Science, Order and Creativity by Peat F. David Bohm David & F. David Peat

Author:Peat, F. David, Bohm, David & F. David Peat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Because most of the prevailing ideas concerning the development of form were, at that time, expressed in terms of Euclidian geometry and sequential order, Goethe’s notion found little resonance in the science of his day. Nevertheless, perhaps with the development of new ways of looking at such questions, the time has come to explore such directions more fruitfully.

It would seem reasonable, and probably Goethe would have agreed, to suppose that the particular generative order described above is part of a still higher generative order of a wider range of species of plant, going on ultimately to the generative order of plants as a whole and even perhaps to life as a whole. In this way, the generation and evolution of life are thought of as more like the work of an artist than of an engineer. Moreover, considerations of this nature involve a fundamental change in the whole notion of what is meant by a hierarchy of orders. At present the word hierarchy, whose root meaning is a government by priests, contains the tacit idea that lower parts of a hierarchy are dominated by higher ones. But in the spirit of generative orders it is possible to consider hierarchies in quite a different sense. Moreover, the inclusiveness of orders, one within the other, is no longer a mere abstract subsumption in the sense that a more general category contains its particulars. Rather the general is now seen to be present concretely, as the activity of the generative principle within the generative order. This suggests a new notion of hierarchy, in which the more general principle is immanent, that is, actively pervading and indwelling, not only in the less general, but ultimately in reality as a whole. Emerging in this fashion, hierarchies are no longer fixed and rigid structures, involving domination of lower levels by the higher. Rather, they develop out of an immanent generative principle, from the more general to the less general.

The novel, discussed in the previous chapter, is an example of such a hierarchy, for it grows out of a basic generative order within the author’s mind through the generative suborders of plot, character, atmosphere, means of expression, and so on. In addition, this generative order must be expressed within various conventional forms of syntax as they apply within the sentence, paragraph, and chapter, and to the tacit conventions of the novel. Therefore, while within a particular sentence the orders of syntax and semantics may appear to dominate, they are in fact serving the much larger generative order of the novel as a whole. In turn, this larger generative order must serve the aesthetics of style, flow, and readability. So the complex hierarchical order that can be analyzed within a novel is never truly fixed. In a great work of art, it is dynamical and always used in a creative fashion.

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