Philosophies
Perception of Reality
Perception of Reality
We have been looking at philosophies of contemporary culture and gaining
new perspectives upon the work that we have facilitated at the community.
In the words of one member about our process and event"We were
able to notice things and learn ways to view things differently."
When we worked together in Berlin we were interested in the space of the
city; due to its regeneration and reconstruction since the Berlin wall
came down in 1989. Architecture is based on conceptual ideas of aesthetics
and the philosophies are realised within the physical structures and this
translates into the relationships people have with the environment they
live in and observe. We found we could relate our practice of viewing
reality in the city to the rural location of the woods.
Dominant Philosophy
The dominant philosophy pervades not only into the architecture and planning
of a place but in technology, social structures, science, art and culture.
These all influence human relationships and the way people relate to the
world we live in. What philosophies and ideas have come through the built
environments that we live in? One of the most dominant philosophies of
this age is that of the Cartesian model.
In response to this dominant philosophy we have been looking at other
philosophies of viewing the world in order to gain a relationship with
a sense of place. The dominant philosophy of the west only allows one
way of looking at reality and this is through complete objectivity to
what we observe, by separating ourselves from the picture we forget our
place in the picture. Perhaps this is why we create illusions of reality
by identifying our selves with the illusions of desire in what we consume?
"Mechanical order is what mechanical physics talks about, that
has all but taken over the whole of science, infiltrating into the public
consciousness at large. But the order in a Mozart symphony, a tea bowl,
and the yellow tower is "a harmonious coherence which fills us and
touches us", which cannot be represented as a mechanism; "the
mechanistic view always makes us miss the essential thing." The mechanistic
idea of order can be traced back to French philosopher-mathematician Descartes
around 1640. His message was: if you want to know how something works,
you can find out by pretending it is a machine. Descartes was thus prescribing
a method for investigating nature, he didn't really believe mechanism
was the nature of things. But people took him far too literally, and that's
what resulted in the mechanistic modernism of the past century. The mechanistic
view also led to the disappearance of "I" from the world picture,
what it is to be a person, as is inevitable from the emphasis on 'objectivity'
in science. It has annihilated our inner experience. Value disappeared,
or went underground, and with it, feeling; and so the idea of order fell
apart."
Except from a review by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho on 'The Nature of Order', An Essay
on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Vol. 1, The Phenomenon
of Life, by Christopher Alexander,The Center for Environmental Structure,
Berkeley, California
Our first event took place on
Buy Nothing Day by coincidence,
but the context and philosophy behind what we instigated are relevent
to our intentions of finding new ways to view reality alternative to the
dominant picture offered by consumer/capitilist industry.
Alternative Philosophy
During the project we felt a strong sense of the spiritual within the
community. Although the community
does not asert any single spirituality or religion, there is a deep sense of relationship with all life. Note this image detail of Petes poem Eve painted on a tarpaulin:
