All
I have just made my first pass though the first volume of Christopher
Alexander's long awaited four volume opus titled "The Nature of Order".
Alexander is a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkley, educator, architect,
architectural theorist, author, and originally graduated in mathematics
from Trinity College, at Cambridge. In reading his early works " A
Timeless Way to Build" and "Pattern Language" I detected some patterns
of thought which seemed to closely parallel Pirsig's. In Volume 1 of the
series, "The Phenmenon of Life" this suspicion was confirmed with a
direct reference to Pirsig's quality writing experiment at Montana State
told of in ZaMM.
The subtitle of The "Nature of Order" is "An Essay on the Art of
Building and The Nature of the Universe" and comments on the broad and
general "Nature of the Universe" is of course metaphysics. Here is a
passage from section 7 of the preface titled "Decartes":
" The real nature of this deep order hinges on a simple and fundamental
question: "What kinds of statements do we recognize as being true and
false?" This is the question which divides the mechanistic world-view
originating with Descartes from the one which I describe in this book.
In the world-view initiated by Descartes-and largely accepted by
scientists in the 20th century- it is believed that the only statements
which can be true or false are statement about mechanisms. These are the
so called "facts" familiar to everyone in the 20th century.
In the world-view I am presenting, a second kind of statement is also
considered capable of being true or false. These are statements about
the relative degree of life, degree of harmony, or degree of wholeness-
in short, statements about value. In the view I hold, these statements
about relative wholeness are also factual, and are essential statements.
They play a more fundemental role that statement about mechanisms. It is
for this reason that the view of order which I am presenting is this
book inevitably involves us in a shift in world-view." (Christopher
Alexander- The Nature of Order-Oxford University Press 2001 pg16)
The book is not currently available at bookstores but can be ordered
directly from Alexander's website, http://www.PatternLanguage.com/, and
excerpts of the series and other resources are available there also.
3WD
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