which contribute to the wholeness in the world are of vital importance.
Notes:
1. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 1 – The Phenomenon of Life, p. 3.
2. Ibid., p. 15.
3. Ibid., p. 16.
4. Ibid., p. 21.
5. Ibid., p. 35.
6. Ibid., p. 61.
7. Ibid., p. 84.
8. Ibid., pp. 239–41.
9. Ibid., p. 238.
10. Ibid., p. 292.
11. Ibid..
12. Ibid., p. 294.
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