Christopher Alexander – Liking from the Heart

“… contemporary ideas about what is likable are extremely confused. It is a current dogma that you may like what you wish, and that it is an essential part of democratic freedom to like whatever you decide to like. This occurs at a time when the mass media have taken over our ideas of what is likable to an extent unknown in human history. Thus if one were pessimistic, one might even say that there is very little authentic liking in our time. What people like can often not be trusted, because it does not come from the heart.

On the other hand, real liking, which does come from the heart, is profoundly linked to the idea of life in things. Liking something from the heart means that it makes us more whole in ourselves. It has a healing effect on us. It makes us more human. It even increases the life in us. Further, I believe that this liking from the heart is connected to perception of real structures in the world, that it goes to the very root of the way things are, and that is the only way in which we can see structures as they really are.

1. The things we like … make us feel wholesome …
2. We also feel wholesome when we are making them …
3. The more accurate we are about what we really like … the more we find out that we agree with other people about which these things are.
4. … As we get to know the ‘it’ which we like … we begin to see that this is the deepest thing there is. It applies to all judgements …
5. … it is not easy to find what we really like, and it is by no means automatic to be in touch with it …
6. The reasons for the existence of this deep liking are mysterious … [and] empirical … It is not a private matter.
7. … the experience of real liking has to do with self.
8. When we find out the things we really like, we are also more in touch with all that is.

… The main breakthrough in understanding will come when we are able to distinguish the everyday kind of liking (where we obviously do not agree about what we like) from the deeper kind of liking, where we agree, that forms the basis for good judgement …”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life