Importance: 10%
The Big Idea
Christopher Alexander (Architect, Author) in Book 1 of The Nature of Order lays out a set of tests to look at reality and test it for its wholeness and degree of life.
He argues that it is based on reality and coming human attributes so that it is objective and shareable between humans and even cultures.
The Nature of Order, Book 1. p. 353
I first discovered the mirror-of-the-self test in the late 1970s. At that time, I was surprised, and delighted, to have found a simple test which allows access to empirical investigation of quality and life in artifacts.
In the years which followed, I discovered that this particular test was only one of a whole family of similar tests, all of which laid emphasis on the wholeness experienced by the observer, as the underpinning of the empirical method.
Nowadays, since use of this empirical method has become the cornerstone of my method of practice, my colleagues and I do not exclusively use the mirror-of-the-self test. It is a little too exotic for daily use, a little too eye-brow-raising for everyday professional work. In recent years, when making comparisons between Possible building designs, we are more likely to ask ourselves which fills us with the greatest feeling of our own life, which has the most life, which touches the soul most deeply, which one creates the greatest sensation of wholeness in us.
It is this, above all, which is the cornerstone of the test, the observation that the systems with most life have the greatest impact on our own wholeness. It is the observation of this wholeness as we experience it in ourselves, which becomes the cornerstone of the method that allows us to use the distinction between greater and lesser wholeness as we feel it in ourselves to distinguish greater and lesser life in the system being observed.
The Nature of Order, Book 1. p. 354
Other, more general tests are more robust, and easier to use. I find that for daily use, the one that works best is the question: “Comparing A and B, which one makes me feel the most wholeness in myself, which allows me to come closest to my own life, which makes me experience life most deeply?” It is not always easy to answer this question, but it is usually possible.
The Nature of Order, Book 1. p. 354
The essence of the idea of measurement is the following. The degree of life of any given center, relative to others, is, as I have said, objective. But in order to measure this degree of life, it is difficult to use what, in present-day science, are conventionally regarded as “objective” methods.
Instead, to get practical results, we must use ourselves as measuring instruments, in a new form of measuring process which relies (necessarily) on the human observer and that observer’s observation of his or her own inner state. Nevertheless, the measurement that is to be made this way is objective in the normal scientific sense.
The essence of the idea behind this measurement process is that, in comparing two different centers, we ask which one induces, in us, a greater feeling of wholeness. The one which induces a greater feeling of wholeness is the one which has more life. According to conventional wisdom, such a measurement process would appear to be highly subjective, and would therefore appear likely to get different results for different observ-ers. If so, it would be useless, since the whole idea of objective observation would then be vitiated.
But the essence of the new method I am putting forward is that, on the contrary, we discover that different human observers report very similar results when they perform this experiment. Their observations converge. And the convergence of observations made by different observers thus gives us the key to the objective nature of the degree of life being observed.
The Nature of Order, Book 1. p. 355
In all these tests, the observers use observation of their own inner state, when comparing two systems A and B, to decide which of A or B is the more alive. Some of the possible questions are: • Which of the two seems to generate a greater feeling of life in me? • Which of the two makes me more aware of my own life? • Which of the two induces (as asked in Akido) a greater harmony in me, in my body and in my mind? • Which of the two makes me feel a greater wholesomeness in myself? • Considering my self as a whole that embraces all my dimensions and many internal oppo-sites, I then ask which of the two is more like my best self, or which of the two seems more like a picture of my eternal self? • Which of the two makes me feel devotion, or inspires devotion in me? • Which of the two makes me more aware of God, or makes me feel closer to God? 2 • When I try to observe the expanding and contracting of my humanity, which of the two causes a greater expansion of my humanity? • Which of the two has more feeling in it or, more accurately, which of the two makes me experience a deeper feeling of unity in myself? All these tests have in common the fact that they ask observers to be very truthful indeed about the extent to which they are experiencing greater or lesser wholeness in themselves, while they are in the presence of the systems being measured or compared. The observer is thus asked to report an interior experience while in the presence of the things being compared.