Mirror of the Self: A Simple Test

Here is a crucial tool — a piece of infrastructure in the Alexandrian worldview. An empirical keystone of his architecture posits a deep, real, and essentially important connection between human feeling and the structure of the world around us. There is a test that any of us may easily perform, called the “mirror of the self,” to assess the degrees to which some thing has more or less life.

Take any two objects. Any two roughly similar things. Physical, photographic, mock-up prototype, literary passage… Have these two things so that you can hold them both in your attention simultaneously, and then ask yourself, “Which of these two things is a better picture of my true self?”

Naively, that’s all there is to it. But of course, there’s more hidden here in terms of forces that are awakened. In attempting to exercise one’s judgment, this question  —  if we endeavor to answer it truthfully, from a place of deep feeling — forces us to grapple with a number of issues related to the objects in question, and more importantly, in understanding what it is that we really “like”. It is surprising that the answer to this fundamental and personal question is not as straightforward as most people tend to assume. 

Building Beauty is working on a simple “mirror of the self” application to start experimenting with this idea at scale. Tomaž Jelenski has helped me set up a link for anyone to try with some of Alexander’s canonical examples: Mirror of the Self

 The Thesis behind the “Mirror of the Self”

What we grapple with, when we begin to approach the mirror of the self, are the boundaries of the rational Cartesian subject/object divide, the limits of what might be known scientifically. We also confront the philosophical reality of what we mean by ‘deeply personal’ and ‘one’s self’. 

The core thesis behind the mirror, is this: What we as humans (that is, our biological makeup) truly and deeply like, what nourishes our inner selves, is the presence of a strong field of centers, of living structure. We know this because when we are in the presence of a stronger field of centers (i.e. coherent structure), we can feel this as a degree of life, that is stronger or weaker than in some other place. The fact that this life in structure exists — and we can learn to sense it — has enormous consequences. 

We will find, ultimately, empirical agreement about where that life exists. And this means that we can judge the value of space (as being positive for life in general and our life in particular) based on the strength of its own life, on the degree to which it brings forth the field of centers. That this universal sensitivity to life is the one criterion we ought to value the most: because it is us, in the largest and most elegant sense of what ‘us’ might be.

The implications, if true, are astounding, and it will take another three books of The Nature of Order to sketch them all in outline, to connect them to a broader theory of architecture, order, and life. Alexander recognizes the challenge he faces here: “The idea that truth is to be found in the self, not in the world beyond ourselves, seems questionable from almost any reasonable empirical point of view (Book 1, p. 349).” 

And yet we carry on — Alexander believes in all soberness that this is true. That the inner truth exists across cultures because the self is universal. That the mechanical criteria for value we find in a majority-based politics or money-based economy are a false picture, driving from our hearts that which we should truly value. 

Observer Effects

We can view the act of judgment in the mirror of the self as a form of meditation. We are asked to go beyond the surface, to go beyond personal idiosyncrasies of what we “like” in the modern sense. To leave behind what others have taught us to like, which could be their choice, not ours. Alexander uses the term ‘liking’: this is a move far and away different from what happens when we tap a thumbs-up on Facebook, click a heart on Twitter, or say that “I like yellow.”

What this test attempts to do, how it trains the observer’s sensitivity, is to burn away those stories we tell ourselves that come from a place of ego, image, and media-trained “instinct”. Alexander posits a fundamental commonality. In a central piece of the theory of centers and wholeness, there is, common to humans across cultures, geographies, and age, a core and universal sense of personal feeling. The type of feeling that speaks to our sorrows, our joys, our hopes, and our dreams. The reverence, awe, longing, fragility, and peace that true beauty engenders in all of us. 

Attempting to perform this test honestly, training one’s sensibility through years of repeated exposure and honest personal examination of places, objects, images, finding what one really likes, connects us back to the communal Self. It works to show us what is ultimately timeless.

And we find, within the frame of our existing scientific inquiry, we find signals that point to the validity of what the mirror attempts to capture. Eye tracking studies show patterns of visual interest in objects that correspond to the density of its field of centers—the same indicators of life under Alexander’s system. (More here in Nikos Salingaros’ paper, Connecting to the World.)

The Difficulty of “Self”

Munishwar Nath Ashish Ganju and Narenda Dengle refer to their essay, The Discovery of Architecture, which speaks well to what Alexander is trying to do here. It carries the same thread of “self” that Alexander asks us to connect with in the mirror of the self test. With a larger and expansive view of self — as part of a system, as part of a cooperative community — we can re-evaluate Alexander’s question. “Which of these two things is a better picture of my true self?” Their discussion follows four threads...

First, they look at the Self, where everything begins. 

Second is the act of building, of shaping our world, a fundamental expression of Self. 

Third we move to the idea of maintenance and regeneration, built on the simple recognition that no building can exist by itself, everything built is a part of a system of ongoing use and interaction. 

Fourth, they look at the issue of learning: the very act of maintenance teaches us how to build better, gives us a truer look at what the Self is trying to accomplish, and instructs us how to learn and act more holistically.

They begin by establishing the idea of Self as community. Of course, there is a relationship between people and the process of building. It is a fantasy to believe that one might envision, enact, and maintain built structure as a pure isolated entity (even though this notion is nowadays standard in the profession). The idea of a Self built from mutual cooperation is truer because it is more in tune with nature and natural processes.

Grappling with the Mirror

When one makes the comparison required in the mirror of the self, it is often difficult, and at times disturbing, to ask ourselves what we truly like. Alexander’s deep-seated belief is that any person in the world can, eventually, really learn to be true to their own deep humanity in what they like. But, paradoxically, it may take some effort to get there…

At first glance this is also where we find it easy to fatuously dismiss the idea of the mirror of the self test as a naive game, as something that can have no “right” answer. This notion is demonstrably false. In his own tests, using a range of images, Alexander found a strong degree of agreement across cultures, geographies, and ages. 

Just choosing one of the two options presented, because of some immediately attractive feature, is not really participating in the mirror of the self. We must first, even for just a moment, suspend our disbelief and assume that perhaps one of these objects really could be a better picture of my soul. And then, we choose the first time, knowing it may not be right, that in fact we should paste these images on our wall for a month, or sit with these mockups for a week, or sketch and re-sketch these examples for an hour, and see, really see, what we believe is right. Without a convicted curiosity about which may really be right, are you answering the same question I’m asking?

Reframing the Question

It seems too facile to ask “which is more like my true self” if we don’t know what our true self is — it’s absurd, what could that even mean? Imagine I present you with the example below, and ask you to choose which of these is really, deeply, an example of your true self?

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The Role of the Mirror

While it does form an empirical foundation of Alexander’s theory of centers and the ideas presented in the Nature of Order, this test is primarily a tool. One way for us to become more honestly connected to the life and the quality of those structures we encounter, and to guide our decisions toward creating structure that is more whole and more alive in our work.

If we accept the ideas of living structure and the nature of centers to be true, if we can assume that we have the capacity to learn how to sense and feel where the wholeness is really coming to life, then we may also take one further step: we can take the fifteen properties discussed previously as instructive. The presence or absence of the properties working in harmony can be one guidepost that helps point to a correct decision (although we can never know until we’ve made the model, drawn the sketch, poured the concrete, framed the column…) Learning to see when the properties work, and choosing to create those spaces and places where the properties exhibit themselves in harmony, may be able to point us closer to the core of our own selves.

While the examples presented here are built works and objects, the spirit of this test is carried through into decisions about how we might make and shape every type of center throughout the work we are unfolding.

A Tool for Practical Decision-making

Yodan Rofè reminds us that in the process of building we must be true to ourselves, but also that we may never really know the whole truth. Adaptive design follows a sequence of decisions, which is the opposite of conceiving the form all in one step. (Practitioners of many decades will shudder at this offhand rejection of their accepted method of design, which is to present the project ready-formed). Yodan refers to repeated applications of the mirror-of-the-self test to guide the design forward sequentially. 

“Sometimes that choice is very hard, and we can never be sure whether we’ve chosen well or not. And this can be a real problem. Often when we make these choices we can make them when the difference between them is not so large. We have two choices and have to go one way, or the other way.

And each choice has ripple effects in the whole field of centers. It ripples throughout the context we’re working in, and we may only find out later it wasn’t a good choice. And that happens to anyone who’s done this kind of work. It’s a real issue, [this test] is not a thing that was constructed to make a point.

I think the important thing is to maintain, as much as we can, two opposing views at the same time. One is that there is a true choice in which one option is a truer mirror of the self, that it has more life, and that it is objectively “better”. And the other side is that none of us has the truth in our pockets, and we don’t know. Even if we make a choice and we’re absolutely sure that we’re right, we never really know until sometimes much later or after much more reflection, if we’ve made the right choice or not.” 

A conundrum. All we can do is strive to build and create as much life as possible, continually honing our sensitivity, our ability to understand and create beautiful structure that presents to us a mirror of ourselves. But at least we have liberated ourselves from top-down, all-at-once design, which can never be truly adaptive. That philosophical straightjacket has been discarded.