We borrow heavily on this concept or pattern, or poem. For my part I first began to think of this concept from the perspective of health.
> Note: I was studying medicine during the day, and in breaks from clinical practice in the evenings I would go to Birkbeck in the evening to study philosophy. > Roger Scruton taught a course on the philosophy of aesthetics. it was at this time I began to think more carefully about the aesthetic instinct. I was not enamoured by the subject, though there is much to admire in Kant.
When we appreciate a forest, or pastural scene, when we wonder at the prowess of a natural predator, or revulse at disease and filth, we engage an evolved sense of aesthetics. We find ourselves attracted to a life-like pattern as life-affirming, and repelled by patterns that we have come over hundreds of thousands of years to understand as unhealthy. We can lean on this instinct to some effect.
A core aspect of like-likeness is the potential to thrive, grow, learn and evolve. The quality is not static, nor is it cancerous.
We may be impressed and fearful, even admire the facist, and structured. The minimal clean and ordered - but we understand somewhere deep that there is something they lack. They may grow and expand, but they are not life-like.
As with any pattern, the recognition is not by way of definition or reference, but through a process that Wittgenstein called family resemblance. Today we may talk about the process of pattern recognition in artificial intelligence and give much of the process a grounding in the architecture and biology of neural networks. This form of gestalt is now a science.
# See also