Beyond the Machine: Visible and Invisible Coming together
What is a new metaphor that makes sense to the world that is, not the world as if it is?
Science: Descartes stated "I have described the earth, and all the visible world, as if it were a machine" he heralded the Age of Reason and gave birth to modern scientific method*
Art: "Alberti remarked that a building must appear whole like an organism and Leonardo da Vinci made his famous drawing of Vitruvius’s homo quadratus"
In the last Renaissance both science and art, expressions of visible and invisible worlds, flourished, together.
Today, much of the world sees these two elements as distinct, incongrous, seperate…running in opposition or parralel, far more often than in tandem.
It seems many have chosen** to see the world as such - one based on the ’machine’ metaphor, over the ‘organism’ - more organic, flowing, ever evolving, fluid structures.
Why have our metaphor and language not caught up with our realities. Why the seemingly deliberate preference for one metaphor - a machine - over another - an organism? Why the misquote?
Why are they: science and art, rational/logical and creative/inspired/imagined, not seen as interdependent, interconnected, intertwined elements…to be studied and conversed as two necessary parts of the whole picture. Different perspectives on things seen and imagined.
Descartes specifically said ‘visible worlds’. Yet each of us houses an invisible world in our bodies. The machine metaphor does not carry as a description for our complete selves. And nor, I think, was it ever intended to. He specifically mentions ‘visible’ worlds. The fact that he made such a distinction suggests he believed in invisible worlds as well as …
Why such a preference on things visible?
Yes, we do make the outcomes or outputs visible - in language, in speech, in colour, in movement…but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something else going on…something that is invisible and can’t be measured.
Is your mind visible? - we live in, and with, the ‘invisible’ every day too: our thoughts, our mind, our feelings, our imaginings, our dreams…
Each of us has these experiences daily, and yet somehow, we don’t question that fact that currently the world puts a premium on visible over invisible, worse still, the persistance of the machine metaphor acts as a denial of the invisible.
Machines do not require rest, they do not require dreaming…we are human, we do require rest, dreaming…imagining, purpose. And Descartes said ‘AS IF’…not that ‘it is’
Analogies and models are always useful ways of ’seeing’ things. Of making them visible, but forgetting that they were a simplification in order to explain something larger, and accepting them for the ’whole’ knowledge itself, is dangerous. Our metaphors, our stories, need to catch up with the realities we actually live, and the knowledge we know.
Trusting, accepting, being ok with, the idea, nay the fact, that not everything is visible. And that is exciting, great…and ‘valid’.
Looking at what is, not ‘as if’ it is…
*Cited in New Organic Architecture Ch: Renaissance and Rationalism
**I do sense it (and was) is a choice, though by whom and for what purposes I am less clear/less inclined to speak the negative thought aloud lest it be further expanded…self interest does seem to be a specific theme though…complexity is another…it is simple to describe things as fluid and changing…
^ I also wonder- have we made a massive assumption about what "I think therefore I am" means? Ie what did ‘think’ mean to him? My sense is that it incorporated thinking, feeling and other sensations into the word ‘think’. Yet we have (mis)understood it because of an assumption that he meant what we now understand thinking to mean. Our ways of understandng ‘thinking’ seem to be limited to thoughts - in much of the West at least - rather than a whole, a combination of a myriad of things such as movement, imagination, emotions etc.
thanks to Anthony and Gregg for the seeds..
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