Description of a Community of Care

Thanks for getting this conversation going again, @Toni Blanco . That definition of Alexander's wholeness is really helpful, especially given the "remote" nature of our experiment. If a wholeness is a sense of coherence that exists in any part of the world, and we are each relating to different parts of the world, then a sense of coherence that includes the differences among each part of the world will need to be a sort of meta-wholeness that can "transcend and include" (this is a Ken Wilber term, take anything from him with a grain of salt please) each of the wholenesses in order to offer any kind of coherence. So, treating the (local) wholenesses as centers and building out from there seems like it could be a workable approach.

I've also been thinking a lot about conflict this year, and like the framing of it as "new information entering a system." I do not think it is a coincidence that the conflict polarity between @Jennifer Damashek and @Ronen Hirsch co-emerged with the development of a second approach to GP-writing by Jennifer. I am starting to feel into a hypothesis about how we might explore the conditions of possibility for which this polarity might be synthesized. I will carry this open question with me on my trip to Chile next week. Perhaps a glimpse of wholeness from South America will be useful to us.

We are getting into a tricky subject and I don't have enough knowledge of CA's work, but I can tell you how I have made sense of what I have read about wholeness in CA. I suspect it is different than what Ronen would do.

Wholeness, as a source, seems to me prior to existence/being, like the Neoplatonic one principle (the first cause), which has no existence as such but is the cause of (unique) things existing.

For CA not everything has coherence, but where there is coherence there is wholeness. There is only one wholeness, but that wholeness can be found in the world configured in a myriad of ways. CA came to distill 15 properties present in different combination and intensity.

In the article I shared there is an explanation of all this

Wholeness is a source of coherence which can be found in any

part of the world, and it includes what we intuitively perceive as

the gestalt, the overview or the broad nature of a thing [2].

According to him, a whole cannot be created just by integrating

different parts. Rather, multiple parts are induced by the nature of

the whole. In other words, parts are not pre-existing to create a

whole (Figure 1), but it is always the whole, which comes first.

Parts are then induced within the whole, to define its character

and bring order in it (Figure 2).

To have a consistent way of talking about those smaller entities

within a whole, he called them centers. Each center has its

defining mark. It is a distinct physical system which occupies a

certain volume in space [1]. Alexander sees the essence of design

in this circular relationship in which a whole consists of centers,

whereas centers are induced within the whole . This is obviously

very different from the Cartesian way of understanding design in

modern science and engineering.

Alexander also made a very important assertion when he

explained about how life comes from the wholeness; the degree of

life depends entirely on the presence and structure of the centers

there, and centers become more intense when they support each

other and have the fifteen fundamental properties in their relations.

I am not sure that Wilber's holons illuminate the idea of wholeness; it is true that something that has the property of wholeness includes and transcends, but I am afraid the parallel ends there.

In fact, there is also the issue of sequencing. Regarding this article, it is true that in the exercise of centers and transformations there is no idea of sequence, and Ronen's genius is to give importance to the sequence:

"My impression is that many people are drawn to centers and 15 transformations and patterns from Alexander's work and that Generative Sequences (ie the Japanese Teahouse) are one of the most overlooked insights he has to offer."

I understood that Ronen likes to work intuitively the centers and the sequence at the same time, which makes the exercise very solitary, if not solipsistic.

I think that for the sake of collaboration, it is not too much of a sacrifice to work on centers and properties, and then on sequencing them. That's the conclusion I came to, and I did it with a procedure almost identical to another one Ryan does that I discovered later.

I hope all this will be useful for your trip to Chile!

Thank you for linking to the article you shared about the Wholeness Egg. I read the article. I'm grateful for the summary of the 15 qualities of wholeness as described by CA. I am looking forward to exploring CA's work for years to come. I think the method of designing workshops that the author of the article described is an interesting approach.