Christopher Alexander laid a foundation for order to be understood as living structure.1 Living structure, furthermore, cannot be understood as something separate from ourselves. It is both structure and personal.
It is related to the geometry of space and to how things work. And it is related to the human person, deeply attached to something in ourselves…
—Christopher Alexander 2
Deeper order is the foundation of all things. It is rooted in substance and feeling. It unites the objective (cold and hard) and subjective (warm and soft). It opens the door to a world in which we can be truly human.
A thing is truly personal when it touches us in our humanity.
—Christopher Alexander 3
From the point of view of Christopher Alexander, personal is an objective quality which refers to something true and fundamental in a thing itself. All works which have deep life in them are personal in this sense. The existence of personal feeling in a thing is fundamental to any given situation.
This deep feeling is indeed a mark of life in things.
—Christopher Alexander 4
It is the feeling of life which we experience in ourselves that lets us know something is important. It has deep feeling. It awakens feeling in us. It is the aspect which connects life with our own existence, with what it is to be alive.
…the personal is something inherent in the nature of order and in the universe…
—Christopher Alexander 5
We become happy in the presence of deep order. The connection between my quiet joy and the life in a thing goes to the very nature of deeper order itself. Wholeness, which exists out there, also exists in here, in each person’s heart. The wholeness of the world and our feeling of happiness form a single unity.
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, Part 1, Chapters 1–6, pp. 25–296.
2. Ibid., p. 298.
3. Ibid., p. 300.
4. Ibid., p. 308.
5. Ibid., p. 309.
Related post:
Personal feeling is directly connected to deeper order and life
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.