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Relevant Links: * i-sis news #6
* Xenotransplantation -- How Bad Science and
Big Business Put the World at Risk from Viral
Pandemics
* The Organic Revolution in Science and
Implications for Science and Spirituality Use
and Abuse of the Precautionary Principle
* i-sis news #5
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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