Christopher Alexander: Generating a Living World (pt 2)

Ontological Design for Back Loop Realities

In part one I wrote

More degrees of life is related to a sense of wholeness, of connection and relationship, of the vitality of youth and also the sense of having accumulated experience. A slumhouse can have more life than a postmodern construction. His states his fundamental hypothesis as:

What we call “life” is a general condition which exists to some degree of other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further: The key to this idea is that every part of space— every connected region of space, small or large— has some degree of life, and that this degree of life is well defined, objectively existing and measurable.

But what is doing the measuring?

In Book Two, The Process of Creating Life

Christopher Alexander, toward the end of the book, introduces the notion of Deep Feeling — which is that which is attune to, evaluating what has more life. He describes this one insight as “the most important and profound aspect of living process,” “the most enlightening and appealing,” as wells as, intellectually, “the most controversial and the most difficult to accept.”

The illiterate of the future will be those who cannot feel.
~ Bonnitta Roy

The difficulty today is that, as we move through devastated and ugly environments, we train ourselves not to feel — since the feelings that these environments evoke are painful. We retreat into a dense core of numbness. Ontological design for a living world, therefore, begins with learning how to feel, and this in turn depends upon being able to access islands of sanctuary.

It is important to note that this is where many people get Alexander wrong. They think he is using the word “feeling” in a psychological way. But he is not. He is pointing to something that is subjective, but not psychological, but also objective— something that is inherent in the object. He is pointing out a specific organ of perception that most modern people no longer use to evaluate beauty in terms of wholeness, aliveness, and what belongs with what, where and when. It is a term that gives us the capacity for ontological design.

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