Sanford Kwinter from "Who's Afraid of Formalism?"

"Formalism demonstrates first and foremost that form is resonance and expression of embedded forces. The best local formalisms show that these embedded forces are themselves organised and have a preconcrete, logical form of their own. The dynamic relation between these two levels of form is the space where all indeterminacy or historical becoming unfolds. Extended or true formalisms are diferent only that they also describe relations of resonance and expression between local forms or form systems...The great formalists have always been able to peer into the object toward its rules of formation and see these two strata together as a mobile, open and oscillating system subject to a greater or lesser number of external pressures. The manifest form - that which appears - is the result of a computational interaction between internal rules and external (morphogenetic) pressures that temseleves, originate in other adjacent forms...Algorithmic formalism (the most dynamic, extendable kind) was an invention of Goethe's and remains the basis of all robust, generative formalisms (including those being used today in computational biology)."