Christopher Alexander on Observation

Christopher Alexander has the following to say about the new method of observation which he proposes in The Nature of Order, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life (italics in the original text):

[The method of observation] goes directly to the intuitions which are widely shared and raises them to a formal level as techniques of observation. You are asked to record your own inner feeling [felt sense], your own inner wholeness — and this is used then as the measure of the degree of life in some system of the outer world you are observing. Although this techniques is new to modern science, it was not unfamiliar to the ancients. Confucius advised that a ruler will only be effective to the degreee that he is able to listen to his onw heart. It is said that Socrates gave the same advice.

—Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life, p. 367

The idea that a person will, in general, have difficulty reporting his own internal states accurately, and the training techniques which focus on this problem and allow a person to grow more accurate and more familiar with the internal states arising iin him, are also the main focus of an entire litterature in contemporary psychology of Frederick Perls and hundreds of others [e.g., Eugene Gendlin].

—Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life, p. 368

Related post:
Christopher Alexander on Descartes