Feeling must be the clue to wholeness

Feeling must be the clue to wholeness. I once had an interesting discussion with Sim Van der Ryn. He was arguing that feeling was not enough. In his view it was too emotional. For instance, he said: “In making a sustainable fishpond that works, you just have to concentrate on the facts about fish life, water, plants, and so on, ecological facts about a healthy pond.” I told him: “It is true that these ecological facts are a necessary part of our knowledge, our understanding of how to make a pond. And it is true that many of us know too little about what it requires to make the world sustainable, harmonious in its biological and chemical detail, and so on.

But suppose, indeed, that we are trying to build a fishpond. The facts about the ecology of the pond — no matter how detailed themselves — will not tell us how to make that pond good. Even if we have theories and facts about sustainability, edge plants, fish breeding, water temperature, types of weed, types of insect, and so on — even with all of this we will not succeed in making the pond have life unless we also have a clear inner feeling — a subliminal perception, and awareness, and anticipation — of what life in the pond will be like.” That means we must have a dim awareness within us, of what a pond with life is like, as a whole and in its feeling. If we do have that feeling of life clear (for the fishpond), we can then use it to guide us. It will help us move towards a pond which does have life. But if we do not have such a feeling clear in us, no amount of knowledge about ecology and sustainability will get us to a pond that has life in the sense I am discussing. We shall just be left scrambling mentally, churning about, marshaling our facts, making experiments perhaps — but still not clarified by an inner vision of what to do. Building the pond, stocking it, putting weeds in it, placing bushes around it, we need to be guided by an inner vision of good life in this pond. We must have a feeling in us, which will reliably tell us when we are going in the right direction, and when we are going in the wrong direction. It is ultimately this inner feeling, this inner vision of feeling, which is our only reliable (and necessary) guide.

In short, we must be able to imagine the pond — not as a copy of another pond, or with detailed factual vision about dimension, depth, plants. We must be able to summon up, inside us, an inner sensation of the feeling of a healthy pond, which makes us remember or create the kind of feeling which a good fishpond has: the slow movement of the fish, the light on the water, the kinds of things that may be present at the edge — all this, not in biological or architectural detail — but as a morphological feeling which allows me, in my inner eye, with my eyes closed, to remember, breathe, the kind of soft and subtle feeling of life which such a pond requires. It is that vision of feeling which, above all, must guide me. - Christopher Alexander

In the course of using this method, we shall also find, from time to time, that as we move forward, before we take an action, we can grasp the latent structure as an emotional substance, we may feel it as a vision — a dimly held feeling which describes where we are going, but is not yet concrete, in physical and geometrical terms. This means we can sense, ahead of time, the quality of the completed whole, even when we cannot yet visualize it. We then keep this quality alive in our minds and use it as the basic guiding light, which steers us towards our target. The final target, then, has the feeling which we anticipated much earlier, but often has an unexpected, unfamiliar geometry.

The feeling which steers us in this fashion is a vision — but it is not an arbitrarily invented vision. It is a vision of something we may call the emotional substance of the coming work, a feeling which arises in us, as a response to the wholeness which exists. It is therefore reasonably accurate, reliable, and stable. We can get it, and then keep on coming back to it. It evolves, as the project does, and as our concrete understanding evolves. Thus, as the geometry develops, the feeling is kept intact, but becomes more and more solid provided we do not depart from the feeling that existed in us at the beginning. So, this feeling which guides us is our response to the wholeness — first to that wholeness which existed at the beginning. Subsequently it is our response to the wholeness as it evolves and emerges from our actions. It is our knowledge of what kind of thing is needed to complete that wholeness, and make it more alive.

I have previously described wholeness in mathematical detail so that we understand the wholeness as a real structure. It is something real and substantial in the world. But even though it can be described as a mathematical structure, it is too complex to take in by purely analytical means. In order to get the whole, to grasp it, one must feel it. Its wholeness can be felt. Using our own feeling as a way of grasping the whole, we can put ourselves in a receptive mode in which we grasp, and respond to, the existing wholeness together with its latent structure. This is not an emotional move away from precision. It is, rather, a move towards precision.

The feeling we seek is a condition in which the artist, builder, or participant opens himself to the whole, allows the whole to appear within him, and allows it to act within him: It is, then, the feeling which arises from the work itself. Above all, that which is latent, the structure just below the surface that is “trying” to appear, can be felt. And this is the core of what must be observed, felt, and perceived in order to make structure-preserving transformations feasible. Thus, during a living process, feeling is being used as the surest and most reliable way for the artist or builder to receive the wholeness, nourish it, and respond to it, preserve it, and enhance it. - Christopher Alexander