Patterns and forms are real
Patterns are not categories. This thought occurred to me not long after I finished my last column. I was walking along Lombard Street past a parking lot surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. I looked down and noticed that next to the fence some flowers were growing and that there was a shallow pile of yellow leaves around the bottom of each and that the wind had formed each pile into a similar pattern.
My last column had much to do with categories, arrived at by classifying a group of individuals in terms of the features that they share (and ignoring all the ones they don’t share). Categories, it seemed to me, were purely mental constructs, useful to a degree, but also misleading. A pattern, on the other hand, is a real phenomenon. One discerns a pattern. One does not construct it.
My friend Harold Boatrite, the composer, likes to distinguish between a pattern and a form. He points out that the diatonic scale, with its perfect fifth at the beginning and augmented fourth toward the end, constitutes a form. That perfect fifth has a very strong tonic root, whereas the augmented fourth has no discernible root. That sets up a problem that is resolved upon reaching the octave, which returns you to the tonic.
By way of contrast, the whole tone scale — and the chromatic scale — is simply a pattern, a series of notes.
What is important here is that these patterns and forms are real, not mere mental constructs. This got me to realize that not all categories are the same. Those based on discernible patterns and forms are different from those based on what the schoolmen would have called accidents of being. It is important to know that a given poem is a sonnet and not a villanelle, because the two forms shape what is being said in quite different ways.
The point of these columns, as I said in the very first one, is to follow the method of Montaigne by taking a subject — usually expressed in the form of a quotation — and tracking the train of thought it initiates. It is, in other words, a record of experience, and, as Bryan Appleyard recently observed, “Our experiences seem to be the central fact of our existence.” Moreover, as he also notes, “My experience of a Vermeer is just that: my experience. And telling me why it happens is not the same as saying what it is.”
This column and my two preceding columns have tracked a train of thought initiated in my mind by Lichtenberg’s observation that “Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua.”
I arrived at what I think may be the terminus ad quem of that thought train the other day when it brought to mind what God says to Moses in Exodus, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.” This has been variously translated as “I am who am” or “I am that I am,” though I gather that it literally means something like “I will be that I will be.”
It is certainly a mysterious utterance and has always seemed to me rather a sophisticated notion for some tribes wandering the desert all those many years ago to have hit upon. I presume it is what inspired the theologian Paul Tillich to define God as “the ground of being.”
But what occurred to me was that there might be another and perhaps even better way of interpreting it. Perhaps God is the ground, not of being, but of identity. What’s the difference? Merely to be is one thing, but to know that you are and who you are — well, that is something else again. Perhaps — to change but one word in Lichtenberg’s formula — it is God who creates, not genera and species, but individua.
It is hard to imagine how else the ground of identity could create.
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Would not Plato remind you that the true models for all patterns and forms exist, for lack of a better designation, elsewhere, and that we–like the fellow who perceives only shadows on the cave wall–perceive, experience, and create mere imitations of a greater reality? This is where, I think, Judaism and Christianity come close to Platonism. Perhaps you will disagree.
I would not disagree at all, R.T.I think that is why the patterns and forms are real and not mere mental constructs — in contrast to man other categories, which are only that. In fact, now that I think about it, that groundedness of the forms in reality connects nicely with the notion of God as the ground of identity,
Forms and patterns, of course, only hint at the ineffable reality, just as our metaphorical constructs of “God” only hint at the ultimate ineffable reality. This is often where some philosophers and psychologists (and we might as well include atheists) hit the wall: their unwillingness to accept reality as ineffable.
Hey RT and Frank
I think patterns and forms are real of course, no argument there.But I think you do need a better designation than “elsewhere” especially since that doesn’t seem to mean anything. There is no magical place where the perfect triangle sits as a prototype. Certain things are born in the discourse. Making things appear in our thoughts we bring them into existence. How can reality be ineffable? According to the dictionary definition it would seem impossible. Sure there are things not understood/ known etc, etc. But if it is perceivable by way of our senses( sometimes aided by technology) surely it must be real- and thus is effable.
Gracchus: What if–just for speculation here–what if we are limited in the dimensions we can comprehend (i.e., three), and what if there were other incomprehensible dimensions that can be described–for lack of a better phrase–as being the access to elsewhere. As a whimsical approach to this possibility, I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE in which the folks from Tralfamadore understand and embrace the concept of more than three-dimensions. And, to take a another stab at the problem, surely there are “things not understood/known” that are nonetheless part and parcel of reality, which, of course, is a concept that cannot be limited by a dictionary definition or philosophies since those approaches are limited by human intellect, which–if you follow the strand of thought suggested above–has yet to understand and embrace the concept of more than three-dimensions. Finally, to paraphrase Hamlet, a fellow wise beyond his years: there are more things on heaven and earth than are even dreamed of in our philosophies. As for me, I share a belief in Tralfamadoran possibilies. And so it goes.
Postscript: Also from Vonnegut’s novel, here is something else to consider. The narrator points to a fictional author and reader who share an understanding that a fourth dimension exists, and–as an example–William Blake was one who understood and “penetrated” that fourth dimension, which–as an example–contains heaven and hell. While all of this strays from Frank Wilson’s original points about forms and patterns, it nevertheless, Gracchus, offers more food for thought about “elsewhere,” Platonic ideals, and so-called reality based only on human sensory perception and cognition. I would argue that William Blake, as offered in the Vonnegut novel, is a superb example of someone who understood the possibility of something beyond superficially perceivable forms and patterns. Well, it is something to ponder.