Notes from Jay Irwin’s Alexander book
P.35: We do not see the world as a scrambled Pollock painting but mediated by lines and boundaries; we know harmonies, we know balance; we know the fitting and unfitting; we know everything as bearing similarity and difference, all the way to the quick of the heart which measures the event of every thought and action as against an ineffable ideal that renders judgment (and thus thought) possible at all.46 We do not know the world through discursive means, ultimately, but through analogy, and thus through its communication of the good in beauty.
P.37: While section two will present an implicit critique of
philosophies which deny a transcendent cause, this study does not ignore the Barthian warning
that beauty—or general revelation—without Christ is no revelation at all. Indeed, beauty without
Christ can only be but a shallow flourish of vitality moonlighting as a call of the good: celebrity,
materialism, nationalism, and other pretty evils to which confused souls commit themselves.
P.89: Whether in the form of the camera eye shared by both human and octopus, the form of the dorsal fin, structurally identical on both shark and dolphin, or the form of consciousness, which appears in phyla as distinct as insects, fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals, there appears a form, almost like a “biological cul de sac”172 in which evolution slows down. What this supposes is that in any iteration of, for instance, the proto-camera eye strives an unrealized potency—a problem (e.g., “spherical aberration”)173 that already, in some sense, knows its solution, without which there would be no problem, nor evolutionary change.174
P.92: (Quoting Alexander) “Thus the fullness of my existence, my capacity to be a person, my capacity to drink in, enjoy, and commune with the full depth of living matter in the universe is sanctified, and allowed, and enlarged, by my relatedness with the treestump. It is prevented, atrophied, cut off, by my not-relatedness with the plate-glass window, the fashionable façade, and the deadness of the supermarket parking lot.”
P.93: To put it another way, the “primitive fact” of experience had gone from one of intrinsic order and relationship to one of a world of exteriority in which all physical bodies—along with the nonphysical mind, now entrenched in an isolated subjectivity—all stood apart from one another.
P.100: Love . . . “possesses and desires at the same time,” and it is the very condition of desire. Biran, then, is a philosopher of will, whereas Ravaisson is led, through an idea of tendency and desire, to a conception of love….And for Ravaisson, this principle of love in us supposes its shared existence in nonhuman nature; for it is by a desire for its origin that the mind plunges into a knowledge of what is other than itself. “To search for a reason for everything when certain things, and precisely the highest things, are known immediately by intuition and analogy is a weakness of the understanding—weak undoubtedly because it lacks the intuitive force for it to reach the principle.”195 The (effortless) impetus to go beyond ourselves is the condition which lends us the desire to know anything at all, one which seats us in love already and moves us “to reunite ourselves there again.” For Ravaisson, to know is to love. Being grasps itself in consciousness—so that being is a certain manifestation of consciousness; the mind and the material world are separate expressions of a unified order, a single creative movement of thought thinking itself.
p.103 One may say that the fairy tale deepens the truth of our encounter, plunging us into the difference that beckons and reunites us with love—a reunion which the primitive fact of consciousness demands. It is therefore the aesthetic and imaginative senses that first reveal the world, before discursive and analytical thought; in the intuitions of an analogy or a fairy tale something truer is wrought than in those mechanical principles which speak to only a superficial layer of their essence. As Coleridge knew, particularly in his theory of polar thinking (a theory he developed from the pre-mechanist Giordano Bruno),204 the forces of the world which hold the affinities of difference and similarity together are of an order beyond their material realities: Imagination reveals the connective tissues of being.
p.105: What art reveals here is that there is something profoundly personal in freedom, or in life itself. Freedom is not an untethered chaos but a participation—and what’s more, a reciprocity—within a creative order; there is a felicity, a joy which supposes another’s joy (or freedom). In art—as in the freedom which all nature, unimpeded, expresses—the free act supposes the company of another (who is “the same differently”), supposes the love in which, again, we always already find ourselves at the root of the primitive fact: the effortless desire that impresses upon us the movement to be.
p.164: we must remind ourselves that
our empiricism is not a positivist science but that, again, what we positively behold within this
process is form—not form understood as shape or size or colour as such but form understood as
the “radiance of mystery,”346 which is to say “the mystery of Being itself.”347 In this way, intuition toward this sensation of inner light is gained not by adherence to some external method
we call “negative capability” but by an openness to the terrain of mystery and uncertainty; it is
an active receptivity that is both the means and the goal, an exposure that returns us to innocence
so that “the artist is able to reproduce what originally surprised us in natural objects, teasing out
‘their invisible substance’ and ‘their endless exchanges and correspondences’—penetrating
beyond the surface to the mystery and wonder which shines through their contingent forms.”
p.171: in a sophiological ontology, the suffering or pathos (or waiting)358 to which we are exposed is
not the suffering of, say, the cherry blossom, whose beauty is rooted in that ethereal moment
between glory and death—rooted, that is, in what cannot hold—but in life, which results from
that eternal, trinitarian self-oblation (kenosis) marked upon every creature. Gauguin’s cow
invites us to tears, to a joy elevated by pathos that returns us to the humble mood when we stand
present before being’s surprise. Of course, in order to partake of it, or in order to paint or build
anything like it, we must ourselves undergo this subdued brilliance (i.e., negative capability),
actively receiving these gifts by surrendering before them our lesser selves.
p.174: “The use of money to make money,” writes Alexander, “which ‘inspired’
Western society in the 20th century, and which has quaintly been called ‘democracy’ and
euphemistically ‘the market economy,’ did produce great wealth for a few. But not for most
people. And it has ravaged our environment. None of it unites people with the land they love;
indeed, most often the land that is left, cannot be loved.”\
p.182: on the charge of nostalgia, System A has not been lost,
for it manifests in method what we are in fact: spiritual. “System-A itself,” Alexander states, “is
emphatically not a re-creation of any past era. It is something entirely new, a production system
made today. In its present form, it exists for the first time”—that is, it is not merely an identical
repetition of past times but the processes of the human heart brought to bear upon a new context,
amongst new forms of being and making.384 “It relies on a new kind of humane organization of
building and creative processes and is carried out in a highly modern, even avant-garde form,
acceptable for our time, and congruent with the technical marvels we have come to expect every
day. Its essence lies in the focus on human experience—on feeling, on well-being, on the
possibility of living a deeply contemplated life.
p.202: Alternating repetition, therefore, expresses relation (i.e.,
sophianic) not only within its own pattern but with a further third (fourth, fifth, etc.) pattern of
boundary-forming repetition. In such a way, Alexander states, “it seems that what is really
happening is not repetition, but oscillation. The thing repeats like a wave.”444 “Whenever centers
441 Peguy, quoted in Cunningham (2002), 202. Cunningham also notes “that this does not mean that a second
painting is simply not as good as the first” but that if the second is better, as can often be the case, it “is better
because of the first, so in this sense is less.” Mere cumulation does not intensify a repetition; it requires, instead, a
“lived realisation of the beginning.” This may also be put as the logic of the gift in which the “primal event” is an
“eruption of eternity into [time],” an “infinitely gratuitous gift that can never be reciprocated” in that its equality (its
fertility or perfection) is beyond measure. Maguire (2019), 19.
442 Huizinga (2001), 20ff.
443 TNO 1:165.
444 TNO 1:171.
203
repeat within a structure, they will generally unite to intensify a larger center only when a second
system of centers is inserted between them forming a second alternating system, sometimes even
creating a third system of centers mutually caused by the first two, which once again ripple and
alternate and oscillate.”445
A repetition only has life where others have it too: livingness reverberates through the
fabric of the whole in a subtle melody to which every repetition contributes rhythm. This,
however, is even more pronounced if we see that (nonidentical) repetition is not merely a pattern
over against other patterns, but characteristic of any thing qua thing. As Catherine Pickstock
notes, res (thing), considered a transcendental to most Scholastics, may be “a more fundamental
term than ens,” as that “linking term” which connects ens (being) to essentia (nature).446 That a
finite thing’s nature (essence) is not its being (over against God whose nature is being) is not a
privative effect, some fall in scale from God’s greater nature, but the condition for which we are
granted his likeness.447 Thus our thinghood, that which manifests our “unique specificity,”
supposes a participation in God’s ultimate thinghood (ens realissimum).448 We are not things by
default, but things by design. There could be no difference without thingness, no love which
supposes difference, no particularity—nihil. To aesthetically capture repetition as a living quality
is to give an iconographic face to the individual particulars, as well as to the relationships their
differences augur.
214: where I recognize beauty, I recognize identity, the I meets the I, or the self the Self, a relational symmetry that is, qua relational, irreducible and therefore, as Catherine Pickstock notes, participatory: “If one were to regard this integrity of things as irreducible (and modern thought usually does not), then it can only be ascribed to a participation in the creative action of God, allowing to things a share in his plenitude of formed existence as a kind of grace of coherent beauty to be accounted for in its own terms.”486