Diff for "EmpiricalFindingsFromTheNatureOfOrder"

http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/library/empirical-findings.pdf

ChristopherAlexander 자신이 쓴 글인가보다.

I am a scientist. The science of the last four centuries and especially the science of the last 150 years has profoundly shaped our culture and our civilization. We are now living in a world defined by a widely accepted group of statements and kind of knowledge, which was non-existent before. These have changed our view of what a human being is. The offshoots of science have changed how we look at ourselves, how we think and feel, and how we view our social institutions, political institutions, love, war, and race. How we view children, and how we view old age. How we view art and the making of things. And how we view the birth and death of the cosmos.

Yet in this exuberant and fascinating surge of modern science, with all its authority and power, the divide between fact and value remains hardly changed at all. The questions of what we ought to do, how to solve problems, how to act to shape our existence, how we may attain the peaceful form of existence in which a person lives with quiet in one’s heart, how to act to protect the planet, how to act so as to protect and help the wretched of the Earth, how to bring loving kindness into the workplace—these issues have hardly been changed. If anything they have become more extreme, and every day more painful.

Science rarely helps us with these matters. We scientists have not yet laid down a way of thought that gives us a foundation of careful and tender action that deals with everyday life, makes common sense, and leads to actions that make the Earth more whole in its people and in its soil and substance. Indeed, the philosophy of science, which has brought us so far, has also made it more difficult to address these issues. The findings of science have intentionally separated the process of forming mechanical models of physics from the process of feeling, and from appreciation of the poetic whole that forms our own existence.

In brief then, we have not yet found a model in which we may understand things in an overall, wholesome way that is both rooted in fact, as deciphered by scientific effort, and also gives us a foundation for moral and daily thought and action. As a result, to put it bluntly, we do not know who we are. We can hardly act without floundering morally, or emotionally. Often we find ourselves in the greatest pain because things do not hold together. We cannot find a comfortable picture of our daily actions in relation to the larger whole of the earth and universe.

In The Nature of Order, a four-volume work mainly written in the 30 years from 1975 to 2005, I have tried to construct a coherent picture of life on earth, which makes sense of these matters, and gives us something to live for, and worth living for. How does The Nature of Order work? First, although the book is very long, it is modest in intent and deals with something so ordinary that most scientific works never even touch it, namely: the everyday world around us, the world of rooms, and streets, and houses, and trees.

The four books of The Nature of Order continually try to describe our everyday world in objective terms, yet at the same time, deal with the emotional world which this objective, ordinary world raises in all of us. It is an exploration of the way that we sentient, feeling creatures interact with our surroundings, and of the way that interaction leads us to understand ourselves and the nature of our lives, and ultimately even to understand, in part, the nature of our own souls.

* * *

In the course of this exploration and at its heart, there is a logical and empirical thread of argument, which may be viewed as the core of my four books, and which does establish the necessity of a new view of ourselves in relation to the world. This view ultimately nourishes (and if accepted, could become the foundation of) a new kind of hope—a hope that is all the more profound because it links together knowledge from philosophy, science, and religion, and helps us to experience the wholeness of the whole.

It could even shed light on the way wholeness occurs in the universe, in a sufficiently concrete fashion, that we might find help wrestling with the question of God, and the nature of this concept, which has been explored persistently in the last 2500 years; yet still remains shrouded in mystery and confusion. It might even give us a path for our own access to that mystery, yet couched in acceptable, and concrete terms of scientific reference.

The sequence of my argument follows a brief introduction to each of the four books, and is arranged, as the books are, in four parts.

TheNatureOfOrder, 4권짜리 책으로, 1975년부터 2005년까지 30여년간의 기간에 주로 저작했는데, I have tried to construct a coherent picture of life on earth, which makes sense of these matters, and gives us something to live for, and worth living for.

Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

To lay a groundwork for understanding built environments which support human well-being, I began about 40 years ago, searching for, defining, and identifying, patterns of space that recurred in buildings, each one dealing with a particular range of problems that was likely to occur in the world of building.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, I began to notice that these 250 patterns were themselves special cases of a small number of much deeper configurational properties. ... In the end, I had identified 15 of these properties. ... indeed all "good" structure would be composed of these fifteen fundamental properties.

1. 이전에는 알려지지 않았던 현상이 artifact들에서 관찰되었다. 이를 "생명" 또는 "전체성"이라고 부를 수 있다. 이 특성(quality)은 어떤 예술 작품, 유물, 건물, 공공 공간, 방, 건물의 일부 및 기타 다양한 인간 유물에서 발견되었다. A previously unknown phenomenon has been observed in artifacts. It may be called “life” or “wholeness.” This quality has been noticed in certain works of art, artifacts, buildings, public space, rooms, parts of buildings, and in a wide range of other human artifacts.

2. The idea of how much life is in things is objective in the sense of observation, and is thus common to people of different inclinations and different and cultures. This is a surprise, since it seems to contradict the accepted wisdom of cultural relativity (demonstrated).
3. This quality of life seems to be correlated with the repeated appearance of fifteen geometric properties—or geometrical invariants—that appear throughout the object’s configuration (demonstrated).

4. 우리는 이 품질을 기하학적 측면에서 볼때 '살아있는 구조'라고 부르기 시작했다. We began to refer to this quality, when viewed in its geometrical aspect, as 'living structure'

5. The appearance of living structure in things—large or small—is also correlated with the fact that these things induce deep feeling, and a feeling of connectedness in those who are in the presence of these things (demonstrated).
6. Degree of life is an objective quality that may be measured by reliable empirical methods. The empirical test that most trenchantly predicts “life” in things, in comparing two things, is a test that asks which of the two induces the greater wholeness in the observer, and/or which of the two most nearly resembles the observer’s inner self (demonstrated).
7. Astonishingly, in spite of the vast variety of human beings, human culture, and human character, there is substantial agreement about these judgments—thus suggesting a massive pool of agreement about the deep nature of a “human self,” and possibly suggesting that we may legitimately speak of “the” human self (at least strongly indicated).
8. 15가지 속성은 살아있는 센터가 다른 살아있는 센터들을 지원할 수 있는 방법이다. 센터는 공간에서 The fifteen properties are the ways in which living centers can support other living centers (demonstrated). A center is a field-like centrality that occurs in space.
9. In phenomena ranging in scale from 10-15 to 10-8 meters, on the surface of the Earth again ranging from 10-5 to 105 meters, and then again at cosmological scales ranging from 109 to 1026 meters, the same fifteen properties also occur repeatedly in natural systems.
10. There is substantial empirical evidence that the judged quality of buildings and works of art—judged by knowledgeable people who have the experience to judge their quality with some objectivity—are predicted by the presence and density of the fifteen properties (demonstrated).
11. It is possible that the properties, as they occur in artifacts, may originate with cognition, and work because of cognition, and that is why we respond to them.
12. But that cannot explain why they also occur and recur, and play such a significant role in natural phenomena.
13. Centers appear in both living and non-living structures. But in the living structures, there is a higher density and degree of cooperation between the centers, especially among the larger ones - and this feature directly from the presence of the fifteen properties, and the density with which they occur (demonstrated).

Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

How does this living structure come into being? Where does it come from? And why do these structural properties keep recurring?

This shows us, by default, that beauty does not come about automatically. Yet in nature it does seem to come about without effort!