|
ISIS Report 16/06/08
ISIS Special Essay - Significant Form in Science and Art
In Search of the Sublime
The creation of significant form is the basis of knowledge, possibly for all
living species; it holds the key to aesthetic experience in science and art,
and depends on the inextricable entanglement of all beings in nature. Dr.
Mae-Wan Ho
A fully illustrated and referenced version is posted on ISIS members’ website. Details here.
An electronic version of the complete report, or any other complete ISIS report,
can be sent to you via e-mail for a donation of £3.50. Please e-mail the title
of the report to: report@i-sis.org.uk
Feeling for the 'sublime'
Many 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. Afterwards, I found myself 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
de-materialized 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 similar
moments 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 never passively aroused,
but involve an intensely active engagement; so they can also happen
when I am performing a scientific experiment, writing, painting, sculpting,
or simply thinking and dreaming while awake or asleep. 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 encounters
with the sublime was also perhaps the most significant, as it shaped the rest
of my life. It happened when, as a young undergraduate, I came across the
Hungarian-born biochemist Szent-Györgyi’s remark 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, wandering in
and out of diverse fields; though it was the same poetry in an ever-changing
guise that led me on.
The experience of the
sublime 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 Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
when he said 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
that kernel of the sublime that resides in all those special occasions.
'Significant form'
Clive Bell, one of the Bloomsbury literati around the British novelist Virginia
Woolf, attempted to revive and revitalize what he saw as the dwindling creative
spirit in western art increasingly preoccupied with illusionism and the mechanical
representation of natural forms. To that end, he stressed the universal, timeless
aspects of art. “What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic
emotions?” he asked [2]. “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 masterpieces of Poussin, Piero
della Francesca, and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant
form.”
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 referred to it as a “moving combination of lines and colours”,
a quality distinct from the surface appearance of the artwork 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 effete elitism implied in those remarks probably aroused
more hostility against the idea than anything else. Although what Bell said contains a germ of truth, I feel he
has quite misrepresented the case.
To me, the aesthetic
experience is intuitive and primitive, and hence universal to all human beings.
I would guess that animals, too, have aesthetic experiences. For many of us
bird-song and whale-song do touch the sublime, and so why not for individuals
of their own species or genera? (The neo-Darwinists’ tedious obsession to
‘explain’ everything - including why birds and whales sing – in terms of its
‘selective advantage’ in the struggle for survival simply misses the point,
and has produced nothing convincing.) More importantly, the significant form
in 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. Aesthetic emotion can be developed to great depths, but it can also
be suppressed and obliterated, particularly in the fragmented, formless 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 dominating the art world then, as they
do today.
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. Science, like art, creates
the significant form that gives rise to all aesthetic experiences.
A scientific theory
is above all, a form or a pattern that connects seemingly unrelated or disparate
phenomena, and therein 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 planets and stars. 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 to raise electrons from the ground state to the excited state; and
that within the duration of the electron falling back to the ground state,
the whole of biological creation is poised [3].
The significance of
an authentic scientific theory thus depends on its richness of content and
also in its ‘ring of truth’: it is what we feel to be consonant with our
most intimate experience of nature [4]. Can we say the same 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 suggest we can. I make no claims to scholarship, or 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 on my own experiences, and no one should take what I say
to be a pronouncement on which particular works are significant or on how
science and art ought to be done by everyone.
Figure 1. The Rainbow Worm
Living first instars larva
of the fruit fly observed non-destructively using an imaging technique discovered
in my laboratory. The interference colours, literally the colours of the rainbow,
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
Form and wholeness
What is form? ‘Form’ is a web
of interrelationships making a whole, more importantly, apprehended
as a whole. A pure form is nothing if not concentrated interrelationship.
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 interrelationships in nature, to which the apprehending being
is 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 interrelationships beneath the surface appearance of things.
One is suddenly drawn into a catenated flux of associations, propagating and
circulating endlessly in a subterranean sea of meaning. For a fleeting yet
eternal moment, we lock onto the pulse of some timeless universal being.
Form’ is the irreducible
coherence of part and whole. A random collection of bricks is construed as
a work of art precisely because in its very formlessness, it challenges each
of us, the ‘spectator’ to participate and create a form, if not a significant
form. We cannot help but see faces and castles in clouds, monsters in inkblots
and exotic shapes 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 all the more so, of artistic
perception. It is by no means restricted to visual art. Mozart is reputed
to have ‘seen’ a symphony all at once, before he wrote it out in its entirety
without a single mistake, much to the dismay of the court composer Salieri
[5]. Salieri’s scourge in life was that he clearly recognized in Mozart a
genius towering above his own. Music can never literally be seen. Just as
our eyes seek out and create spatial patterns, our ears assemble and weave
parallel strings of sounds into temporal patterns that make a symphony. A
significant temporal form emerges from an intimate communion between the artist
and nature.
Music conjures a wealth
of rhythmic patterns that are the fabric of natural processes. Day alternates
with night as the moon waxes and wanes and the seasons follow one after the
other in regular succession. The heavens are thick with the tangled paths
of stars and galaxies encircling one another in an intricate cosmic dance.
Our bodies, similarly, are replete with rhythms, from the infinitesimal vibrations
of molecules to the thump-thumping of the beating heart, all pulsating in
complex harmonies to the music of the earth and heavenly spheres [6] (see
Quantum Jazz, SiS 32).
Rhythmic elements are
very prominent in the ‘decorative art’ of all indigenous cultures, which include
textiles, rugs, pottery, basket-work, body-painting and motifs applied to
habitations, clothing, shields, weapons, utensils, jewellery and practically
every article of use. An embroidery from the Koryaks of Eastern Siberia looks
at first glance, remarkably like a musical score for an ensemble of ten or
more [7] (Fig. 2). None of the repeated patterns in ‘decorative art’ realistically
represent anything in nature, however. The artists have created a pattern,
a significant form, capturing what they intuitively feel and perceive, and
communicable through a certain indefinable, universal syntax of form.
Figure 2. Embroidery from Koryaks of Eastern Siberia
Is that not so for science
and scientist?
Mephistopheles in the
great German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epic poem, Faust,
scoffs at the scholars who try to understand a living organism by the detailed
description of its parts [8],
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 might well have been describing
the project carried out to its logical extreme by molecular biologists of
the present day. Goethe himself, both poet and scientist, knew more than anyone
else that the artist who recognizes wholes makes a better scientist than the
analyst who breaks up the whole into parts. He said [9]:
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.”
Universal wholeness and the apprehension of significant form
The intuition of form, or wholeness,
is the pre-requisite to knowing, in science as in art. The British mathematician/philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead [10] called the primitive act of an organism ‘getting
hold’ of the world “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 up to much larger
things such as the earth itself, or a galaxy. The word
‘prehensive’ is used deliberately, to include the non-cognitive perception
of organisms other than human beings, or perhaps also the intuitive perception
of human beings.
Is there evidence that
organisms other than human beings perceive patterns and forms? There certainly
is. Bees appear to have the ability to create a map of their surroundings
and to communicate it as such. Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch
had discovered in the late 1940s that when a bee scout finds a source of food,
she returns to the hive and performs an elaborate dance to tell her hive-mates
where the food is located [11]. Actually, a song generated by the beating
of her wings accompanies the dance, and both song and dance are necessary
to convey the precise information. This is an astonishing feat; not only
does the bee have a map of its world as a whole, it can transcribe this map
into the significant form of a dance and communicate that to its hive mates.
Mathematician Barbara
Shipman at the University of Texas Arlington in the United States was introduced
to the bees’ dance as a child, and while doing her Ph. D. in the 1990s, discovered
that the bees dance could be modelled as transformations in a six-dimensional
space called a ‘flag manifold’ [12] that quantum physicists use to describe
the behaviour of quarks. The bees seem to have discovered flag algebra long
before humans did; or else, as suggested by Shipman, they are directly sensitive
to the quantum field of quarks. Bees and clever human beings, it seems, have
a common grammar of form and transformation, for whatever underlying reason.
Could it be that this grammar of form and transformation is universal?
Ants live in huge colonies
and super-colonies with cities, gardens, and many technologies. Biologists
have found that they, too, can tell each other complicated stories with something
pretty close to a language [13]. An ant scout was made to go through a maze
to find food. On returning to the nest, it huddled together for a while with
a group of workers, touching antennae and mouthparts. The scout was then removed
from the nest. The workers subsequently found their way to the food through
the maze in a much shorter time than when the scout was removed before it
had the chance to confer with them. So ants also have the ability to perceive
patterns, make maps of their environment, and communicate them in some
form of language. These amazing capabilities depend, as Whitehead rightly
said, on perceiving wholes in the most primitive act of “prehensive unification”.
Prehensive unification
is an integral experience of a here-and-now. We are compelled to recognize
the organism as an autonomous conscious being at the point of prehensive unification,
‘enfolding’ information from its environment (such as a map of the whereabouts
of food) and ‘unfolding’ it to another space-time (the hive with its mates).
The here-and-now in the act of prehensive unification always refers to other
spaces and other times, entangling other, deeper, more extensive levels of
reality; and that is where the significance of the occasion begins.
Whitehead’s organic vision is one of universal wholeness,
in which everything is entangled with everything else through individual acts
of prehensive unification (see [14] The Rainbow and the Worm). The
paradoxical conclusion to centuries of mechanical reductionism in Western
science is to rediscover the organic reality that we are all entangled with
and within nature, from the infinitesimal quantum of light to stars and galaxies.
This natural entangled state is the only possible ground for the creation
and apprehension of significant form and hence of authentic knowledge.
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 English poet
Lord Byron’s 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 resonance between the two: the clear starlit night and her
dark, shimmering, mysterious beauty, each reflecting and heightening the qualities
of the other in our mind, intensifying their simultaneous presence.
In just the same way,
a significant form in science is as deep as it is dynamic. The search for
natural order in 17th century Europe
[15] is nothing if not a quest for a deep, significant form. In biology, this
began as the idea of ‘the unity of type’ among organisms superficially different,
yet sharing a common structure or ‘body plan’. 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”, that displays itself fully only in the transformations of
becoming. In a community of organisms, this dynamic form captures the convergence
of resonance, affinities and sympathies, and at the same time, the
creative divergence of individualities, multiplicities and diversities, rather
like the endless variations on a theme. 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 a poet to interpret
them.
Figure 3. Spirit of the valley by Mae-Wan Ho
The significant form and poetic imagination
The significance of a form lies
in its ability always to transport 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 those flights of the imagination by focussing
attention ever back onto itself until one is overwhelmed with a sense of oppression.
Stage sets and productions
in the theatre are most suggestive when they are spare and simple. One particularly
memorable example is British actor/director Giles Havergal’s 1990 production
of an adaptation of English novelist Graham Green’s 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 humdrum existence, nevertheless harbours a romantic fantasy
of bohemian life in the retold (perhaps imagined) 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 17th century English poet and playwright William
Shakespeare’s days, when theatre was not a spectacle - the stage sets being
always minimal. Members of the audience were not spectators, but active participants
in a timeless drama of the imagination. As Shakespeare said in the prologue
to Henry V:
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;
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 show
why this position is in reality, the most concrete.
Figure 4. Woman makes man music through the night by Mae-Wan
Ho
Form and transformation
Darwin and practically all post-Darwinian
systematists (those who study classification of living things) 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, connection through the bloodline.
There is no deep, transformational order encompassing the biological world,
in such a way that a multitude of apparently disparate forms can be made simultaneously
present to our mind. That is why I often experience an unbearable sense of
oppression whenever I come up against a neo-Darwinist who sees biological
forms as nothing more than an imperfect record of evolutionary history. Indeed,
most neo-Darwinists interested in evolutionary history have given up studying
biological forms to concentrate on comparing the DNA of different species
instead.
As I have demonstrated
elsewhere [16-20], form
and transformation are independent of heredity. The dynamics generating form
in development naturally gives rise to a transformation set depicting how
different forms are related by transformation, and therefore, also providing
a natural system for classifying the forms. (Swedish botanist, Carl
Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, was searching for such a natural system.
He realized that the system he invented - which biologists have inherited
to the present day - was a stopgap, and not the natural system intended [19].)
Figure 5 is a diagram
of a transformational ‘tree’ of the range of body patterns in the first instar
fruitfly larva [18] obtained by exposing the embryos briefly at different
times during early development to an atmosphere saturated with ether. The
main sequence, going up the trunk of the tree, is the normal transformational
pathway, which progressively divides up the body into domains, ending up with
16 body segments of the normal larva. All the rest with solid outlines are
transformations in which the process of dividing up the body has been arrested
at different positions in the body. The patterns with dotted outlines are
hypothetical forms, not yet observed, connecting actual transformations. This
transformational tree reveals how different forms are related to one another.
It gives the logic, or grammar of transformation, showing how superficially
similar forms are quite far apart on the tree, while forms that look most
different are neighbours. Figure 6 depicts the model of successive bifurcation
and the embryos arrested at different stages in the main sequence.
Figure 5. Transformation tree of body patterns in fruit fly
larvae
Figure 6. Model of successive bifurcation and actual embryos
arrested in the main sequence
A natural system
of classification - one that reflects the natural transformational relationships
- also results from the tree. The twenty-four actual forms or species are
classified hierarchically into one ‘Family’ with two ‘Orders’, the first Order
containing three Genera, and the second Order, eight Genera. The forms not
yet found (depicted in dotted lines in Fig. 5), would also fit neatly in the
natural system of classification should they be discovered in future. There
are 676 possible forms according to the rule or grammar of transformation
that gives rise to the 16 segments. If all the body segments were free to
vary independently, the number of possible forms would have been 216, or more than 60 000.
I have also produced
a transformation tree for all possible ways leaves are arranged around the
stem in plants [20], based on the dynamics that generate the patterns discovered
by French mathematical physicists [21]. The discovery caused quite a stir
in France, as leave arrangement, or phyllotaxis,
has been a long-standing problem in biology, ever since Alan Turing drew attention
to it. Many neo-Darwinian ‘just-so stories’ have been invented over the years
to account for different leave arrangements in terms of ‘selective advantage’;
all of which have been proven irrelevant in one stroke. The power of dynamics
- the syntax of form - is that it predicts the set of possible transformations,
excluding all others. It also tells us how the possible forms are related
by transformation. These transformational trees are scientific documents,
but they are also works of art giving access to the natural process - the
tao or natural grammar - that connects apparently disparate forms.
Participation in significance
In the indigenous Taoist tradition
of Chinese art and poetry, great effort is devoted to cultivating spontaneity.
Spontaneity has the quality of free flow, of being both innocent, the Chinese
for which is tiãn zhēn, heaven-true, and natural, the Chinese
for which are both tiãn rán, heaven-being, and zi rán, self-being,
with the connotation of being at ease with heaven and with oneself.
It is, of course, also a state of freedom: zi yóu, self-sourced.
It is significant that
‘self’, zi, in Chinese does not mean the isolated individual, rather
it has the sense of a being located by its specific relationships to the cosmos.
The self, as it were, is held and supported by a myriad of specific entanglements.
Thus, whereas the predominant trend in Western culture has been to sever the
connections between self and nature, and to fragment the self into a pure
(‘objective’) 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 empowered
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 quantum coherent state that maximizes both local freedom
and global cohesion [14]. In order to attain true spontaneity, therefore,
it is necessary 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, centred 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.
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 Palaeolithic cave paintings
and petroglyphs, neolithic Chinese jade sculptures, and African masks, we
perceive the archetype of a multitude of significant forms and transformations
rooted in the cultural histories of peoples living fully within nature.
Their works of art are hymns to the creativity of nature herself.
Figure 7. Palaeolithic rock painting courtesy
of Prague Museum
Figure 8. Neolithic Chinese jade phoenix
Figure 9. Mask, Ivory coast
Participating 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 the dynamic
transference of signification. This recalls what British philosopher and poet
Owen Barfield said of language [22]. In the beginning, the meanings of words
were concrete, because they were the sign to things and the invisible, inextricable
links between them. 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 we no longer feel.
I touched the sublime
the first time I heard French mathematician René Thom’s lecture on catastrophe
theory and morphogenesis (form generation) [23] more than 30 years ago. Here
was a theory that concretely signified to me all forms in nature, offering
a tantalising glimpse of the universal generative grammar of form,
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,
but can be the most concrete and complete apprehension of nature’s unity.
| |
|
