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                          In Search of the Sublime

                                 Mae-Wan Ho




                 * Feeling for the Sublime
                 * Significant Form
                 * Universal Wholeness and Significant Form
                 * Significant form is deep and dynamic
                 * The significant form and poetic imagination
                 * Participation in significance
                 * Participation in love
                 * Notes and references



     Feeling for the Sublime

     A few years ago, I attended for the first time a performance of
     Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. The electrifying moment came when
     the Queen of the Night launched into her aria. I sat bolt-upright
     on the edge of the seat, and must have held my breath for the
     entire duration. My heart ached and tears welled up in my eyes.
     Her voice rang through me everywhere as though I had
     dematerialized into an exquisitely sensitive ethereal being that
     filled the auditorium. There was intense excitement, but also
     something supremely joyful and serene. No words can capture that
     charged moment but that I was in the presence of the sublime.

     I have experienced the same moments of sublimity on very different
     occasions: in the theatre or cinema, while listening to music,
     reading, and once, during a lecture on mathematics that I barely
     understood at the time. These moments are by no means passively
     aroused, but involve an intensely active engagement; so they can
     also happen when I am myself performing an experiment, in the act
     of writing, painting, or simply thinking and dreaming. Always,
     there is something familiar, recognizably the same, even though
     the onrush of feelings and imageries that fill the moment to
     overflowing never fails to colour each occasion uniquely.

     One of my first experiences was also perhaps the most significant,
     as it more or less shaped the course of the rest of my life. It
     occurred when as a young undergraduate, I came across
     Szent-Györgyi's idea that life is interposed between two energy
     levels of an electron. I was so smitten with the poetry in the
     idea that I spent the next 30 years searching for it, becoming
     something of a `gypsy scientist', wandering in and out of diverse
     fields. Though in reality it is always the same poetry, in a
     different guise, that leads me on.

     The experience of the sublime lies at the heart of the aesthetic
     feeling, which is not exclusively provoked by `works of art' in
     the conventional sense, but also by `works of science'. Volumes
     have already been written on aesthetics, and I am inclined to
     agree with Wittgenstein when he says that there can be nothing
     better said on aesthetics as saying nothing [1]. So I am saying
     nothing on aesthetics. Instead, I want to explore the basis for
     that kernel of sublimity that resides in all those special
     occasions.



     Significant Form

     Clive Bell, one of the Bloomsbury literati surrounding the
     novelist Virginia Woolf, attempted to revivify and revitalize what
     he perceives to be the dwindling creative spirit in western art
     increasingly preoccupied with illusionism and the mechanical
     representation of natural forms. To that end, he stresses the
     universal, timeless aspects of art. "What quality is shared by all
     objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?" he asks. "What
     quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres,
     Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's
     frescoes at Padua and the materpieces of Poussin, Piero della
     Francesca, and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible --
     significant form." [2]

     In other words, all works of art produced anywhere at any time
     whatsoever, are capable of arousing our aesthetic emotion because
     they possess significant form.

     But what is significant form? Clive Bell has called it a `moving
     combination of lines and colours' -- a quality distinct from the
     surface appearance of the picture itself. Hence, significant form
     is not the same as the beautiful form, say, of a man or woman, a
     flower or a butterfly. It is supposed to be a pure, abstract
     quality. The emotion it arouses is not ordinary emotion but
     aesthetic rapture, given only to a chosen few. The efféte elitism
     implied probably aroused more hostility against the idea than
     anything else. Although what he says contains a germ of truth, I
     feel that Bell has quite misrepresented the case.

     To me, the aesthetic experience is intuitive and primitive, and
     hence universal to all human beings. (One may even conjecture that
     animals, too, have aesthetic experiences. For many of us, bird
     song and whale song do touch the sublime, and so why not for their
     conspecifics or congeners?) More importantly, the significant form
     that gives rise to aesthetic experience is by no means abstract.
     On the contrary, the more significant the form, the more concrete
     it has to be, as I shall show later on. Aesthetic emotion can be
     developed to great depths, but it can also be suppressed and
     obliterated, particularly in the fragmented, industrial society we
     now inhabit. Bell's invectives were directed, after all, against
     the philistines on the one hand and the academicians on the other,
     both equally lacking in artistic sensibility, but nevertheless
     dominant in the art world.

     I discovered Bell's idea just as I was becoming quite convinced,
     through my own activities and experiences, of the symmetry between
     science and art as ways of getting to know nature intimately. To
     me, science and art are both creative acts which involve "seeing
     deeply into reality and drawing seductive patterns from a
     universal ground of similitude. Seductive because they are
     communicable to other experiencing consciousness resonating to the
     same ground, being themselves likewise connected. This
     actualization of patterns or forms, and the communion of shared
     experience through a universal ground constitutes the essence of
     both artistic and scientific creativity." [3] Science, like art,
     creates the significant form that lies at the basis of all
     aesthetic experiences.

     A scientific theory is above all, a form or a pattern that draws
     into a unity seemingly unrelated or disparate phenomena, and
     therein lies its ability to arouse aesthetic feelings. It is
     surely the stuff of poetry that an apple falling to the earth in
     our garden should have reference to the motion of heavenly bodies.
     Equally so the realization that all living things, from the
     tiniest microbes to human beings and whales, are animated by the
     same infinitesimal quanta of sunlight, captured one at a time by
     green plants in order to raise particular electrons from their
     ground state to the excited state; and that within the single
     duration of the electron falling back to the ground state, the
     whole of biological creation is poised.

     The significance of an authentic scientific theory thus depends on
     its richness of content that somehow `rings true', in other words,
     it is what we feel to be consonant with our own, intimate
     experience of nature. Can we say the same thing about artistic
     form? Can we judge the significance of artistic form according to
     its richness of content and its consonance with our most intimate
     experience of reality? I am suggesting we can. I would like to
     explore further the notion of significant form in art and in
     science, in order to bring out more clearly the symmetry between
     the two. I make no claims to scholarship, nor to being anything
     like a connoisseur. Instead, I am literally an amateur who loves
     both science and art, and practises both to some extent.
     Inevitably, I shall be drawing mainly from my own experiences, and
     you should not take what I say to be a pronouncement on which
     particular works are significant or on how science and art ought
     to be done.

     Form is a congery of relationships that make a whole, more
     importantly, apprehended as a whole. A pure form is nothing if not
     concentrated relationship. The intuition of form is the
     pre-requisite to knowledge, hence it is common to all ways of
     knowing, in science as in art. For a form to be significant
     requires something in addition. A significant form is never just
     the superficial form of any object or work of art as such, nor is
     it merely a certain abstract formal combination of lines and
     colours. It is a form that signifies some deep relationships in
     nature, to which the apprehending being is herself connected.
     Without this connection, there can be no significance in the
     content, and hence, no significant form. The significant form is a
     conduit to the nexus of relationships beneath the surface
     appearance of things. One is suddenly drawn into the catenated
     flux of associations, propagating and circulating endlessly in a
     subterranean sea of meaning. For a fleeting yet eternal moment, we
     lock into the pulse of some timeless universal being.

     Form is the irreducible coherence of part and whole. A random
     collection of bricks can be construed as a work of art precisely
     because in its very formlessness, it challenges each of us, the
     `spectator' to participate and create for it a form, if not a
     significant form. We cannot help but see faces and castles in
     clouds, monsters in ink-blots and exotic forms in random dots.
     Form is so central to human perception that, I am told, it is
     extremely difficult to prove something random or formless.

     The intuition of form and wholeness is the basis of perception,
     and perforce, of artistic perception. It is by no means restricted
     to visual art. Mozart is said to have had the ability to `see' the
     whole of his compositions simultaneously in an instant. Is it not
     so for the scientist as well? Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust,
     scoffs at the scholars who try to understand a living organism by
     the detailed description of its parts,

          "Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand
          Fehlt leider! nur das gestige Band."
          (Then he has all the parts within his hand
          Except sadly, the living bond.)

     Goethe himself, both poet and scientist, knew more than anyone
     else that the artist makes a better scientist than the analyst. He
     says,

          "In all ages even among scientific men, there can be
          discerned the urge to apprehend the living form as such,
          to grasp the connections of their external visible
          parts; to take them as intimations of inner activity,
          and so to master, to some degree, the whole in an
          intuition." [4]



     Universal Wholeness and Significant Form

     The intuition of form, or wholeness is the pre-requisite to
     knowing, in science as in art. Wholeness is in the very fabric of
     life and reality. The organicist philosopher, Alfred North
     Whitehead refers to the primitive act of prehension by an organism
     as `prehensive unification'. One must realize that Whitehead's
     organism refers to any and every entity in nature, from an
     elementary particle to what we would call organisms, and all the
     way to much larger things such as the earth itself, or a galaxy.
     His deliberate use of the word `prehension', literally, `the act
     of grasping', is so as to include the non-cognitive perception of
     entities other than human beings. The act of prehensive
     unification defines a wholeness, an integral experience which can
     be held and located in the here and now. An organism is an
     autonomous form arising at the locus of prehensive unification,
     enfolding and unfolding space and time. The here and now in the
     act of prehensive unification always refers to other spaces and
     other times, entangling deeper, other levels of reality; and that
     is the beginning of the significance of the occasion. Significant
     forms are created in the most primitive acts of prehensive
     unification.

     Whitehead's imagery of universal wholeness, in which everything is
     entangled with everything else through individual acts of
     enfoldment and unfoldment, may be compared with the late David
     Bohm's notion of implicate and explicate order in the evolution of
     the quantum universe. Both attempt to explain the phenomenon of
     quantum entanglement which in the end, compels quantum physicists
     to a view, one might say, a vision of universal wholeness. This is
     the paradoxical conclusion to centuries of reductionism and
     atomism in western science. Contemporary western science thus
     fundamentally converges towards indigenous knowledge systems in
     its acknowledgment of a primitive, universal truth: we are all,
     from the infinitesimal quantum of light to stars and galaxies, all
     inextricably entangled within nature. This natural state is the
     only possible ground for the creation and apprehension of
     significant form and hence of authentic knowledge.

        [Living first instar larva of the fruitfly about to emerge]

        Figure  1. Living first  instar larva of the  fruitfly about
        to  emerge,  observed noninvasively  by Interference  Colour
        Vital  Imaging, a novel  technique discovered by  myself and
        my  colleague, Michael Lawrence.  The colours  are generated
        by the  liquid crystalline phases of the molecules making up
        its  tissues.  Seeing it  for the  first time  was indeed  a
        moment  of the sublime.  (Photograph reproduced from  a live
        video recording of 125 times magnified microscope image.)



     Significant form is deep and dynamic

     Significant form is deep and dynamic. It is not to be found in the
     surface appearance of things, but in their reference to realms of
     reality not immediately before us. A beautiful woman is not a
     significant form as such, but becomes so in the immortal lines:

          She walks in beauty like the night
          Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
          And all that's best of dark and bright
          Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

     The significance lies neither in the form of the woman nor in the
     night, but in the dynamic transference of sympathetic resonances
     between the two: the clear starlit night and her shimmering, dark
     and mysterious beauty, each reflecting and heightening the
     qualities of the other in our mind, intensifying their
     simultaneous presence.

     In exactly the same way, a significant form in science is deep and
     dynamic. The search for natural order in 17th century Europe is
     nothing if not a quest for a deep, significant form. In biology,
     this began as the idea of `the unity of type' encapsulating the
     transference of similitude among organisms superficially different
     to a greater or lesser extent. Not only is the organism perceived
     as a whole, a form in itself, but as a community of forms united
     by dynamic transformation. The science of biological form, or
     morphology, is not about the study of Gestalt, or fixed form. A
     Gestalt is but an instantaneous snapshot of the organic process of
     transformation and development. Form, to Goethe, is the intimation
     of inner process, and displays itself fully only in the space-time
     transformations of becoming. In a community of organisms, this
     dynamic form bespeaks the convergence of resonances, affinities
     and sympathies, and at the same time, the creative divergence of
     individualities, multiplicities and diversities. In Goethe's view,
     living things in their totality strive to manifest an idea. They
     are nature's works of art, and so incidentally, they require an
     artist to understand and interpret them.



     The significant form and poetic imagination

     The significance of a form lies in its ability always to conduct
     us away from the here and now in a wide sweep of the imagination
     that returns only to be led away again and again. The moment
     expands and grows with each cycle around the ever-widening circuit
     of signification, and so one seems to dwell in the moment forever.
     It is for this reason that significant forms are often figurative
     or non-representational. A `realistic' work can inhibit these
     flights of the imagination by focussing attention ever back onto
     itself until one is overwhelmed with a sense of oppression.

                          [spirit of the valley]

                            Spirit of the Valley
                      62x46cm, acrylic on paper, 1988.
                                 Mae-Wan Ho

     Stage sets and productions in the theatre are most suggestive when
     they are spare and simple. One memorable example is Giles
     Havergal's 1990 production of an adaptation of Graham Green's
     novel, Travels with My Aunt, in which three men, dressed in
     identical brown suits, take turns playing aunt and nephew as well
     as all the other characters, including a dog. This so effectively
     underlines the irony and pathos in the humour that one begins to
     thoroughly identify with the everyman bank clerk, who, in the
     drab-brown dullness of his uneventful routine existence,
     nevertheless harbours a romantic fantasy of bohemian life
     epitomised in the adventures of his anarchic, eccentric aunt. In a
     more `realistic' production, one's imagination cannot participate
     to the same degree, and hence partake of the significance of the
     occasion.

     A significant form always invites participation, as it used to be
     in Shakespeare's days, when theatre was far from a spectacle --
     the stage sets being always minimal. The audience were therefore,
     not spectators, but active participants in a timeless drama of the
     imagination [6]. As Shakespeare says,

                       Think, when we talk of horse,
                             that you see them
                         Printing their proud hoofs
                          i' the receiving earth.
                        For `tis your thoughts that
                          now must deck our kings,
                         Carry them here and there,
                            jumping o'er times;
                        Turning the accomplishments
                               of many years
                            Into an hour glass.

     One can see the parallels in the development of the science of
     biological form. For Goethe, the unity of the biological world is
     a manifestation of some deep natural order. The attraction of a
     seemingly abstract, transcendental primeval form or archetype can
     be understood in the same way, for it invites our imagination to
     actively participate. I stress `seemingly' because I shall
     presently demonstrate that this position is in reality, the most
     concrete.

     By contrast, Darwin and practically all post-Darwinian
     systematists regard the unity of type as implying nothing else
     than the community of descent. The significant form loses
     significance as its content collapses into one dimension. It comes
     to signify only one thing: heredity, or connection through the
     blood line. There is no deep, transformational order encompassing
     the biological world, so that all forms can be made simultaneously
     present to our mind. This gives rise to the sense of oppression I
     often experience when I come up against a present-day
     neo-Darwinist who sees the whole point of studying biological form
     as that of tracing phylogenetic history.



     Participation in significance

     In the indigenous tradition of Chinese art and poetry, great
     effort is devoted, paradoxically, to cultivate spontaneity.
     Spontaneity has the quality of free flow, of being both innocent,
     the Chinese for which is, heaven-true, and natural, the Chinese
     for which are both, heaven-being, and, self-being, with the
     connotation of being at ease with heaven and with oneself. It is,
     of course, also a state of maximum freedom, self-sourced.

     It is significant that `self', in Chinese does not mean the
     isolated individual, rather it has the sense of a being located by
     its specific, detailed relationships to the cosmos. It is, as it
     were, held and supported by a myriad of specific connections, of
     entanglements. Thus, whereas the predominant trend in Western
     Europe, especially within the Cartesian framework, is to sever the
     connections between the human self and nature and to fragment the
     self into a pure intellect divorced from all bodily feelings,
     indigenous Chinese culture, as indeed, indigenous cultures all
     over the world, simply regard the unity of nature and the
     integrity of self as a matter of immediate experience that needs
     no special pleading. Consequently, any person, or `self' is
     enpowered to participate in nature's process.

     Furthermore, acting spontaneously and freely is also acting in
     accordance with the cosmos. (This may be compared to the coherent
     state in quantum theory which I have shown elsewhere to be one
     which maximizes both local freedom and global cohesion.) In order
     to attain true spontaneity, therefore, one needs to cultivate a
     heightened awareness of one's entanglement with the whole.
     Traditional Chinese artists spend a long time meditating and
     attending to the object, which may be a landscape, or flowers, or
     some other living beings (it is also highly significant that there
     is no category of `still life' or `nature morte' in Chinese
     painting, for everything is alive), and will pick up the brush
     only when the moment is ripe: when the will of all nature,
     centered at that moment on the artist, becomes concentrated in one
     unbroken gesture. The work of art is a unity, formed `in one
     breath' in a single duration enfolding a multitude of durations,
     when artist and nature are mutually transparent. Thus, it is
     neither the artist imposing her arbitrary will on nature, nor
     nature impressing its form on a passive artist: it is something
     new created to mark the unique occasion of their intimate union.
     Indigenous art is art at its most authentic because it is drawn
     directly from nature herself by an act of total participation.

     The same sense of participation in the significance of the
     occasion is responsible for the extraordinary power of so-called
     `primitive' art to move us. In the pure form of a neolithic, an
     African or Central American sculpture, we perceive the archetype
     of a multitude of forms and transformations that ramify deeply
     with the entire cultural history of a people living fully within
     nature. Their works of art are hymns to the creativity of nature
     herself.

     The participation in the significance of the occasion is a
     concrete act, both for the artist and the amateur. The most
     significant form is hence also the most concrete because it
     signifies ultimately all of nature, all of reality by dyanmic
     transference of signification. This recalls what Owen Barfield has
     said of language [7]. In the beginning, the meaning of words were
     concrete, because they were the sign to things and the invisible,
     inextricable links between them, which were directly perceived by
     the participatory consciousness that embraces all of reality
     within herself as she permeates all levels of reality. Later on,
     meaning became abstract and subject to definitions, denuded of all
     associations and feelings. So language suffers a loss of
     significance. Words become mere conventional symbols, representing
     things and ideas which we no longer feel.

     I touched the sublime the first time I heard René Thom's lecture
     on catastrophe theory and morphogenesis almost 20 years ago. Here
     was a theory that concretely signified to me all forms in nature,
     offering a vision of a universal generative principle, the tao of
     nature beyond the archetype whereby the multiplicity of things may
     converge and diverge, transmute and commute in weird and wonderful
     ways. Mathematics can indeed be a deep and significant form
     encapsulating the dynamic transference between forms. It is by no
     means abstract or Platonic. On the contrary, it can be the most
     concrete and complete declaration of nature's unity. One's
     intuitive reaction to the `Lorentz attractor' and the 'bifurcation
     diagrams' in chaos theory has a similar basis. They are
     significant forms not because they are abstract, or merely pretty
     to look at. On the contrary, they are significant because they
     signify large classes of otherwise unrelated phenomena that we
     experience at another level in our daily lives. Suddenly, we see
     them with fresh, penetrating eyes, all shimmering before us. The
     `strange attractors' of chaos are the hieroglyphs of our present
     age.



     Participation in love

     At a recent conference dedicated to the memory of the late quantum
     physicist and humanist David Bohm, Chris Isham (physicist and
     philosopher) describes how he felt when he first came across
     Bohm's ideas of universal wholeness in quantum physics. He says it
     was like "being in love for the first time".

     "Love" is an overused and abused word, and hence thoroughly
     inadequate to describe the rich panoply of feelings that make up
     the aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, for those who have been
     fortunate enough to have experienced love in the sublime, it is
     indeed not dissimilar. It too, is a feeling of heightened
     awareness of being connected, not only to the loved one, but to
     everything else by sympathetic transference (of both sameness and
     contrast). The lover is indeed in love with the whole world. The
     loved one becomes a sign through which everything else, even the
     most ordinary and mundane, is known and loved afresh: the whole
     world takes on a new significance.

     The creation of significant form is an act of communion, of love
     between artist and nature, between artist and amateur, between
     amateur and nature. It is nature presenting nature to herself
     through us who are all of the same cloth, to reaffirm and
     celebrate that universal wholeness that is both the source and
     repository of all creation. Goethe says, "In the beginning was the
     act": it was the act of love.

                 [Woman Makes Man Music Through the Night]

                  Woman Makes Man Music Through the Night
                      72x95cm, acrylic on paper, 1988
                                 Mae-Wan Ho



     Notes and references

       1. Derek Jarman's movie, Wittgenstein, 1993.

       2. Bell, C. (1914). Art (J.B. Bullen, ed., 1987), Oxford
          University Press, Oxford.

       3. Ho, M.W. (1989), Re-animating Nature: The Integration of
          Science with Human Experience. Beshara 8, 16-25, p. 23.

       4. Goethe (1807) Bildung und Umbildung organischer Naturen,
          cited by Russell (1916), p.50, retranslated by the present
          author.

       5. See Russell, E.S. (1916). Form and Function, John Murray,
          London.

       6. See Heilpern, J. (1989). Conference of the Birds. The Story
          of Peter Brook in Africa, Methuen, London.

       7. See Barfield, O. (1951). Poetic Diction, Faber and Faber,
          London.


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