A&O – PATTERNS

ART & ORGANISM

Patterns


“Nature seems to be built on patterns, and looking for these patterns is the primary preoccupation of artists and scientists alike[i]  “What’s beautiful in science is the same thing that’s beautiful in Beethoven,” says [the physicist Victor] Weisskopf.

“There’s a fog of events and suddenly you see a connection.  It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together before.”  (K.C. Cole in Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life.

Recalls Whitehead’s “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” (Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues (1954) 10 June 1943)

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PATTERNS apparently exist at all levels of organization–not least (considering our interests in A&O) neuronal, behavioral, social… 

 

 


[i].  Searching for patterns is searching for harmonies: the medieval ideal, according to Joseph Campbell (1972): “accord between the structure of the universe, the canons of the social order and the good of the individual.” Williams James (1902) said,  “. . . the religious life consists of the belief that there is an unseen order  and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”