Metamorphic Seeing

"Metamorphic Seeing"

Oil on canvas, 22" x 22" 

2023

 

"This life's dim windows of the soul 

Distorts the heavens from pole to pole 

And leads you to believe a lie 

When you see with, not through, the eye."

~ William Blake 

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This painting is about the idea of "metamorphic seeing" — seeing the archetypal as a dynamic logos within nature and the world, not as a static abstract and detached unchanging archetypal order, but a logos that is with the living and changing forms of the world, seeing not just the transcendent or material, but both, One and Many, Being and Becoming, as One process, or non-dual continuum. 

Goethe called this way of approaching nature or phenomena a gentle or “delicate empiricism,” ridding the mind of theoretical preconception and projection, and even an initial rational explanation, to fully take-in an observational and visual study of the phenomena, nature or a living process. Naturally, artists who draw from nature and still life quickly learn this lesson in visual empiricism. To see fully the object perceptually for what it is, the artist has to let the object's light and image come to the eye indiscriminately without a mental preconception of representation of what it is, trying to see the object or scene as a direct whole-pattern image.

“There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself in the most intimate way identical with its objects and thereby becomes actual theory. This heightening of these spiritual powers belongs, however, to a highly cultivated age.” - Goethe

“We ought to talk less and draw more.” - Goethe

“It seemed to me that the ideas I gained about optics built a bridge between what spiritual insight reveals and the results of scientific research.” - Rudolf Steiner 

Goethe’s metaphysics is about finding the transcendent within the logic of the metamorphosis of form, not in a detached static unchanging Platonic sense, but in a metaphysics close to the senses and to the intelligence within nature, or what Simon G. Powell calls the bio-logic of "Natural Intelligence." It doesn’t exclude our senses or subjective perception and consciousness of phenomena, it includes them as a part of the process of understanding the whole reality, but with little room for abstract theory. 

"Evolution is a naturally intelligent learning process that weaves together naturally intelligent systems of bio-logic wise to their surroundings. This natural intelligence can be considered unconscious or even subconscious." - Simon G. Powell

“Rather than linking concepts together in a logically plausible, mathematically expressible, causal sequence, thinking about living nature required an organic, holistic, intuitive-participatory approach in which what the senses revealed as a sequence of parts is instead allowed to unfold in a single, continuous, unified process of metamorphosis.” - Christopher Bamford

This delicate empiricism, or "metamorphic seeing" is not something purely intellectual, or theoretically or mathematically modeled in its specifics, but is more an organic participatory perceptual philosophy of seeing phenomena all as a kind of interlinked musical physics and biology, a generative and then living mathematics, a metamorphic-logic embedded inherently in the emergence of form and order as a whole. It is less about precision and the particulars and more about the rough overall picture and dynamic of a whole systems pattern. This roughness of the overall picture, is something we see both in composition and layout in the arts, and also when looking at the visuals and principles of fractal patterns in mathematics.

The empirical and the holitsic, the objective and subjective, science and the arts, these are two different ways of seeing or lenses of perception that can actually reinforce each others truths, in the same way that the smooth circles and self-same straight lines of Euclidian geometry are different from the organic self-similarity of Fractal geometry, or as Benoit Mandelbrot phrased fractal geometry, the "geometry of roughness," both are different aspects or expressions of the same transcendent logos or archetypal principles that geometry itself represents to us most clearly.

"The existence of fractals challenge us to study forms that Euclid left aside as being formless; the morphology of the amorphous." - Benoit Mandelbrot

“Contrary to popular belief, the “objectivity” of conventional science is not borrowed from phenomenal objects.” - Frederick Amrine

“As in science, no matter how faithfully one excludes the subjective, it is still the subject who contrives the exclusion.” - Lewis Mumford

“Nature is interpreted to itself in human consciousness. Thought is the final member in the sequence of processes that forms nature.” - Rudolf Steiner

“If you can see science in the light of the process of cognitive perception (consciousness) then you understand what science is, and most importantly you understand what it isn’t.” - Henri Bortoft  

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“This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence … a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.” — Plato 

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In a complementary way, mind, intelligence, or self-consciousness, emerges in humans from the natural unconscious intelligence of the body, as the natural intelligence of the entire biosphere emerges from the unconscious background cosmic intelligence, or the symphony of physical laws of matter. Building upon and within itself, a process of self-organizing creative emergence marks each great era in the epoch of evolution, from the matter of the cosmos, to the biology of life, to the interiority and inner life of self-consciousness itself, the awareness of awareness.

“We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.”

― Plotinus

This emergent and creative organizational intelligence that spans throughout the history of life and the universe could also be referred to as an "evolutionary intelligence,"  and that when it itself starts to become self-conscious through humans, (evolution becoming aware of the dynamics of evolution through the evolution of consciousness) could be a called a relatively new "evolutionary self-aware" capacity or intelligence, or level for seeing the world and itself as whole systems. One that has the potential to create systems in-tune or in evolutionary syntony with the overall whole—or "Design For Evolution," at the socio-cultural levels, a phrase the brilliant evolutionary thinker Erich Jantsch titled a book about.

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"Dissipative self-organization is cognitive; that is to say, it organizes information into knowledge." - Erich Jantsch

"The ultimate importance of the evolutionary vision lies not just in its power of unifying scientific thinking and stimulating a truly trans-disciplinary approach, but also in the philosophy it expresses—a philosophy close to life and its creativity." 

- Erich Jantsch

"The clearer our sense of direction and movement, the more meaningful can design become, but also the more powerful. Because only when we sense all these powers around us, all this vast stream of evolution, can we coordinate and use them for our purposes—which will then also be the purposes of overall evolution." ~ Erich Jantsch (Design For Evolution)

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As an evolutionarily self-aware species, we are either going to learn to consciously design for and with evolution and its dynamics, or get controlled by mass reaction to perpetual social and natural crisis's, opportunist self sabotage and self-destruction, regressing into unconsciousness, the loss of self-governance, cultural and civilizational collapse and even extinction.

"Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate the spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction." 

- R. Buckminster Fuller

Because self-consciousness is counter to the unconsciousness of nature, nature and the evolutionary process are unconsciously naturally intelligent, they are self-organizing autopoietic systems; humans on the other hand are conscious of themselves because they can step back and reflect (through increased mental interiority) and manipulate that unconscious order of process, in nature and in themselves. 

Early cultures perceived that the causal order of nature was ruled by a more unconscious subjective mythos, (projecting gods on to forces of nature), then surpassed by the emergence of a more self-conscious objective rationality, reason, law and science that governed nature. But now we can see that we have to use both aspects together, self-balancing each other, creatively weaving the dynamic for a new emergent cosmic story, or way of relating to the universe, to create an evolutionary path forward that appreciates and integrates both truths; in short, we have to design conscious systems to be evolutionarily in-tune with unconscious ones for harmony or snytony to emerge.

Erich Jantsch postulates three basic levels for inquiry and design in his book Design For Evolution which I find helpful: 

1. The Mythological - (personal/subjective/instinctive)

2. The Rational - (technical/objective/reflective)

3. The Evolutionary (or Creative-Emergent) - (subject and object as complementary process/creative-emergent innovative action/nondual/self-balancing). 

"A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist." - R. Buckminster Fuller

The alienation of science from life, which has become a matter of growing concern, is about to be overcome by the evolution of science itself." - Erich Jantsch

"You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason." - Plotinus

Current conventional science alone says the perception of truth must be detached and outside of any subjective human bias, transcendent of human error you might say, becoming an ironically godlike but also usually a creatively sterile perspective. But phenomenology and Goethean science says we can never truly fully get out of our human bias, to get down and past the so called secondary reality of our 1st person experience and to a 3rd person primary reality of pure equations of physics and matter and light; to do so would be an exercise in meaningless dogma, that mocks the idea of transcendent religious truth while becoming it, perhaps unconsciously. 

"Subjective and objective knowledge fall together in the framework of self-organization. The creative process wherever it unfolds, in art or science or merely in natural and effective living, falls together with the dynamics of evolution." - Erich Jantsch

A Goethean or Evolutionary phenomenology and epistemology would include the subjective presence of the observer, consciousness, the experience of the phenomena through the senses, as the primary reality, not secondary, creatively integrating its unique perceptual worldview and a whole systems view while also keeping open to the potential evolution and empirical critique of its own perspectives limitations and projections. 

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“Goethe’s great contribution was that, in contrast to conventional science’s mechanist-materialist bias toward—indeed, nearly exclusive focus upon—what was lifeless, or dead, Goethe’s orientation was toward Life. He sought what was living and he understood that life, which was continuous and whole, permeated and included all in its embrace. His central discovery therefore, we might say, was how to think about and affirm the primacy of the organic.” - Christopher Bamford, Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge, The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner

“Some kind of evolutionary participation must take the place of the logical, concept driven proof.” - Rudolf Steiner 

"The arts still convey to us a wholeness embracing the opposites, where formal language fails and science has become a narrow trap of one-sidedness."

- Erich Jantsch

“Self-knowledge is already the beginning of self-transformation. The transformed self, co-creative, constructs enhanced phenomena in turn. Neither of these two poles is primary. Rather, what is primary is the activity that precedes the distinction between subject and object, and calls both into being. Out of this pure activity, the particular subject and particular object are precipitated as moments of a larger dynamic.” - Frederick Amrine

"The interdependence, the creative tension between structure and process reveals one of the most fundamental pairs of opposites from which all life, not just the life of human beings and systems, receives energy." - Erich Jantsch

“The keystone of the entire structure of the spiritual and physical universe is Rhythmic Balanced Interchange between all opposites.” - Walter Russell 

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Fractal geometry, as a meta-field of study of self-similar and living patterns and geometry, also gives us an archetypal window into natures inherent and unseen side, into the generative feedback parameters of its “Self-organizing Golden Algorithm,” for the creative emergence, growth, and evolution of matter and then biology, and for seeing the cosmos, life, and consciousness as a unified evolving whole, with a universal fractal blueprint and fingerprint. 

"The Sacred Cut represents the main factor in ancient geometry itself. There is only one Sacred Cut. In fact, it was the main-door key to ancient geometry." - Tons Brunés

Thinking about fractals, with the idea of moving from a static conception of the archetypal to a more dynamic one, we find that the "Phi Ratio" or "Golden Ratio" or "Divine Cut" (also see: Golden Circles) exhibits these whole-part fractal and generative dynamic relationships in the traditional and contemporary study of sacred geometry, and is the key to opening up higher Archimedean solids and fractal relationships. They are made from straight lines and circles in a kind of Euclidean space of pure self-same order, contrasted to fractal geometry that is more made from organic and rough line patterns of self-similar chaos and order. 

Fractal Phi Pyramids over the Mandelbrot set

*Large Red Pyramid angle 51.827° (Giza Phi

Pyramid)

*Blue Pyramid angle 76.345°(Russian Phi Pyramid)

(Image by George Leoniak at Knew Geometers)

One is linked more to the inorganic world and the other the organic world, and to the extent that the physical world of space and time’s emergence comes before the biosphere’s emergence, because it contains and goes beyond it, there seems to be an order-of-process in these two archetypes of geometry; the more inorganic space-time geometry is more something that is beyond the universe, that the pure-line geometry and its constants become the closest shadows of the transcendent and the principles it creates that we can interact with in the physical world, while fractal geometry is more of a living and organic and unpredictable geometry of process and emergence, but still retaining deep connection with the more archetypal Euclidian or transcendental geometries.

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"Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see."- Benoit Mandelbrot

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