Philosophy for Architects (Architecture Briefs) 9781568989945, 9781568987408, 9781568989389, 9781568986975, 9781568988184, 9781568987903, 9781568989464, 9781568988702

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Philosophy for Architects

Philosophy for Architects Branko Mitrović

Contents Illustrations Preface 9 Introduction

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

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Plato 26 Aristotle 42 The Rise of Modernity 56 Immanuel Kant 76 Romanticism and Historicism 92 Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Philosophes and Philosophers 142 Analytic Philosophy 174 Conclusion 188 Acknowledgments Bibliography 193 Index 198

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Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1-800-722-6657. Visit our website at www.papress.com. © 2011 Princeton Architectural Press All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 14 13 12 11 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Editor: Laurie Manfra Designer: Jan Haux Special thanks to: Bree Anne Apperley, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek Brower, Janet Behning, Megan Carey, Carina Cha, Tom Cho, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Linda Lee, John Myers, Katharine Myers, Margaret Rogalski, Dan Simon, Andrew Stepanian, Jennifer Thompson, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mitrović, Branko. Philosophy for architects / Branko Mitrović. p. cm. — (Architecture briefs series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-56898-994-5 (alk. paper) 1. Architecture and philosophy. I. Title. NA2500.M59 2011 102’.472—dc22 201005207

The Architecture Briefs series takes on a variety of single topics of interest to architecture students and young professionals. Field-specific information and digital techniques are presented in a user-friendly manner along with basic principles of design and construction. The series familiarizes readers with the concepts and technical terms necessary to successfully translate ideas into built form. Also in the Architecture Briefs series: Architects Draw Sue Ferguson Gussow ISBN 978-1-56898-740-8 Architectural Lighting: Designing with Light and Space Herve Descottes, Cecilia E. Ramos ISBN 978-1-56898-938-9 Architectural Photography, the Digital Way Gerry Kopelow ISBN 978-1-56898-697-5 Building Envelopes: An Integrated Approach Jenny Lovell ISBN 978-1-56898-818-4 Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques Lisa Iwamoto ISBN 978-1-56898-790-3 Ethics for Architects: 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice Thomas Fisher ISBN 978-1-56898-946-4 Model Making Megan Werner ISBN 978-1-56898-870-2

Illustrations fig. 1

Mental rotation exercise. Drawing by the author, technical preparation of the drawing



by Cameron Moore. 23

fig. 2

The Ionic order, from Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture, Dover



Publications, Inc. 25

fig. 3

Doubling a square, from Plato’s dialogue Meno. Drawing by the author, technical



preparation of the drawing by Cameron Moore. 2 and 33

fig. 4

Villa Rotonda, from Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture, Dover



Publications, Inc. 40

fig. 5

Details of the Ionic order, from Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture,



Dover Publications, Inc. 41

fig. 6

Fraser spiral (Wikimedia free domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fraser_



spiral.svg). 136

fig. 7

Duck-rabbit. Drawing by the author. 137

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Few things are more important in writing than clarity. If a book fails to convey its ideas to the public it is intended for, it may as well not have been written at all. Delivering clarity is not easy, and it becomes even harder when attempting to explain a set of specialist concepts and ideas from one field to the students and professionals of another. Specialist texts are often written in field-specific technical terminology; explaining their content in terms that are easily grasped by nonspecialists is unlikely to be easy. At the same time, there are few fields with a greater reputation for the complexities of their texts than philosophy. This reputation is, I believe, unjustified—certainly, texts in molecular biology or astrophysics are likely to be more technical and less accessible to the general public What can be said at all can be said than the writings of philosophers. Besides, many philosoclearly. . . —Ludwig Wittgenstein phers have emphasized clarity of writing as an important criterion in judging a work. “What can be said at all can be said clearly” is the famous axiom of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), while John Searle (1932–) observes, “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t 1 understand it yourself.”1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Not many people are going to be worried if they don’t Logisch-philosophische understand a text on astrophysics, but many care about the questions Abhandlung: Tractatus logicophilosophicus (Frankfurt discussed by philosophers. Popular explanations of philosophers’ works am Main: Surhkamp), 2. are often sought after, and there exists a substantial publishing industry John Searle, Intentionality that caters to this interest. A book with the title “Molecular Biology for (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), X. Architects” is unlikely to be written, whereas Philosophy for Architects is, arguably, a likely choice of reading for many practitioners and students of architecture, who often manifest a lively interest in philosophical ideas. The theoretical inclinations of many architects lead directly to genuine philosophical questions. Yet the reading habits of people working in the two fields, architecture and philosophy, are immensely different. Architectural education, with its studio culture and crits, poorly prepares students to embark on the systematic reading of complex texts. Rather, it could be said to encourage superficiality by requiring students to absorb as many different ideas from as many different sources in the shortest time possible in

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order to concoct a crit presentation. “Branko, you don’t mean we have to read the whole book?” is the question I often get asked by students in the architectural theory courses I teach. Nothing could be more different from the reading habits inculcated in philosophy students, who are required to re-analyze the texts they study by re-reading the books from which these texts originate, in order to grasp the contexts and implications of various arguments. In the bibliography at the end of this book, I have included some advice about how to approach philosophical texts that, I believe, can be helpful and will reduce the difficulties that readers with an architectural background are likely to encounter when embarking on further reading. In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, architects’ attraction to philosophy, combined with their frustration over the perceived impenetrability of philosophical texts, led to a remarkable phenomenon. In order to promote their careers, many practicing architects and especially academics felt compelled to write in a jargon that sounded philosophical. In philosophy, however, it does not matter what jargon you use but how you argue and how logically consistent your views are; jargon is relevant only insofar as it facilitates the precision of arguments. One In philosophy, it does not matter what may smile today over the verbiage that characterizes jargon you use but how you argue. architectural writings from the 1980s and the 1990s, but one should not forget that these were genuine attempts to address theoretical questions by authors who lacked the necessary philosophical skills. Many fundamental problems of architectural theory are manifestations of wider philosophical problems. The problems that an architect must resolve in design practice—questions of proportion, spatial composition, relation to the environment, representation, meaning, appropriateness to time, and so on—have, more often than not, their wider philosophical articulation. What appeared as empty The problems that an architect must intellectual pretence in the 1990s sometimes led more resolve in design practice have, more sober practitioners to the belief that one should simoften than not, their wider philosophical ply avoid the theoretical quagmire altogether by stayarticulation. ing safely in the realm of practice. In fact, the hope

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that this can be done is naive. It typically leads to reliance on unconscious philosophical assumptions inculcated during one’s architectural education. Practicing architecture means facing philosophical questions daily, although one may not always be aware of it. The intention of this book is to make its readers—architects, practitioners, and students—aware of the wider philosophical problems encountered in their design work. It seeks to provide the elementary information necessary to place various problems and debates within a philosophical context and to enable readers to understand typical philosophical ways of phrasing discussions about such problems. The The intention of this book is to make its fact that the book places architectural problems in their readers—architects, practitioners, and wider philosophical context has dictated its form. If the students—aware of the wider philoreader is to understand certain ideas in their philosophisophical problems encountered in their cal context, then the philosophical ideas that preceded design work. and generated that context have to be addressed as well. Since philosophers typically formulate their ideas in reaction to those of their predecessors, the book’s chapters follow the historical order of the philosophers. It would be wrong to mistake the book for yet another on the history of philosophy; topics such as scholastics or Immanuel Kant’s ethical theories are left unmentioned simply because they have little relevance to contemporary problems of architectural theory. Philosophical positions have been selected for this book because they have something important to say about the architectural and theoretical problems that are relevant to the contemporary situation. Therefore, chapters typically discuss various philosophical positions with respect to the way they affect (or are implicitly present in) contemporary architectural Philosophical positions have been debates—more precisely, philosophical positions that a selected for this book because they have contemporary practitioner or student of architecture is something important to say about the likely to encounter today, such as those found in a proarchitectural and theoretical problems fessional discussion, architectural theory course, studio, that are relevant to the contemporary or crit. One of my intentions was to produce a book situation. that would help students in graduate-level architectural

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theory courses grasp the wider philosophical background of the problems discussed in such courses. This is not a scholarly book; technical terminology is introduced in order to explain it and prepare readers for future philosophical readings, while endnotes are there to provide further clarification, not to cite sources. The imperative to write clearly was further strengthened by the book’s limited length, which forced me to explain, in as few words as possible, the philosophical positions that I am writing about, while not making my explanations cryptically short or incomprehensible. Early in the twentieth century the Oxford philosophy professor John Alexander Smith (1863–1939) used to begin his lecture series by discussing the fact that his students were eventually to follow very diverse career paths—they would become lawyers, bankers, or doctors. Hardly anything he had to say during his lectures would be of any use in their future careers, he would observe. “But one thing I can promise you,” he would add, “if you continue with these lectures to the end, you will 2 always be able to know when men are talking rot.”2 The study of philosoRamin Jahanbegloo, phy often has a healthy and salubrious effect on many fields; it helps people Conversations with Isaiah Berlin see through faulty arguments, sloppy thinking, and emotionally colored (London: Halban Publishers, 2007), 29. or pretentious verbiage. The real gain from studying philosophy is not in learning about the views of great philosophers but in understanding their arguments and in acquiring confidence in one’s ability The real gain from studying philosophy to think critically, by thinking through these arguis not in learning about the views of ments. The important result of such confidence is the great philosophers but in understanding ability to recognize the pressures, generated by one’s their arguments and in acquiring confipeers or authorities (including, for instance, studio dence in one’s ability to think critically. critics or tutors), intended to make one adopt beliefs that one does not understand or finds contradictory with one’s other beliefs. For an architect or student of architecture, such an ability is not an irrelevant skill. Insofar as it sets readers on the road toward acquiring this skill, this book fulfills its purpose.

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Imagine that you have volunteered to participate in a research project in social psychology. You arrive at the venue on time. In the room you find the psychologist and five other people participating in the experiment, who arrived a short time before you. The psychologist explains that the participants will be asked to respond to a series of questions pertaining to the geometrical figures she will draw on the board. She asks the participants to respond in the order they arrived in the room. Then she draws seven straight lines of different lengths on the board and asks the participants to come individually to the board and point to the shortest line. Much to your surprise, one after another, the participants go to the board and point to the second longest line, declaring it to be the shortest. When your turn comes, you point to the line that is obviously the shortest. You immediately notice that some people in the group look at you with surprise. The psychologist then draws five squares and asks which one is the smallest. Again, one by one, all of the participants point to the second-largest one. When your turn comes, you point to the smallest. A number of participants in the experiment once again look at you with surprise. For the next question, the psychologist draws a series of circles and again asks for the smallest one. Similarly, the participants point to the second largest one. You point to the smallest—and this time you hear one of the participants giggling behind your back. The test proceeds. Every time, after all the other participants have given an answer that you thought was wrong, you give what you think is the right answer. Tension builds. Possibly, you start thinking that you may be doing something wrong or that you are misunderstanding the psychologist’s instructions. Maybe you really are wrong. Or, because the tension makes you feel uncomfortable, you start giving the same answers as everyone else even though you are aware that what you are saying is patently wrong. Finally, after some time, the psychologist announces that the test is finished. She then explains to you that the test was intended to measure the resistance of grown up individuals to peer pressure. You were the only person being tested, while the behavior of the other five participants was prearranged—they were acting. The purpose was to establish

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how many questions it would take the average test participant to yield to peer pressure and start answering like everyone else. In the event that you gave in to peer pressure, she may sense that you now feel embarrassed and console you by saying that many people do the same. Indeed, it is sometimes prudent to yield to peer pressure when it comes to saying things. Even in modern democracies, expressing an unpopular view may lead to unpleasant situations. In totalitarian systems, contradicting the public or official opinion can be downright dangerous. You may think that, for instance, it is not good to invest in real estate at a certain moment, although all your friends are doing it. If this is what you believe, telling your friends who have taken huge mortgages (because, they say, everyone is doing it) that the property bubble is going to burst is not going to make you popular. But avoiding confrontation with your peers does not mean that you have to adopt their views and get a mortgage yourself. Basing your beliefs on rational arguBasing your beliefs on rational ments and reasons, in spite of the pressure to conform arguments and reasons, in spite of the to a different view shared by other people (the majority pressure to conform to a different view of your peers or an authority figure), is called intellecshared by other people (your peers or tual integrity. A persistent problem in human society is an authority figure), is called intellectual that many people are easily swayed by what is, or what integrity. they perceive to be, popular opinion. For this reason, in many countries, it is forbidden to publish election forecasts for a number of days before an election to prevent citizens from voting according to what they perceive to be the view of the majority. One way to look at philosophy is to say that it studies the rational arguments and reasons used to acquire beliefs independent of the views of other people. From this point of view, philosophy is not about specific intellectual problems. Rather, it can be Philosophy studies the rational seen as a way to approach various problems by insistarguments and reasons used to acquire ing on the analysis of arguments and their logical conbeliefs independent of the views of sistence. Philosophy, one could say, fundamentally other people. relies on intellectual integrity. Nevertheless, there is an

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alternative view that an individual is always predetermined by his or her social environment, the context and culture in which that individual lives or has grown up. This view is plausible in the sense that it was impossible, for instance, for an ancient Greek to have beliefs about nuclear physics because nuclear physics as a discipline was nonexistent at the time, and no individual could have acquired beliefs about it. It would be much less credible to say, however, that in modern Western society a person cannot decide, following his or her own reasoning, how to vote or whether to invest in shares or real estate. Although people are often swayed by a popular view or an authority figure and they sometimes lack the knowledge and competence to make the right decision, ultimately they do have to make their own decisions. At some moment an individual has to decide whether he or she is going to follow his or her own personal reasoning, emotions, the majority view, or an authority. It may be pointed out that the majority view is often right and that experts or authorities often know better; statistically, it is often safer to follow their views. This argument tends to be valid when it comes to the opinions of experts who are routinely dealing with a certain type of situation—for instance, medical doctors—but it is not at all clear that a large group of people, most or all of whom have little relevant information about a given problem, are likely to form the correct opinion. Arguments: Truth and Falsity An argument always provides the grounds to believe that something is true or false. In philosophy it is not enough to merely claim something. One needs to argue and state the reasons for believing something to be true. It is also important to think through the claim’s consequences and make sure it is compatible with other beliefs that one may have and the claims one wants to make. Otherwise, one may end up with contradictory beliefs. Formulating a philosophical position is, in many ways, like designing a house. If a philosopher inadvertently allows contradictions in his or her claims, this is like an architect failing to notice, that the plan and the section do not match. To nonphilosophers, the amount of energy that philosophers

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devote to ensuring that their views are not contradicin many ways, like designing a house. tory can be seen as hairsplitting—and vice versa, phiIf a philosopher inadvertently allows losophers often recognize nonphilosophers by their contradictions in his or her claims, this limited ability to structure arguments without falling is like an architect failing to notice, that into contradiction. If a contradiction is allowed once, it the plan and the section do not match. is unclear why one should not allow it another time— and ultimately we finish with the situation that whenever a person claims something, he or she may also claim the opposite. When this is the case, it becomes pointless to construct arguments about anything; it’s more effective to shout. Philosophers have provided various definitions of truth and accounts of when a certain sentence, thought, or statement can be said to be true. It is reasonable to assume that a sentence or statement is true if it corresponds to reality and states facts or if it is coherent with other sentences or thoughts that we know to be true. But, what kind of entity do we say is true or false? A possible answer would be that we attribute truth or falsity to sentences. The problem with sentences, however, is that they can mean more than one thing and be true and false at the same time. For example, the sentence “Visiting architects can be entertaining” may mean that it can be entertaining to visit architects or that architects are entertaining when they come for a visit. The sentence can be true in one sense but false in another, depending on the thought it is intended to express. Also, sentences are always written in a specific language, such as English or German, whereas one may want to assume that certain thoughts are true regardless of the language in which they are expressed. When an American says “The table is in the room” and a German says “Der Tiesch ist im Zimmer,” they are expressing the same thought Thoughts that can either be true or false in different languages. Thoughts that can either be true are called propositions. or false are called propositions. Some philosophers would argue that propositions are not merely thoughts and that they somehow exist independently of human psychological processes. The proponents of this view argue that, Formulating a philosophical position is,

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for instance, 2 + 3 = 5 is always true and would still be true if humans did not exist and there were nobody to think the corresponding thought. Even if the human race were to die out, two apples plus three apples would make five apples. In fact, if the entire material world—the earth, solar system, and all of the galaxies in the universe—were to disappear, it is still hard to conceive how two and three would not equal five. Certainly, when we say that 2 + 3 = 5 is true, we are not just talking about the content of a thought in someone’s brain. Rather, human thoughts are manifestations of propositions that are conceived of as eternal and independent of humans and their thinking. We shall see more about this kind of argument in the first chapter of this book. It is typically assumed that propositions are made by combining concepts. Like propositions, concepts are independent of language, but unlike propositions they are neither true nor false. For instance, the English word table, the German word Tiesch, and the Italian word tavola express the same concept. They do not express the same proposition because propositions are either true or false. Relativism It is often said that everything is relative. People who say this usually mean that nothing is certain and that there are no definite truths. Philosophers are weary of such general statements because of their inherent difficulties. If we say that nothing is certain (or that nothing is definitely If one says that there is no truth, one is true), we are immediately faced with the question: Is immediately faced with the question: Is it certain (or definitely true) that nothing is certain (or it true that there is no truth? Consider that nothing is definitely true)? This question is not just what it means to say, “Nothing is true.” contradictory, it leads to a paradox. Consider what it If this were true, then it must be false; if means to say, “Nothing is true.” If this were true, then it false, it must be true. must be false; if false, it must be true. There are, in fact, more sophisticated arguments in favor of the relativity of truth than facile, general statements of this kind. An argument that was widely used throughout the twentieth century pertains to the way language affects human thinking. Many

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twentieth-century philosophers subscribed to the view that human thinking is exclusively verbal and specific to language. Widespread adoption of this view was called “the linguistic turn.” In the next section, we shall see that such a position is not compatible with an architect’s Many twentieth-century philosophers daily design work. For now, it is important to note that subscribed to the view that human different people, when asked how they think, somethinking is exclusively verbal and specific times say they think in words, while others say they do to language. not, that they think first and then express themselves in words. There are numerous arguments to support one view or another. Those who believe that thinking precedes the expression of thought in language may point out that sometimes it is difficult to find suitable words to express their thoughts. One can sometimes recognize a person without being able to remember the person’s name, but this argument can be refuted by saying that the process of finding a suitable word is the process of formulating a thought. It may also be said that human beings can differentiate among numerous properties of objects, such as nuances of colors, without being able to name them. This can be answered by saying that such differentiation really occurs in perception and does not count as thinking. The visual imagination, for example, can be characterized as a particularly prominent example of a nonverbal mental process. It may be argued that its operation is necessary for solving three-dimensional geometrical problems and that it should therefore count as thinking, but we shall see in the next section of this introduction that some philosophers, such as Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), have denied that there is such a thing as visual imagination. The British philosopher Michael Dummett (1925–), who also argued that all thinking is verbal, did not deny visual imagination but simply said it does not count as thinking. If all thinking is verbal, then everything we can possibly know or believe depends on the language in which we think. The proponents of this view would typically say that language carves reality into the objects of our thoughts. They argue that humans learn to organize their experience into objects that bear certain properties only with the acquisition

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of language. From this point of view, a newborn baby we can possibly know or believe perceives various bundles of light; only through learndepends on the language in which we ing language does a child learn to sort this experience think. The proponents of this view into things and properties. would typically say that language carves The idea that different languages reality into the objects of our thoughts. and the individuals who speak them organize their experiences of the world in radically different ways was promoted by American linguists Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941). In their view, languages shape human sensory experience into a certain world order. They pointed out that Eskimos have a great number of words for snow and differentiate accordingly among different kinds of snow. Similarly, Whorf argued that the language of the Hopi (a native American culture) organizes experience in a way so different from English that the two languages cannot be “calibrated.” It would follow that when two people from radically different cultures meet, the possibility of translation breaks down, because they share no common experience for translation to convey. Quine illustrated the problems associated with such radical translation by imagining the case of an ethnologist trying to learn the language of a tribe that has lived in complete isolation. As he is trying to talk with a local member of the tribe, a rabbit jumps out of a bush, and the tribe member pronounces the word gawagai. This may mean “rabbit,” but, Quine points out, it may also mean “a bundle of undetached parts of a rabbit” or “a time period in which a rabbit occurs” or something completely different. The tribe member may not even organize his or her experience of the world into things and properties that these objects bear. Because ultimately the tribe member’s experience of the world is organized radically differently, communication or mutual understanding is not possible. It follows that the capacity for human thought is determined by the culture and language to which an individual belongs; there is nothing that human beings (or, by extension, their cultures) can share in common. Consequently, cultures can be so different that communication between them is impossible. Quine, however, failed to explain historical events, such as Spain’s conquest If all thinking is verbal, then everything

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of Mexico, in which two completely different cultures without any prior contact managed to communicate out of necessity. The American philosopher Donald Herbert Davidson (1917–2003) pointed out an interesting problem. If the ways in which humans of fundamentally different cultures organize their experience are indeed completely different, it will actually be impossible to communicate the content of that experience. Consequently, it would be impossible to say that people from radically different cultures organize their experiences differently because we cannot know what their experiences are like. Davidson notes how paradoxical it is that Whorf, who argued that because of their language, the Hopis experience the world in a completely different way than English speakers, nevertheless tried to describe what this experience was like in English. If the experiences of the English speakers and the Hopi could not be “calibrated,” then any attempt to describe (in either language) the way the other experiences the world would be pointless. Yet, the idea that people belonging to different groups are somehow radically different continues to carry exotic appeal. Throughout this book, we shall see how various philosophers have tried to claim that the intellectual capacities of the group with which they identify differ from those of other groups. Not uncommonly, such positions coincided with, implied, or contributed to right- and left-wing political agendas. The idea that language organizes and determines an individual’s experience of the world was accepted by many philosophers throughout the twentieth century. For the past twenty years, however, the idea has been thoroughly debunked as a result of systematic research in the field of cognitive science. This research primarily concentrated on the thought processes of animals and children prior to the acquisition of language (prelinguistic infants). It has been established that children experience the world as consisting of things and properties well before the acquisition of language. Some observations show that three-monthold infants already know that surfaces lie on a single body, but only if the

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surfaces are connected. There is also evidence that infants assume that objects continue to exist when they are no longer in view. Five-month-old infants will continue to reach for a previously seen object when the lights in a room are turned off. In general, there are good reasons to believe that animals and prelinguistic infants have some sensibility of the basic principles of organizing experience into things and properties. It follows that, before they learn language, children structure their experiences of the world in ways similar to adults. The Visual Imagination The view that all thinking is verbal may have been influential among twentieth-century philosophers, but it is unlikely to make sense to architects, who have to first imagine the buildings they design. Visual imagination plays an important role in the creative process. For The view that all thinking is verbal is instance, imagination is necessary in order to think unlikely to make sense to architects, spatially, comprehend the various aspects of a building who have to first imagine visually the and grasp the relationships among plans, sections, and buildings they design. facades. It has been mentioned, however, that many twentieth-century philosophers denied the existence of visual imagination. Among European continental philosophers, the view that all thinking is verbal traces back to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). We shall see in chapters 6 and 7 that the thinkers who subscribed to this view exercised a huge impact on English-speaking architectural theory throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Their philosophical positions were, however, often so radically antivisual that architectural theory came to be seen as a discipline dealing mainly with architecture’s cultural role, but having little say about the spatial and visual properties of architectural works. The response of these theorists was that architecture is only a cultural artifact and since all thinking is verbal, architecture can be thought about only verbally. Buildings are then to be judged exclusively on the basis of the narratives attached to them. We shall see more about such debates in the final chapters of this book.

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Both visual images and sentences represent the way things are, but they accomplish this in different ways. Images are said to be analogous representations because in some way they resemble the objects that they represent. Sentences (propositions) are said to be propositional or symbolic representations because they represent by convention. For example, we can specify which part of an object a part of a picture represents, but we cannot say which part of a dog’s tail the letter t in “tail” represents. The important aspect of analogous representations is that they are particularly suited to representing spatial objects and relationships. They are of little use when it comes to abstract concepts that are impossible to draw, such as serendipity or freedom. When it comes to spatial objects, a shape can be geometrically defined Analogous representations are and described digitally in numbers, using mathematiparticularly suited to representing cal equations. This means that every shape can be spatial objects and relationships. described in words by reciting a series of mathematical equations, but this is a cumbersome process that few people will understand. Similarly, one can try to describe a building using words, but if the description is intended to replace a set of architect’s drawings, it will have to be so long that it will ultimately become impossible to follow. Visual images, on the other hand, are particularly well suited to representing spatial objects. For a substantial part of the twentieth century, research in the field of psychology was dominated by a movement called behaviorism. Its main thesis was that human thinking cannot be scientifically studied because it cannot be measured or quantified. It is possible to study only its manifestations in human behavior—the external human reaction. Behaviorists often went one step too far and The main thesis of behaviorism was that were inclined to argue that what could not be studhuman thinking cannot be scientifically ied in a scientific manner did not exist. This kind of studied because it cannot be measured position blocked psychological research pertaining to or quantified. Only its manifestations in visual imagination for decades. A major breakthrough human behavior can be studied. occurred in the 1970s when the cognitive scientist

Introduction

fig. 1 The upper and lower-left drawings depict the same object rotated differently. The lower-right drawing shows another object. In Shepard’s tests, similar drawings were used and the subjects were asked to determine whether they represented the same or different objects.

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Roger Newland Shepard (1929–) demonstrated the importance of visual imagination for human spatial thinking. In one experiment he asked participants to compare the geometrical similarities of the contours of various U.S. states without looking at a map. The experiment clearly showed that people can make judgments about shapes even if the shapes are not present. To do so, they relied on visual imagination. In another experiment, Shepard presented subjects with pictures of geometrical bodies consisting of ten cubes. The cubes were aligned in different ways and pictured from different angles. (fig. 1) The combinations of cubes were rotated so that their pictures showed them from different sides, and the participants were asked whether and in which cases the pictures represented the same combinations of cubes. With a bit of practice they achieved 95 percent accuracy in their responses. The important result, however, pertained to the speed with which the participants responded. The pictures actually represented combinations of cubes rotated from 0 to 180 degrees. It turned out that the greater the angle of rotation, the longer it took the participants to decide whether the drawings represented the same or different combinations of cubes. In other words, the participants were rotating the images in their minds. Shepard’s experiments have often been cited, and it is sometimes even suggested that he discovered the concept of mental rotation. In fact, the ability to imagine the buildings from different sides—to mentally rotate a building’s shape, or its parts—has been used by architects for centuries. A drawing from The Four Books on Architecture, written by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) and published in 1570, shows an architectural element from various sides: an Ionic column (fig. 2) The assumption

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is that the reader will combine these images in a single mental model of the architectural element. The illustration shows what happens when the object is rotated using the visual imagination. Until very recently, many European architecture schools taught undergraduate students descriptive geometry in order to develop their skills in imagining geometrical shapes from different angles. Descriptive geometry is a discipline that predates the widespread use of computers and was used to define Descriptive geometry is a discipline the way shapes and lines project onto a given plane. that predated the widespread use of For instance, when two geometrical bodies penetrate computers and was used to define the each other along a certain line, the problem is to draw way shapes and lines project onto a that line and construct on paper the geometrical progiven plane. jections of that line on imaginary planes. Solving such problems sometimes requires intensive spatial thinking and the use of mental rotation. Today, various computer-aided design (CAD) programs are used to perform similar operations. Shepard’s experiments caused a great deal of debate and have been interpreted in many different ways. First, there was the question of whether mental rotation was really the process people used when asked to solve geometrical problems. Some psychologists argued that visual imagination was only an epiphenomenal process, meaning that the images the participants reported to have imagined were not really used to solve the problem but were only manifestations of some deeper mental process. This would be similar to the way lights blink on the computer during its operation; if we break the lights (e.g. with a hammer), the process will still go on. Also, there was discussion about how mental rotation works. Psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn (1948–) suggested a model in which humans have the ability to imagine pictures the way they appear on a television screen (in those days, the cathode-ray tube). The implicit suggestion was that the ability to rotate objects in the visual imagination was inborn. Kosslyn’s model was criticized by Zenon Pylyshyn (1937–), another psychologist, who argued that these processes are the result of our tacit knowledge. His point was that when we imagine physical events,

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fig. 2 The Ionic order, The Four Books on Architecture, Andrea Palladio, 1570.

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we imagine them according to the physical laws known to us. For instance, if one imagines a blue transparent filter next to a yellow one and then imagines them moving toward each other until they overlap, one will imagine green as the color of the overlapping area. This happens on the basis of our acquired knowledge about such physical processes; we are certainly not born with the knowledge of how light filters work. Pylyshyn’s view was that the same thing is true of our ability to manipulate spatial objects in our imagination: it is not inborn or hardwired into our mind but results from our acquired knowledge about the world. Kosslyn’s answer to this criticism was that this may be the case for knowledge used in imagining physical processes, such as the overlapping of filters, but not when it comes to the ability to imagine the spatial properties of objects and to manipulate them mentally. Ultimately, the debate between Kosslyn and Pylyshyn turns out to be an age-old question, well-known to philosophers: Do we acquire all knowledge through experience, or is some knowledge inborn? It is a question that can be traced to the origins of philosophy.

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Philosophy as we know it began in ancient Greece. The earliest philosophers in Greece were predominantly concerned with the nature of things and the question of what the world was made of. In the fifth century B.C.E., the development of cities and the communication that urban life enabled, as well as new challenges to the social structure brought about by these changes, introduced questions about human society that were not present in earlier philosophy. The Athenian philosopher Socrates (469– 399 B.C.E.) stands at the beginning of this redirection of interest from nature to human affairs. Those who preceded him are therefore referred to as pre-Socratic philosophers. Athens of the fifth century B.C.E., where Socrates was born, was culturally and intellectually one of the most productive societies in human history. The city was among the most powerful Greek citystates of its time, and it flourished as a result of its strong naval fleet and maritime trade. The political system was democratic, but the rule of law was often not effective. Court processes were held in front of large juries that could easily be—and often were—swayed from the law by emotional speeches or pressured from an incited mob. Nor were political decisions always a result of deliberate policies; they were often made in the emotionally charged atmosphere produced by the manipulation of citizenry. In such a society, the ability to deliver a public speech and convince fellow citizens—the ancient Greek version of what we call “public relations” today—was of paramount importance. For prominent citizens, this skill was necessary for survival, especially considering the casual attitude of the Athenian courts toward sentencing to death and the mob’s ability to become easily incited against anyone. Wealthy parents paid great attention to ensuring that their sons were educated in the Sophists often encouraged the belief art of public speaking, or rhetoric. The educational systhat nothing is ultimately true or false, tem was largely in the hands of Sophists, private tutors just or unjust, and that all that matwho taught rhetoric and some elements of general edutered was how one managed to convince cation. They often encouraged the belief that nothing people. is ultimately true or false, just or unjust, and that all

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that mattered was how one managed to convince people. The prominent Sophist Protagoras (ca. 490–420 B.C.E.) summarized their position by saying, “Man is the measure of all things.” Athens went to war with Sparta in 431 B.C.E. Whereas Athens based its strength on its fleet, Sparta was a continental power. The war lasted twenty-seven years, but the decisive blow for the Athenians came as a result of their invasion of Sicily in 415 B.C.E. The decision to invade Sicily was made by an Athenian assembly incited by orators and did not take into consideration elementary facts about the island’s size, logistics of warfare, or the power of local cities. The huge Athenian fleet’s Sicilian expedition turned into a disaster. After this, they lost absolute control over the seas. While they depended on maritime traffic to import food to the city, the Spartan fleet was increasingly capable of threatening these transports. In 406 B.C.E. the Athenians defeated the Spartan fleet at the Arginusae islands. Due to bad weather, however, the Athenian commanders were unable to organize proper religious services for all of the soldiers and sailors who had died in battle. When the fleet returned to the city, the commanders were tried in a highly irregular process; under public pressure, they were sentenced to death. Consequently, the Athenians had no competent naval commanders and were ultimately defeated a year later, when the city surrendered. It was in such an environment that Socrates lived his life. By the time the war with Sparta had ended, he was an old man. He was passionate about educating young men, but unlike the Sophists, he refused to accept money for tutoring. Rather than teaching, he based his educational method on conversation and a special skill of posSocrates based his educational method ing questions to lead the people he talked with to new on conversation and skillful questioninsights. He often compared this skill to midwifery. His ing that led people to new insights. His modest starting point was always his own ignorance; starting point was his own ignorance however, his skillful questioning would often expose and he often compared this skill to contradictions in the views of those he conversed with, midwifery. thus making their ignorance and assumptions obvious.

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The young men who accompanied Socrates enjoyed seeing prominent citizens revealed as fools, but this was certainly not the way to make oneself popular. One of his passionate followers managed to obtain, from the oracle of the god Apollo in Delphi, the opinion that Socrates was the wisest of men. Socrates interpreted this judgment as Apollo placing him ahead of other people for his awareness of his own ignorance. Following the lost war, Athenian society underwent a deep crisis. First, the Spartans imposed the rule of Thirty Tyrants, killing many prominent citizens and forcing others into exile, although the dictatorship was overthrown and democracy re-established within a year. Following these events, Socrates made himself particularly unpopular by discussing the ways in which the democratic system had resulted in unwise political decisions that led to Athens’ defeat. For instance, he reasoned that if one needed medical advice, one consulted a person who knows something about medicine. If one needed new shoes, went to a shoemaker. But when it came to running a government—the most complex skill of all— Athenians somehow believed that everyone had a competent opinion on how to do it. In an atmosphere in which defending the democratic system was also a question of patriotism, putting forward arguments of this kind was asking for trouble. In 399 B.C.E., Socrates was accused of impiety and of spoiling the youth. The trial, held before a jury of five hundred men, turned out to be a vote of unpopularity more than a proper trial. According to Athenian law, the jurors first voted to establish whether the accused was guilty and then determined the punishment. Paradoxically, the number of jurors who voted for the death penalty turned out to be greater than the number of jurors who found him guilty. Socrates was sentenced to death and executed with poison hemlock. His relaxed attitude during the trial, however, left a lasting impression for generations. Socrates acted according to his reasoning and was not swayed by fear, emotion, or passion. Nobody knew, he explained to the jurors, if death was good or bad, and fearing it amounts to claiming to know what is impossible to know. At the age of seventy, he believed that a quick death was preferable to continuing to live and

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observing the painful decay of one’s body. Insofar as he defended himself at the trial, he perceived it as a favor to the jurors. In his view, he was merely trying to save them from committing an injustice. Facing death, Socrates’ attitude resulted from clear, rational arguments. When friends offered to help him escape abroad, he asked whether they knew of a place where death would not reach him. He even retained his dry sense of humor. When a friend said that he found it unbearable to see him being sentenced to death despite his innocence, Socrates jokingly asked if he would prefer to see him sentenced because he was really guilty. Plato’s Philosophy Plato (ca. 428–348 B.C.E.) was one of the young men who spent much time with Socrates. He was present at the trial, left his record of it, and subsequently applied the methods he learned to the development of a systematic philosophical position that far exceeded Socrates’ views and intentions. Plato wrote his philosophical works in the form of dialogues, and in most of these, Socrates appears as the main character, discussing various philosophical problems with other people and defending the position that Plato was advocating. Plato realized that all human affairs were in a state of perpetual flux and that fashions, ruthless politicians, or corrupt orators could influence people easily. Not unlike human affairs, nature is also in a state of endless change; things decay and fall apart. Therefore, his main question was whether there may be something that is not subject to change or to the fads of human society or to the impermanence of natural things. He found the answer in mathematics. Regardless of Plato’s main question was whether there anything happening in human society, no assembly or may be something that is not subject a tyrant could change mathematical truth by a vote or to change or to the fads of human a decree. Two and three make five, regardless of human society or to the impermanence of will. Natural things change all the time, but they cannatural things. He found the answer in not change contrary to the laws of mathematics. In mathematics. fact, it is possible to imagine that all of nature—the

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entire material world—might disappear but two and material world might parish, but two and three would still make five. It follows that the laws of three would still make five. mathematics are true and must somehow exist independently of human affairs and the natural world. They are true even if humans do not know about them. It is more correct to say that humans discover them. Plato reasoned that mathematical things, such as numbers or geometrical figures, are eternal and imperishable and that they are imperfectly reflected in the natural world. For instance, it is possible to cut a triangle out of paper, but such a geometrical figure will never have perfectly straight lines. Similarly, drawn geometrical figures can never be drawn absolutely perfectly. Sooner or later, a paper triangle will be destroyed because material objects don’t last forever, but the eternal Form of a triangle cannot dissolve or cease to exist. Plato used the Greek word eidos, which translates as Form—and philosophers have since talked about “Platonic Forms”—to refer to the eternal prototypes of mathematical things. (These are also sometimes referred to as “Platonic Ideas,” but Ideas in this sense are not ideas in the human mind; they are independent, eternally existing prototypes of things.) In other words, material things are only reflections, or instantiations, of eternal Forms. Because they are composed of matter, they are perishable and imperfect. Plato did not limit Forms to mathematics. Plato reasoned that justice and beauty He assumed the existence of ideal prototypes, Forms, are not merely social conventions. Similar or Ideas of natural things as well as various aspects to mathematical forms, they exist indeof human society. He reasoned that justice and beauty pendently of human society, regardless are not merely social conventions. Similar to mathof what humans know or believe. ematical Forms, they exist independently of human society, regardless of what humans know or believe. When a person or group of people commits an injustice, they may believe that they’re acting as they should, but they have nonetheless committed an injustice. Being wrong about ethical or aesthetic issues thus turns out to be equivalent to being wrong about mathematics. This may seem to imply a significant conceptual leap—Plato’s point is precisely that ethical and It is possible to imagine that the entire

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aesthetic issues have the same certainty as mathematics, since they all pertain to eternal Forms. In his view, ethical and aesthetic norms have their origin outside the conventions of human society, as is the case with mathematics. Today, many religions base their ethics in a similar way, when they preach that moral norms are God given and not social conventions. Furthermore, Plato reasoned that material or perish1 able things could not be properly called “real” since what is real cannot We shall see in the next be temporary. Only eternal Forms can be properly called “real.” People, chapter that Aristotle denied in his view, are often wrong about that which is “real.” In his dialogue that such Forms can exist independently of individual Republic, he describes a group of people who have been chained inside a material things and claimed cave since childhood. Light comes from behind them, and they cannot that they were latent within see things directly. All they can see are shadows on the wall of the cave. things; for Plato, Forms exist prior to and independent They learn when various shadows coincide or follow each other, and they of individual things. know what kinds of noises accompany certain shadows. They take these Throughout the history of to be the noises of the shadows, and they take the shadows for reality. philosophy, this debate has been repeated over and over According to Plato, the “things” of our world are reflections or shadows of again. We classify objects in eternal Forms or Ideas, which do not exist in space or time, but outside of various ways (red, wooden, it. Perishable things are their reflections.1 From this point of view, material soft), and the question is—in what way do we conceive things resemble the Forms that they reflect, the way, for instance, etchings these classes to exist? resemble the original used to generate them. Material things are just decayPhilosophers often refer to ing copies of their eternal prototypes. such classes as universals, and the debate about their In Plato’s view, the knowledge of “real” things (i.e., nature is called the debate eternal Forms) is still available to humans. In his dialogue Meno, a young about universals. A universal uneducated slave boy is being questioned by Socrates. He asks the boy is a technical philosophical term that refers to a property to double a given square. The boy first proposes to double each side of shared by a number of the square, but Socrates leads him to realize that this would be the way objects. One should not to make the square four times bigger. (fig. 3) Through further questioning, confuse it with the everyday use of the term. Socrates brings the boy to construct a square over a diagonal of a given square, which indeed has twice the area of the given In Plato’s view, knowledge is very much square. The boy thus resolves the problem. Socrates like remembering, in that it is already guides the boy to the solution without telling him what present in the human mind. to do. All answers were already present unconsciously

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in the boy’s mind. Plato therefore infers that knowledge is very much like remembering, in that it is already present in the human mind. In a number Socrates’s dilemma is how to of dialogues, Plato uses the metaphor of previous life to explain the fact double the sides and the area of a square, 4th century bc . that humans already have knowledge of that which is true, beautiful, and just; the knowledge is innate, and humans only need to make it conscious. In the dialogue Phaedrus, he metaphorically describes the human soul as consisting of a charioteer and two horses. Together with other souls, the soul chases across the heavens after its proper deity: Zeus, Apollo, and so on. In the process, the charioteer has the chance to glimpse the “real” world of Forms beyond the limits of heaven. When the chariot loses its balance and falls to Earth, a human is born. The soul remembers some of the truths it saw while chasing the gods across the heavens, while the deity it had been following influences its pursuits in human life. The followers of Zeus (ancient Greece’s most powerful god) strive to become leaders and rulers; the followers of Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love) dedicate their lives to love; the followers of Ares (the god of war) excel in battle. Plato derived beauty from love. In Symposium, Socrates argued that young men initiate their interest in philosophy by loving beautiful individual bodies. The next step is to recognize beauty in souls and to start appreciating it more than that of beautiful bodies. As he matures, a man will see beauty in beautiful works, customs, and sciences. He will realize ultimately that beauty—shared by bodies, souls, The enjoyment of beauty that begins works, and sciences—is one beauty. He will start lovwith corporeal love, in Plato’s view, ing beauty itself instead of its specific manifestations. ultimately ends in seeing what is eternal. The enjoyment of beauty that begins with corporeal love, in Plato’s view, ultimately ends in seeing what is eternal (the world of Forms). At the same time, Plato dismisses imitation in the arts because the existing things that these arts imitate are merely shadows of “real” things; that is, producing an imitation of an imitation is like making a shadow of a shadow. Plato resented the rise of democracy, and he saw in it one of the worst political systems that could be. He believed that only the fig. 3

In Plato’s dialogue Meno,

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tyranny of one man is worse than democracy, and by its nature democracy will eventually result in the tyranny of one man. Plato identified liberty and freedom of choice with lawlessness. His description of the ideal state in the dialogue Republic is a totalitarian fantasy in which the societal life revolves around a caste of “guardians,” individuals selected and educated to preserve the society from any change. Families and property are abolished, and all children are raised together. The state is ruled by philosophers, while life is highly austere and most of the arts (especially those that yield some kind of pleasure) are expelled. The state should be a perfect reflection of the eternal Form of a state; and one should do everything to arrest change in it since all change is decay. Since only philosophers know enough about the eternal Forms, and since this knowledge is necessary in order to know how to arrest change, the ideal state can be ruled only by philosophers. Plato has often been criticized for his antiliberal and antidemocratic political views. The Austrian philosopher Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) identified Plato’s philosophy as the source of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. At the same time, one should bear in mind that democracy, as Plato understood it, was the Athenian democracy of his time, marked by the weak rule of law. In an attempt to arrest what he perceived as the decay of society, Plato assumed that there is an absolute Form of a state and that individual rights should be sacrificed to achieve and preserve it. It is worth noting, however, that his philosophy need not result in an antiliberal position. Beginning with Plato’s theory of Forms, one could assume that certain rights belong to individuals as human beings and that human beings have certain rights as reflections of the Form of a human being. The state would then be the sum of such individuals. This alternative position is similar to the views of many contemporary proponents of universal human rights. When people condemn some cultures for suppressing the human rights of members of various groups, they assume that certain values (such as the rights of individuals) are in some way absolute and do not depend on social context. They take a position very similar to Plato’s, although they hardly ever mention eternal Forms. They have to

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assume that some values are not merely cultural prodderived and relative to social context, ucts and are absolute in some way. Otherwise it would then oppression cannot be condemned be meaningless to criticize, for instance, the oppression in the case of those traditional societies of women in some traditional societies. If we accept that where it is customary. all values are culturally derived and relative to social context, then the oppression of women cannot be condemned in the case of those traditional societies where it is customary. It makes sense, therefore, to differentiate between Plato’s own political views as he related them to his philosophy and attempts to apply his philosophical position to defend sets of political views that are radically different than his own. If we accept that all values are culturally

Ontology, Architectural Theory, and Optical Corrections When Plato inferred that eternal, imperishable Forms were real, and he claimed that changeable, material objects cannot properly be called “real,” he initiated a new philosophical discipline: ontology. Ontology discusses the way things are and in what sense they can be said to be. It is about being. Philosophers may say that specific problems within architectural theory are ontological problems, although architectural theorists may not be aware of this. Ontological problems in architectural theory start with the question, “What is a work of architecture?” We ascribe certain properties (e.g., beauty) to works of architecture. But what is a work of architecture? One may be tempted to say that a work of architecture is the physical building, but very often we talk about the various properties of a building even when it has not been built or was built but no longer exists. What is discussed in these cases is the idea of the building, as conceived by the archiWe ascribe certain properties (e.g., tect and conveyed to other people by means of drawbeauty) to works of architecture. But ings. This idea need not be a Platonic Form. One can what is a work of architecture? assume that it is the content of the architect’s thoughts and those of the people who read his or her drawings. Nevertheless, if we ask what the content of the idea is, it is possible to give a Platonist answer and say that it is the eternal Form of such a building. In other words, the argument will be that when a mathematician thinks about

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mathematical theorems, his or her thoughts are about eternal mathematical Forms; when an architect thinks about architectural designs, his or her thoughts are about the eternal Forms of buildings. Works of architecture are, then, not created but discovered, like mathematical theorems. A related long-standing debate in architectural theory concerns optical corrections. If we want a certain architectural element on the facade to be perceived as proportioned in a certain way, should its proportions be adjusted to the conditions of perception or not? If a work of architecture is understood as a reflection of the eternal Platonic prototype, then there is no place for optical corrections: The building’s proportions should be as similar to the original prototype as possible. Likewise, if a building is conceived of as a physical object, whose proportions are enjoyed insofar as they are perceived a certain way, then optical adjustments are necessary. There is also the view that optical corrections are not necessary because the human mind processes the information it receives from the senses. For instance, if we perceive a line of telegraph poles, the farther away they are, the smaller they appear. Nevertheless, one is unlikely to assume that the poles are smaller just because they appear smaller. There are, however, situations in which various other circumstances affect our perception and judgment of the sizes of architectural elements. The Roman architectural theorist Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (ca. 80–15 B.C.E.) argued in his treatise The Ten Books on Architecture that optical corrections are necessary in various situations that arise when designing temples. In his view, the corner columns of a temple need to be made slightly thicker because one does not see a dark wall but open space behind them, which makes them appear thinner than other columns. Similarly, he provided formulas for making the beams that rest on Ionic columns (the entablature) thicker for taller columns to prevent them from appearing smaller than they actually are. He also recommended various ways of adjusting the proportions of a building to the conditions of perception. When Vitruvius wrote his recommendations for optical corrections, this may have been his fantasy, but he may also have been

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documenting an older Greek practice. It is known that he read and had access to ancient Greek writings on architecture that have since been lost. Vitruvius’s recommendations were particularly praised by a number of architectural theorists during the Italian Renaissance, although it would be difficult to prove that they were applied. In the eighteenth century, these statements were regarded merely as documents of Roman decadence and evidence of the relative inferiority of Roman architecture in comparison to Greek. It was believed that the Greeks constructed their temples with and without optical corrections. In the early nineteenth century, the first modern and systematic archaeological surveys of temples in Greece dispelled these misconceptions. It was discovered that Greek temples were lavishly painted in bold colors. (These colors had completely The whiteness that some architects faded by modern times, so that only the white of the associate with perfection would marble remained.) The whiteness that some architects probably have indicated to the ancient associate with perfection would probably have indiGreeks that the building had not been cated to the ancient Greeks that the building had not properly completed. been properly completed. More important, archaeologists’ surveys demonstrated numerous strange departures from straight lines and verticality on the elements of Greek temples that often looked like or even coincided with the optical corrections described by Vitruvius. On the Parthenon in Athens, for example, the large steps that form the base of the temple are slightly curved along the side of the wall; the columns are inclined inwards for 1/150 of their height; the walls of the temple’s inner cell are inclined inwards for 1/80 of their height; and the ornamentation at the top is tilted slightly outward. These numerous departures from straight angles and lines are exceptionally precise and barely perceptible. In most cases, they can be detected only when one knows how to look for them. Once they were systematically studied in the twentieth century and their possible optical effects compared, it became impossible to say how and what kind of optical effect such departures from straight lines and orthogonal corners were able to produce. One commonly stated argument is that Greek temples were designed to be perceived from various sides, whereas if optical

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corrections are to work at all, they must be observable from a single point of view. Optical adjustments can only suit a specific point of view and would be likely to be perceived as deformations if perceived from another point in space. (One may, for instance, need to make a wall curved in order to ensure that it is perceived as straight from a certain point of view, but from other points around the temple the wall will be then perceived as curved.) Many archaeologists today dismiss the discussion of optical corrections on Greek temples as unscientific, because there is no scientific explanation of how the fine adaptations that the Greek architects made to their temples would affect visual perception. Archaeologists thus prefer to talk about the refinements of Greek architecture without attempting to explain what motivated Greek architects to strive to achieve such detailed departures from straight lines. Plato knew something about the idea of optical corrections and, quite predictably, dismissed it. The Parthenon, the major Athenian temple on which refinements have been measured by modern archaeologists, was completed approximately five years before Plato was born. In his dialogue Sophist he mentions that sculptors, when making particularly large sculptures, adjust the proportions of the Plato says that the sculptors, when upper portions of the body to the conditions of percepmaking particularly large sculptures, tion by making them bigger. He criticizes this practice adjust the proportions of the upper because by doing so, these sculptors depart from the portions of the body to the conditions correct proportions of the original. It is interesting of perception by making them bigger. to observe that he could have argued differently. It is He criticizes this practice because by also possible to argue that the executed building is a doing so, these sculptors depart from way to express a certain architectural idea. (Idea can the correct proportions of the original. be understood here as the idea in the architect’s mind or as the Platonic Form of an architectural work.) To convey the idea accurately, the building must enable the public to perceive the desired proportions. It follows that the building should include not the proportions conceived by the architect for that work of architecture, but those that would correctly convey the architect’s idea to the general public. In that case, a building becomes a means to convey a certain spatial idea,

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as is the case with a drawing, model, or any other means of architectural communication. Palladio and Platonism In what form can Plato’s philosophical principles be consistently applied to architecture? What kind of reasoning about architecture, in theory and in practical design solutions, will result from such an approach? The work of the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) can be taken as a good illustration of such consistent application of philosophical principles to architectural design. Palladio was trained as a stonemason. In his late twenties and early thirties, he came into contact with Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550), a prominent diplomat and scholar in the city of Vicenza, where Palladio lived. Through Trissino, Palladio received a wider humanist education and came into contact with the philosophical circles in the neighboring university city of Padua. In his writings—Palladio’s most important publication is his treatise The Four Books on Architecture—he never explicitly related his theoretical views to any specific philosophical position. Various historians have nevertheless often observed that his specific design decisions regularly follow a line of reasoning that can only be described as Platonist. More specifically, it is Palladio’s consistent application of design principles that correspond to a philosophical position, rather than The starting assumption of a Platonist what he says, that qualifies his approach as Platonist. approach to architecture has to be that In the background of any a building is a mere reflection of an Platonist consideration of architecture has to be the ideal prototype; the more closely the assumption that the material product (a building) is a building reflects this original prototype, mere reflection of an ideal prototype; the more closely the better it is. An architect in this the building reflects this original prototype, the better sense does not invent or create new it is. An architect in this sense does not invent or crearchitectural works; rather, an architect ate new architectural works; rather, an architect discovdiscovers and explores architectural ers and explores architectural Forms. Palladio’s career Forms. consisted substantially of designing villas of a very

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fig. 4 Villa Rotonda, from Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture.

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similar type and morphology, which can be qualified as a several-decades-long exploration of the same building form. These villas are often understood as material instantiations of an ideal prototype because Palladio tended to disregard the context in which his designs were placed. If a design is really good, one could argue, it is good for any site—the way a mathematical theorem cannot be said to be true in one place and false at another. One of Palladio’s most famous works, the villa Rotonda, near Vicenza, has a central circular core, four blocks of rooms around it, and four monumental entrances with protruding pedimented porticos. (fig. 4) The hill on which the villa is placed, however, has been artificially heightened by the platform on which the villa was set. Two out of the four monumental entrances end at the edge of the platform and cannot be properly used. The building’s multiple symmetries are perfect, but the placement of the major elements of the architectural composition is dysfunctional in relation to the site. Palladio’s designs of urban buildings are characterized by the same tendency to sacrifice the consideration of site to the perfection of the building. His competition entry for the Rialto Bridge in Venice was notoriously too large for the site, although Palladio must have known the site well. Similarly, in his architectural treatise, he presented a number of his designs for urban palaces in his native city, Vicenza. Many of them were initiated, but very few were completed. They often could not be completed because they were designed to be too large for their sites and sometimes even for the entire city block in which they were located. When he had to choose between adapting to the site and following the internal logic of the architectural design, he usually chose the latter. In his theoretical writings, Palladio never advocated in favor of optical corrections, which makes him an exception among other architectural theorists of the Renaissance. Buildings should have the proper

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fig. 5 Details of the Ionic order, from Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture.

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proportions, we are left to infer, regardless of how they are perceived. Other Renaissance architectural theorists’ writings and treatises typically included long sections about the ways the classical orders—the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns and entablatures— were to be proportioned, and they mostly repeated the proportional ratios stated by Vitruvius. Palladio provides a similar account as well, but he often corrects Vitruvius’s ratios by minuscule amounts. Often, these amounts were so tiny that the correction could not be perceived; sometimes it was as small as 1/720 of the lower-column diameter. If this correction were five millimeters, then the column would have to be twentynine meters tall. Since this detail was on the top of the capital, it would be too high for the difference to be perceived. Palladio thus divorces architectural works from the way they are perceived. This affected his approach to drawing and visual communication as well. He almost never used perspective drawings in his architectural representations. Instead, he developed a system of presentation that combined various orthogonal projections of architectural elements from different sides. In this way he accurately rendered their shapes and proportions, although no architectural element could ever be perceived that way. (fig. 5) Through the history of architecture, architects have often referenced philosophers in order to find solutions for the various theoretical as well as specific design problems they encountered. Few architects became respectable philosophers in their own right, such as the baroque architect Guarino Guarini (1624–1683). Even fewer philosophers actually practiced architecture, such as the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Palladio stands out, however, for his systematic application of a certain set of principles derived from a consistently developed philosophical position.

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Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) was a disciple of Plato and arguably the most influential philosopher in history—that is, he exercised the greatest influence over the longest period of time. Unlike Socrates and Plato, Aristotle was born not in Athens but in Macedonia, a powerful northern Greek kingdom that during his lifetime became a major military power. His father was the physician to the king, which contributed to Aristotle’s strong interest in biology, on which he ultimately based his philosophy. He came to Athens as a young man to study philosophy at the Academy, the school founded by Plato. After Plato’s death, Aristotle left Athens and lived for a number of years on the western coast of Asia Minor. (This area is today part of Turkey, but it was Greek through most of written history, until 1923 when the Greeks were expelled by the Turkish government.) In 343 B.C.E. the king of Macedonia invited Aristotle to tutor his son, who would later become known as Alexander the Great, one of the greatest military geniuses in history. After the boy grew up, Aristotle returned to Athens and opened his own philosophical school in the part of the city known as Lyceum. When Alexander died at the age of thirty-two during a military campaign, there was an anti-Macedonian upheaval in Athens, and Aristotle moved to the city of Chalcis on the Greek island of Euboea, where he died a year later. Aristotle’s Philosophy It was always difficult to explain the nature of Plato’s eternal Forms. What were they, and where were they? Is it still perhaps possible to explain mathematics and material things in this world without referring to Forms outside of it? The effort to replace Plato’s explanations, which depended on eternal Forms external to this world, with explanations that rely on material things and properties of this world was the central motive behind Aristotle’s philosophy. Even when writing about mathematics, he insisted that numbers and geometrical figures do not exist independently of material things; they are numbers and figures of material objects. In his view, it was pointless to ask whether two and three would make five if the material

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world were to perish. The world, he argued, cannot perish; it is infinite in time and without a beginning or an end. (It is, however, finite in space and when mathematicians talk about infinite magnitudes, they can do so only by imagining them.) Instead of mathematics, Aristotle based his philosophy on biology. When he rejected Plato’s theory of Forms, he certainly did not intend to go back to the Sophists’ view that everything was just social convention. He observed that certain regularities occur in nature regardless of what humans may believe or decide. An animal of Aristotle based his philosophy on biology a certain species gives birth to another animal of that instead of mathematics. same species, not an animal of another species. A puppy grows into a dog, never into a cat. Central to Aristotle’s explanation of the world is the distinction between the essential and accidental properties of things. A dog may have many accidental properties, such as color, size, and four legs. It may change its size or lose a leg, but it will still be a dog. The essence of something is what it is to be that thing; it is the property that a thing cannot lose without becoming something else. A dog’s “dogness” ensures that a puppy will eventually grow into a dog. We have seen that Plato used the Greek word eidos when talking about eternal Forms that exist independently of this world. Already in Plato’s usage, the word form ceased to mean shape. Aristotle used the same word to talk about 1 the essences that are in things.1 Essences make things into what they are. For this reason, translations His point was that there was no need to postulate Forms outside of the of Aristotle’s works often talk material world. Only natural things have essences, while man-made things about forms when Aristotle refers to essences in his text. retain the essences of the natural things from which they are composed. Another phrase that Aristotle For example, if one were to bury a wooden bed, it would sprout a tree, not used when talking about the another bed. essence of a thing was “the nature of a thing” or “what it Modern science assumes that material things consist is to be that thing.” of atoms. Combinations of atoms constitute molecules; these, in turn, determine the chemical structure of the material from which something is composed. Aristotle did not believe in atoms, although the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, who preceded him, had developed early

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atomist theories. Aristotle believed that a thing consists of matter and that thing’s essence, or form. Matter alone has no properties whatsoever, and in his view, it can be infinitely divided into smaller units. Essence, or form, makes a thing what it is, and individual things are instantiations of their essences. Various specific things that share the same essence (e.g., individual human beings) are individual instantiations of that essence. Essences can exist only in individual material things; unlike Plato’s Forms, they cannot exist independently of the things in which they are instantiated. According to modern science, various molecular processes (related to DNA) cause the growth of organisms. But for Aristotle, there are no molecules, nor is there DNA; rather, the essence of an organism makes it what it is. Aristotle’s explanations typically describe the change from being potentially something to becoming that thing in actuality. Aristotle insists on explaining things, not events. Modern science explains events by citing other events that caused them. Ultimately, even “things” can be comprehended as events, in that groups of molecules, atoms, and their parts move in a certain way for a period of time. But according to Aristotle, it is things that have causes. Aristotle’s science explains how things There are four kinds of causes: material, formal, final, come about; modern science searches and efficient. Only efficient causes correspond to what for the causes of events. is understood to be a “cause” by modern science. The material cause of a thing is its matter; its formal cause is its essence. The final cause of a thing is its purpose. For example, birds have wings in order to be able to fly. Aristotle believed that natural things are preconceived to work in certain ways. Today we assume that a cause precedes its effect in time; however, with Aristotle’s final causes, it is the other way around. If one assumes that cork trees were created to make wine bottle tops, then the idea of a wine bottle top comes before the creation of cork trees. The rejection of such final causes would eventually become one of the most important issues in the rise of modern science. It meant rejecting the view that things exist or happen because there is a greater

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Reason that permeates the universe (such as God) rejecting the view that things exist and purposefully makes it a certain way. If one says or happen because there is a greater that birds have wings in order to fly, it is like saying Reason that permeates the universe and that some Reason intended them to be able to fly and purposefully makes it a certain way. for that reason provided them with wings. Only in the nineteenth century did the theory of evolution explain the properties of plants and animals in a way that did not depend on the idea that their structures were preconceived by a mind (or God) that created the universe. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) developed a theory of evolution that said, for instance, that birds have wings and are able to fly as a result of natural selection, not as a result of the preconception of an allpowerful Creator. For many centuries, the Aristotelian understanding that bodies of plants and animals are purposefully structured was the dominant view. Before the theory of evolution, there was no other explanation for the seemingly purposeful organization of the bodies of living creatures. Plato’s conception of science was based on the model of mathematics, and it was conceived as the study of Forms. For Aristotle, science involved the study of the essences of things. When we know a thing’s essence, we can infer its other properties. Aristotle was also the first to systematically study logic, the philosophical discipline that explores the correct means of reasoning. Because his approach to science was based on the study of essences, it differs from our modern understanding of science. Today we understand that a definition should say, with satisfactory precision, what a thing is. But it is often possible to make such descriptions in various ways, all with equal precision. For instance, one can define a circle by saying that it is “the intersection of a sphere and a plane,” or that it is “the line whose points are equidistant from the same point.” For us today, both descriptions are equally valid because they are both equally precise. But Aristotle operated with essences; for him, descriptions may be equally precise, but only those that state the essence of a thing really count as definitions. A human being, for example, can be equally well differentiated from other animals when it is described as “an animal able to The rejection of final causes meant

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laugh” or “an animal that possesses reason.” No other animal can laugh, and no other animal possesses reason; but only a description that relies on reason would count as a definition in Aristotle’s view since it states what he regards as the human essence. Aristotle was also the first to describe and study syllogism. Syllogism is the logical procedure whereby one infers, from two statements (or propositions), a third statement. For example: All humans are mortal. Socrates was a human. —Therefore, Socrates was mortal. Aristotle’s work in logic was probably the most influential aspect of his teachings, and the approach to logic that he formulated remained the basis of all philosophical approaches to logic until the early decades of the twentieth century. Aristotle’s Cognitive Psychology Visual imagination plays an important role in the design process, making Aristotle’s discussion of the functioning of the human soul particularly interesting for architects. Aristotle was the first to systematically describe the functions of the human soul and its cognitive processes. His account describes the functioning of the five senses—sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—that provide data to a central organ, called common sense. Common sense combines the information that arrives from the senses. It makes one aware that the white thing one perceives is also hard to the touch. Imagination then forms the phantasm of the thing that common sense describes. A phantasm is like a little model of the thing being perceived or thought about, and it represents its properties analogously. We have seen that some twentieth-century philosophers argued that one cannot think without words; Aristotle argued that one cannot think without phantasms, which as he conceived of them were predominantly visual.

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Memory stores phantasms generated by the imagination so that they can be recalled later. The highest section of the soul, the intellect, then contemplates phantasms and extracts their essences. This enables us to grasp what a thing is. To be able to do this, the intellect is divided into two parts, passive and active. The passive part takes on the form (or essence) from the phantasm, while the active mind enables this to happen. The active intellect can be compared to light in that it comes directly from God and makes essences accessible to the passive intellect. The passive intellect has no inherent character because in order to replicate the properties of the things it thinks about, it must be able to become like them. The active intellect is immortal, but Aristotle did not specify whether the passive intellect is mortal or immortal. Despite Aristotle’s emphasis on the role of visual imagination, he says relatively little about its functioning. It is not even clear whether phantasms are to be understood as three-dimensional models or as two-dimensional pictures. He does not describe anything similar to mental rotation. Indeed, his theory of light would make such a description impossible. Mental rotation, as modern psychology describes it, implies that visual perception represents the spatial disposition of objects the way they stand in relation to each other. The underlying assumption is that light, which enables us to form an image of that disposition, moves in straight lines. If light were to move along an irregular or curvilinear path, then in certain cases, one would perceive a thing that stands to the right of another thing as standing to its left. For Aristotle, however, light does not move at all; the actualization of the transparent medium is what transmits pictures. We have seen that Aristotle likes to explain things as changing from potential to actual. The transparent medium that enables vision is in a state of potential when it is dark, and it is actualized when it is light. Aristotle thus does not rely on the assumption that light moves in straight lines. As a result, his theory of vision cannot explain the fact that when a thing is on the right of another thing, we perceive it there and not, for instance, on the left from that other thing.

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Aristotelian Philosophy and Architectural Theory Philosophy in the late Middle Ages meant writing commentaries on Aristotle or producing philosophical works that began from Aristotelian positions. Aristotelianism remained the dominant approach to philosophy and the natural sciences in university contexts Aristotelianism remained the dominant throughout the Renaissance. It lost its appeal only approach to philosophy and sciences gradually with the rise of modern science in the seventhroughout the Renaissance. It lost its teenth century. This means that architectural theorists appeal only with the rise of modern sciduring the Renaissance (or those who received or were ence in the seventeenth century. exposed to a university education) articulated problems in Aristotelian terms. One should bear in mind that architectural theory was first established as a discipline during the Renaissance. Prior to that, we know of only one architectural treatise, that of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books on Architecture. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) authored the first architectural treatise of the early modern era. He also authored the first Renaissance description of the construction of perspective, the first treatises on urban surveying and secret codes, and the first grammar of the Italian language. He also wrote mathematical and literary works and was the architect of a number of influential early-Renaissance buildings. Because of his interest in the numerical defining of shapes (from which our modern methods of digitalization originate), his work attracts more interest today than that of any other pre-twentieth-century architectural theorist. Alberti received a university education, which in those days meant extensive training in Aristotelian philosophy. Although he typically formulates problems of architectural theory based on the Aristotelian way of looking at things, how he resolves them indicates that he also drew on other sources, such as alternative optical theories and mathematical works. We have seen that for Aristotle a thing consists of form and matter, whereby “form” is understood as essence or “what it is to be that thing,” as he put it, not just the shape of that thing. Alberti opens the

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theoretical considerations in his architectural treatise and essence; for Alberti, a building On Building with the observation that a building, as a consists of matter and lineaments. physical object, consists of lineaments and matter.2 If we now look carefully through his treatise, we shall 2 find that he systematically used the term lineaments to refer to the shapes of “On the topic of building” is a things. (He seems to have derived the term from his studies of the work of literal translation of Alberti’s the Greek mathematician Euclid.) Much of Alberti’s interest in the visual phrase De re aedificatoria. The most recent English arts relates to the problem of recording, reproducing, and geometrically translation of this treatise is defining shapes. Renaissance architects made great efforts to learn to titled On the Art of Building in design like the Romans, and they spent a good deal of time trying to repTen Books. licate the shapes of Roman architecture, such as the elements of columns. Finding a suitable term for talking about shapes was not easy for Alberti. Due to the widespread influence of Aristotelian philosophy, he could not use the word form. As we have seen, Aristotle held that only natural things, not man-made things, have essences. In Alberti’s view, beauty is a property of things, like any other. It is in things and does not exist as a Platonic Form outside of 3 them.3 He considered the belief that the judgment of beauty is arbitrary Very few works by Plato seem to be a “common vice of ignorance.” When he defines beauty, he says it is to have been available to a proportional relationship among the parts of a building such that nothAlberti, and he cited only one of them, The Laws. ing can be added or taken away without changing the building for the worse. This is actually how Aristotle defined a thing well made in his book Nicomachean Ethics. For Alberti, the ability to judge beauty is inborn, and “nobody can be found so sullen and slow, so crude and uncivilized” to not be moved by things beautiful. The way he discusses the beauty of buildings makes it clear that he bases it on visual and spatial properties. Because he wrote in Latin and often lacked the words to refer to the various parts of buildings, Alberti used the names of different parts of the body that were in some way similar; for example, he referred to vertical supporting elements as bones. But he was strict about distinguishing the names of things from judgments of their beauty. For him, the judgment of beauty was based purely on the visual enjoyment For Aristotle, a thing consists of matter

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of the shape. In this sense, he was not only the first the aesthetic qualities of works of visual architectural theorist of the pre-modern era, but also art derive from their visual and spatial the first formalist. Formalism is a doctrine that states properties and not from any associathat the aesthetic qualities of works of visual art derive tions, concepts, or meanings associated from their visual and spatial properties (such as relawith them. tionships among parts) and not from any associations, concepts, or meanings associated with them. The idea that pleasures, which derive from the senses, are shared by everyone, independent of any thought one may associate with the object, had already been mentioned by 4 Aristotle in his Eudemian Ethics. Alberti endorsed this doctrine.4 Formalism is a doctrine that states that

It is much less clear what Vitruvius thought about formalism. In his treatise, he mentions utility, firmity, and beauty as the three important aspects of architecture, but he does not say whether he considers the judgment of beauty to be independent of conceptual considerations. (For instance, does beauty depend on how well the building functions?) He also mentions the criterion of appropriateness: that it is improper to put sculptures of politicians in a recreation center or the sculptures of athletes in city hall. But again, it is unclear whether the judgment of the beauty of individual architectural works will be affected by such inappropriate placements.

Digitalizing Shapes Alberti had strong reasons for dedicating so much attention to the concept of shape. The central interest of a number of his books pertains to the problem of quantifying shapes; in other words, defining them either geometrically or numerically. Such interest relates him closely to what has been going on in the architectural profession in recent years with the introduction of digital media. His treatises On Painting and Elements of Painting discuss the ways to define mathematically what is seen by geometrically constructing a perspective drawing. The treatise On Sculpture discusses the methods of replicating shapes by measuring them, while his architectural treatise, On the Topic of Building, discusses the proportional relationships among architectural shapes, such as the classical orders. His Description of the City of Rome attempts to provide a numerical, quantified description of Rome. Numerical and geometrical descriptions are those that can be stated in words, and Alberti’s efforts concentrated on trying to find ways to communicate verbally those things that can be efficiently thought about only visually. Alberti could not have invented CAD, but it would not be wrong to say that he invented the principle on which modern computer screens work. When he describes the geometrical construction of perspective, he compares perspectival drawing to a drawing on a window. His

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intention is to define the lines that come into view when one draws the contours of an object as they appear through glass, on the surface of the glass. That all distances between objects can be measured and geometrically defined has certainly been known since the earliest days of civilization. Alberti’s program, as he explained it, was to define combinations of lines, angles, and surfaces so that everything that can be perceived by the eyes can be represented in lines. Spatial relationships in the world are consistently geometrical; to represent them visually, the representation must be geometrically consistent as well. At the same time, Alberti’s understanding of light differed from that of Aristotle. Between the third century B.C.E. and the fifteenth century C.E., a long tradition of late Greek, Arab, and European thinkers had worked toward explaining the phenomenon of light, and Alberti was a beneficiary of that tradition. He assumed that lights travels in straight lines from the object to the eye, forming a pyramid of sight whose apex is in the eye; its basis is the shape of the object perceived. The plane of the picture is the place where the imaginary window plane intersects the pyramid. In the early twentieth century, the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) suggested that the geometrical construction of perspective was discovered during Alberti’s lifetime (and not before), because the understanding of space had differed until that time. Panofsky was influenced by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), with whom he shared the idea that space was not conceived as homogenous before the Renaissance. They defined a homogenous space as one in which points are mere designations of positions and have no other content except their positions relative to one another. In such a space, it must be possible to draw identical figures from every point in space. This is how we conceive of space today. Cassirer and Panofsky claimed that in other cultural contexts and before the Renaissance, space was conceived as nonhomogenous, meaning that people assumed that various parts of space carried different significance, which in turn affected the relative validity of geometrical

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principles. It follows that, prior to the Renaissance, people could not grasp that geometry was equally valid in the same way everywhere. Panofsky’s thesis was that because the understanding of space as homogenous was unavailable before the Renaissance, the consistent geometrical definition of spatial relationships was inconceivable, and consequently, the geometrical construction of perspective could not have been discovered. At around the same time, other historians, such as Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose work we shall discuss later, claimed that the ancient Greeks were not able to conceive of infinite space. Since the vanishing point in a perspectival drawing is a representation of infinity, this also implies that the ancient Greeks could not have discovered perspective. The idea that space, as we understand it today, was inconceivable to the ancient Greeks and Romans (that it is a product of the modern era) became widespread among architectural historians. The great popularity of historians’ claims that the members of some cultures could not achieve things that were routinely achieved by the members The great popularity of historians’ claims of the historian’s culture, even when such claims are that the members of some cultures could wrong or cannot be substantiated, is a remarkable phenot achieve things that were routinely nomenon within cultural studies during the twentieth achieved by the members of the histocentury. Some historians tried to expand Panofsky’s rian’s culture, even when such claims are claim and argue that even before the eighteenth cenwrong or cannot be substantiated, is a tury, space was not understood as homogenous, but remarkable phenomenon within cultural then it remains unclear how perspective could have studies during the twentieth century. been discovered in the fifteenth century. Architectural historians have also claimed that the word space did not appear in architectural treatises prior to the eighteenth century, but this is plainly wrong. Alberti used this term (spatium in Latin) nearly one hundred times in his architectural treatise. There is a body of research in anthroA body of research in anthropology shows pology that shows that virtually all known cultures that virtually all known cultures possess (or possess (or possessed) the concept of space. A more possessed) the concept of space. careful historical examination reveals that claims that

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the ancient Greeks were unable to conceive of homogenous or infinite space are wrong. A number of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander (ca. 610–546 B.C.E.) and Xenophanes (ca. 570–475 B.C.E.), believed that the world was infinite. This was also the view of the Greek astronomer Aristarchus (ca. 310–230 B.C.E.). The mathematician Euclid used the concept of infinity to define the concept of parallel lines. At the same time, Panofsky and Cassirer’s claim— that before the Renaissance people could not conceive of homogenous space—results in numerous difficulties. Their definition says that a space is homogenous if it is possible to draw the same geometrical figures from every point in that space. A figure can be a simple line, and according to Panofsky’s and Cassirer’s definition, in a nonhomogenous space, it should be possible to draw a straight line from the point A to the point B but not vice versa. Since lengths are measured along straight lines, it follows that the cultures that did not conceive of space as homogenous actually did not grasp that the distance from the point A to the point B is the same as the distance from B to A. It follows (and it is certainly hard to believe) that Greek and Roman architects did not know that a wall has the same length regardless of which end it is measured from. A good example of classical Greek understanding of mathematics is Euclid’s treatise Elements. The treatise was well known through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and was studied by Alberti. In this book, Euclid presents the entire geometrical knowledge of his time. He begins by defining elementary concepts (point, line, plane, etc.) and stating some obvious truths (called axioms, which are the elementary truths from which Euclid inferred everything else); for instance, it is possible to draw only one line through two points in space. He does not deal with the materiality of geometrical bodies; all of his theorems pertain to shapes regardless of what a thing is made of. To understand his geometrical proofs, one needs to imagine an infinite space populated by immaterial geometrical figures and bodies. The geometrical characteristics of these figures and bodies conform to our everyday experiences. For example, the

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length of a line remains the same regardless of which end we measure it from. Such space is called Euclidean. One of Euclid’s axioms bothered geometricians for centuries. It says that given a line and a point outside that line, it is possible to draw only one line parallel to the given line through that point. Many geometricians thought this was less obvious than Euclid’s other axioms. In order to prove the axiom in the early nineteenth century, the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792–1856) tried to see what would happen if he assumed the opposite: that it could be possible to draw more than one parallel line through a given point with a given line. He believed that, by starting from such a premise, he would eventually run into contradiction. Surprisingly this did not happen; instead he developed a series of theorems of a different geometry, thus inventing the first non-Euclidean geometry. The starting premises are different from Euclid’s, and therefore the theorems do not correspond to everyday experience. Since Lobachevsky’s time, mathematicians have invented many such geometries, and some of them have found applications in various fields of modern science. Outside the realm of everyday human affairs, it is accepted that non-Euclidian geometries sometimes provide a better understanding of the way the universe operates. At the level on which architects operate, where daily human affairs are conducted, it is Euclidian geometry that determines how things work. An architect could never design, nor could a human being ever inhabit, a non-Euclidian house.5

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That which we call modernity originates in the intellectual positions of the Italian Renaissance. The same applies to modern architectural theory. But one should bear in mind that Renaissance architectural theory was not—and could not have been—formulated in an intellectual vacuum. It relied on a wider worldview that was available to Renaissance theorists, which assumed a preconceived order of the universe and the idea that the earth is its center. This worldview was demolished only with the rise of modern science at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Our modern worldview (and architectural theory with it) is predominantly the result of the collapse of this older understanding of the world and derives from its rejection. The Great Theory For more than twenty centuries, until the end of the Renaissance, European thinkers assumed that the sun and planets revolved around the earth. Very few astronomers objected to this view—called the geocentric system. Most notable among those who did were Aristarchus of Samos, among the ancient Greeks, and Copernicus (1473–1543), during the Renaissance. The geocentric system was based not merely on the observation that, seen from the earth, the stars and sun seem to revolve around the earth. Rather, it relied on complex speculations about the role of numbers and proportions in the structure of the universe. The ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras (sixth century B.C.E.) is today mainly known for the Pythagorean theorem. However, he also made other important discoveries. Strings of different lengths on a musical instrument produce tones; Pythagoras discovered that different musical intervals (relationships between tones) can be defined as numerical ratios between string lengths. For instance, if the length ratio between strings is 2:1, the resulting interval will be an octave; if it is 3:2, the resulting interval will be a fifth, if it is 4:3 a fourth, and so on. Pythagoras’s discovery made a huge impression on his contemporaries because it connected two separate fields of knowledge, music and

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mathematics—it defined well-known phenomena from one field using concepts from another. In a way, it was the first physical law in history to be formulated using mathematics. The possibility of such a law immediately invites a very complex philosophical question: How is Mathematics is ultimately the result of such a law possible? Numerical relationships are somehuman thinking; it is rational. But physithing that we can calculate in our heads, but how can cal objects themselves cannot think. strings know which tone or interval they should proHow can they then behave rationally, duce? Mathematics is ultimately the result of human according to mathematical calculations? thinking; it is rational. But physical objects themselves cannot think. How can they then behave rationally, according to mathematical laws? Does it mean that some kind of Reason had pre-organized the world according to mathematical principles and keeps it running that way? Some ancient Greek philosophers expanded Pythagoras’s idea—his followers actually formed a sect—to define everything as the manifestation of numbers. In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato described the movements of the planets around the earth as the manifestation of the same numerical and proportional relationships that are found in musical ratios. From this point of view, the universe is organized by the Divine Craftsman, Demiurge, who transformed matter according to the eternal Platonic Forms. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the world from nothing; Plato’s Demiurge, however, works with the available matter and introduces rational organization into it. Its work is forever hampered by matter’s instability and propensity for change. Plato’s description of Demiurge gave birth to the long tradition of understanding God as the architect of the universe, often mentioned by Renaissance and baroque architectural theorists. Music, from this point of view, ceases to be merely what human ears can hear. Audible music—what we today call music, that which can be sung or played on an instrument—is then understood as only a manifestation of a wider concept of music. Musical theory was believed to provide the mathematical description of the functioning of the universe. From the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance, treatises on music

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often contained more material about the movements of the planets than about what we understand as music today. Numerical proportions were typically expressed using the names that refer to musical intervals, and it was implied that, for instance, proportions on a human body or between various positions of planets were to be understood as musical intervals. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy (90–168) provided an account of the universe along these lines that was to remain canonical through the Renaissance. His astronomical treatise, Almagest, describes the movements of the planets and the sun around the earth. Because it is fundamentally wrong—it assumes that the sun and planets revolve around the earth—the geocentric system cannot successfully explain, let alone predict, the movements of planets in the sky as they are perceived from the earth and measured by astronomers. To avoid this problem, Ptolemy assumed that the planets not only revolve around the earth but also make smaller circles, called epicycles, along their path. (As astronomical observations became more and more accurate during the Renaissance, newer and newer epicycles had to be introduced to explain the observed movements of planets across the sky.) Ptolemy’s treatise On Music defines various angles between the planets and the sun as numerical ratios and identified them as musical intervals. In this view, the five planets known at the time, the sun, and the moon are attached to heavenly spheres that rotate around the earth. The final, farthest sphere carries immoveable stars. There are thus eight spheres, which correspond to the eight tones of the musical scale. Ptolemy’s treatise Tetrabiblos then describes how various positions of planets, as described by his musical theory, astrologically affect human lives and events on Earth. Various angles between planets are expressed as numerical relationships and therefore can be understood as musical intervals. Since the movements of spheres were understood to affect human events on Earth during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the entire universe was seen as a kind of musical instrument played by God. Historical events were the result of astrological influences that derived

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from the music the instrument produced. Ultimately, this music was to result in the final harmony of the world, harmonia mundi. In accordance with these views, in a treatise that he wrote on magical enchantments (De incantanionibus), the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) rejected the idea of divine miracles or demonic actions and attempted to explain such events as the result of the astrological influences of heavenly spheres. He assumed that God cannot operate in the material world except through astrological influences and by moving planets. In his view, planets not only direct the actions of humans but actually rule humans through dreams, visions, prophecies, and so on. Religions rise and die according to the will of planets; planets support the oracles of a nascent religion and give some of its members (such as prophets) the power to perform miracles, then subsequently rescind that gift. The ability of Christian faith to produce miracles, Pomponazzi observed, was fading in his time, which meant that its end was approaching. His view was that Christian religion is true not in absolute terms but only in its historical context. We shall see later that an Pomponazzi believed that Christian equivalent understanding of history (only based on the religion is true not in absolute terms but belief in the “spirit of the time” and not on astrology) only in its historical context. became very influential in the nineteenth century and had a huge impact on architectural theory in the twentieth century. It is thus important to mention Pomponazzi, as a counterexample to the view that the understanding of human thinking as the product of historical environment came about only in the nineteenth century. Even in Pomponazzi’s time, the astrological explanation of historical events was just one perspective. From its early days, Christian theology featured an important debate over whether and to what degree human actions and beliefs are a result of an individual’s free will and to what degree they are predetermined by God. Obviously, if God predetermines human actions, then historical events are also a result of His will. Some theologians argued that there can be no free will: since God created the world and he is all-powerful, it follows that he knows

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human actions in advance of their happening. Whatever happens takes place with God’s pre-approval. The proponents of free will, however, argued that God’s knowledge of future human actions does not mean that he causes them: an astronomer may predict an eclipse, but that does not mean the astronomer has caused it. This question was very important for Christians. If God predetermines human actions, then he must also predetermine the individual’s salvation—and consequently, it would follow that regardless of what people do in their lives, it has been decided from the beginning of the world whether they are going to paradise or hell after death. The early Christian theologian Aurelius Augustine (or St. Augustine, 354–430) thus argued that very few human souls will ultimately be saved; there is nothing an individual can do to achieve salvation since salvation is predetermined by God. In spite of Augustine’s view, Catholic theologians through the Middle Ages were more inclined to believe in free will. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the problem of free will was extensively debated by the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467–1536) and the church reformer and founder of Protestantism Martin Luther (1483–1546). Erasmus argued that human beings possess free will and rationality, which enable them to decide between Erasmus argued that human beings right and wrong; in opposition, Luther said that human possess free will and rationality, which thinking capacities were predetermined by God. We enable them to decide between right shall see that, in the nineteenth century, an important and wrong; in opposition, Luther said stream of philosophical thought in Germany came to that human thinking capacities were identify God with history, and, as a result, the debate predetermined by God. between Erasmus and Luther eventually received an important reformulation in twentieth-century architectural theory: Is an architect’s creativity merely a product of his or her historical situation, or can creativity be based on genuinely individual reasoning? Can architects decide what is good and bad in their designs independent of the spirit of their time, or should we assume that a superior force, such as the history of architecture or its spirit, uses them as mere

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draftsmen? Is the history of architecture merely the sum of individual architects’ creativities, or is it a force in its own right, whereby architects are mere technicians who produce designs that are appropriate for a certain time? The problems of architectural theory are often the manifestations of wider philosophical problems with a much longer history.

1 However, later scholarship has not confirmed Wittkower’s interpretation of Renaissance architects’ approach to design. It has been shown that he selected the eight buildings he analyzed among the forty-four designs Palladio presents in his treatise precisely because the buildings’ ratios correspond to musical intervals. On average, the

Twentieth-Century Reception of Renaissance Proportional Theories We have seen that Alberti defined beauty in architecture as the proportional relationship between the parts of buildings such that nothing can be added or taken away without detriment to the building. When he states what kind of proportional relationship he means—for instance, his preferred length-to-width ratios for rooms—he expresses these ratios as equivalent to musical intervals. The idea that certain proportional relationships of a building are beautiful because they correspond to certain musical relationships is often found in Renaissance architectural writings. Palladio’s mentor, Daniele Barbaro (1514–1570), expresses that view a number of times in his commentary on Vitruvius. Obviously, the music he had in mind was not merely audible music but, following the Renaissance understanding of the concept, music as the system of numerical relationships according to which the universe is organized. But then one needs to ask: Did Renaissance architects really select certain numerical ratios because of their musical interpretation, and if so, to what degree? In his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), the art historian Rudolf Wittkower advocates the view that major Renaissance architects made their design decisions on the basis of a belief that they should use the ratios that correspond to musical intervals. Analyzing the plans of eight buildings by Palladio, he points out the repeated use of such ratios. It is interesting to note that making this argument in the years following World War II meant implicitly advocating modernist architecture. If Renaissance architects were not really concerned with ornamentation and the classical orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian), then modernist architects could reject them as well. For

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buildings Palladio presents do not show a much higher presence of rooms with length-to-width ratios that had musical interpretation than if these ratios were chosen randomly. It follows that Renaissance architects and architectural theorists such as Barbaro or Alberti referred to musically derived ratios when they had to explain the beauty of certain combinations of elements, but this does not mean that reasoning about musical intervals actually guided the design decisions of Renaissance architects.

2 Much of this work is of highly dubious intellectual merit. For instance, considering numerous horizontal lines on the entablature of a Greek temple, it is always possible to find a horizontal line that, in relation to some vertical line, will give the Golden Section. Eventually, the excessive zeal of its proponents has done much harm to credible historical research about the use of the Golden Section. A contemporary architectural historian who actually finds that the Golden Section was used by a Renaissance architect is likely to be very cautious about publishing such a result.

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many architects, the discussion of “principles” made the transition from classicism to modernism much easier to accept, especially when drawing elaborate classical facades in the years of the post–World War II building boom was simply not an economically viable option. Wittkower’s book and its implications were very pertinent and substantially contributed to the rise of modernist architecture.1 The late 1940s and 1950s were the golden years for theories of proportions. Wittkower’s book was only the tip of the iceberg. The remarkable aspect of the revival of interest in theories of proportions was its mystical character—quite inappropriate for the modernist movement—which prided itself on representing the modern era of science and technology. Since the works of the German psychologists Adolf Zeising and Gustav Fechner in the nineteenth century, there has existed a tradition of writings about the Golden Section. The Golden Section is the ratio (1+√5):2, or 1:1.618033…; it is the ratio between the diagonal and the side of a pentagon. The main idea of Golden Section theorists is that this ratio appeared in the works of nature (such as the human body, the bodies of animals, plants, and crystals) and is naturally preferred by the human mind. The theorists implied that God preferred this ratio when He created the world and that he instilled the preference for it into the human mind. Consequently, artists, when trying to produce beautiful things, applied this ratio, even subconsciously. In the 1920s, numerous authors, such as Mathila Ghyka, Jay Hambidge, and Miloutine Borissavlievitch, made extensive efforts to find the Golden Section in works of nature, art, and architecture.2 This tradition provided the basis for modernist architects and theorists’ interest in proportions in the 1940s and 1950s. Occasionally, this interest turned into sheer mysticism, as was the case with Le Corbusier’s Modulor, which was intended to introduce harmony in the world by standardizing architectural works and industrial products according to the Golden Section. It is interesting to compare the greater theoretical framework of modernist views on proportional theories with that of Renaissance theorists. The

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latter believed that God introduced a certain order, turned into sheer mysticism, as was the and the architect participated in it by using the same case with Le Corbusier’s Modulor, which proportions as his divine colleague. In contrast, modwas intended to introduce harmony in ernist architects and theorists of the twentieth century the world by standardizing architectural professed their faith in science and technology, which works and industrial products according their architecture was meant to express and celebrate. to the Golden Section. However, if things in nature come about by the causal laws that natural sciences postulate, then the Golden Section can appear only as a side effect of natural causality. It cannot be part of God’s preconceived plan. If the bodies of humans or animals are the result of evolution as described by biology and the theory of evolution, then it is unclear why evolution should result in bodies that exhibit proportional relationships according to the Golden Section. It is even harder to explain that the human mind would develop a preference for shapes proportioned according to the Golden Section. The mystical interests of modernist architects and theorists simply cannot be squared with their professions of faith in science and technology. Occasionally, this interest in proportions

The Collapse of the Great Theory The Italian Renaissance set in motion social mechanisms that were unprecedented in human history. The fall of Constantinople and the resulting influx of Byzantine scholars to Italy in the fifteenth century brought Italian intellectuals in contact with ancient Greek philosophy and science; the invention of the printing press, which happened at the same time, enabled the expansion of knowledge and learning on a scale that had been inconceivable in the past; a developed urban environment and the presence of universities provided a fertile ground for intellectual exchange. All this gradually led to the re-examination of the dominant worldview and the understanding of the universe. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to revive the idea of the ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus that the earth, together with other planets, revolves around the sun. For most

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of the sixteenth century, this view remained merely an interesting hypothesis. Because Copernicus assumed that the planets go around the sun on circular paths, his model of the universe was no more successful than Ptolemy’s when it came to predicting or explaining the movements of the planets as perceived and measured from the earth. It was only by the end of the sixteenth century that the systematic work of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) provided extensive measurements of the movements of planets, which enabled the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) to formulate the model of the solar system in which planets traveled around the sun on elliptical paths. By the end of the second decade of the seventeenth century, Kepler’s discoveries provided the model that enabled mathematical calculation of the positions of the planets as perceived in the sky. About the same time, the Florentine scientist Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) directed a newly invented instrument—the telescope—at the skies. He discovered that the moon is made of rocks and that the planets are not merely shiny points in the heavens but have physical shapes and dimensions. His discovery of Jupiter’s moons and the fact that their movements could not be explained by the geocentric system further strengthened the view that the earth revolves around the sun. At the same time, Galileo instigated a revolution in physics. His numerous discoveries (for instance, that, contrary to Aristotle’s view, bodies fall with the same speed toward Earth regardless of their weight) revolve around the idea of quantifying, measuring, and expressing mathematically physical processes, or events. Aristotelian physics and natural science, we have seen, endeavGalileo’s numerous discoveries revolved ored to explain things, how they came about, how their around the idea of quantifying physical essences operated and produced individual objects. processes, or events; unlike Aristotelian It did not rely on mathematics. Galileo’s physics was physics and natural science, it was about about quantifying and measuring events—the movequantifying and measuring events—the ments of bodies. Galileo famously stated that the book movements of bodies. of nature was written in mathematics.

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For both Plato and Aristotle, a mathematical natural science would be a contradiction in terms. Natural things are material, while the matter that Platonic Forms are thought to reflect, or in which Aristotle’s essences are thought to operate, resists full rational mathematical description. Plato introduced his Forms and Aristotle his essences precisely to explain the rationally explainable aspects of natural objects. But once Forms or essences are removed, pure matter utterly lacks any properties that can be rationally (e.g., mathematically) described. For Galileo, however, even the resistance of matter—for instance, the friction caused by air, which makes some bodies fall at different speeds than others—can be mathematically described and predicted. There is no event in the material world that cannot be quantified. We have seen how important it was for Alberti to emphasize that this was the case with all visible shapes; for Galileo, this was the case with the movements of all things as well. Galileo also revived interest in ancient Greek atomic theories. The Greek philosophers Leucippus, Democritus (ca. 460–370 B.C.E.), and Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E.) believed that a piece of matter cannot be infinitely divided; such division will sooner or later reach the smallest, indivisible particles, called atoms. Between these particles was empty space. Such an understanding of matter contradicted Aristotle, who believed that a piece of matter was infinitely divisible into smaller and smaller parts. Atomism also implied the possibility of empty space, or vacuum, which Aristotle had denied. Throughout the seventeenth century, atomic theory gradually became more and more accepted among scientists. Material objects increasingly became understood as clusters of atoms, and their properties were to be explained exclusively by the atoms they contain and their movements. The atomistic picture of the world implied an understanding of nature as a conglomerate of particles and a vast machine. Ultimately, through subsequent centuries, this view led to the rejection of the belief in an all-knowing Mind that organized or preconceived material things nin a certain way and with a certain purpose. Sciences gradually ceased to rely on Aristotelian final causes. Increasingly, things and their properties were seen

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as the result of a mechanical interaction between atoms. This left no room for explanations based on the assumption of a Mind intervening in nature in addition to the existing natural laws (which themselves could still have been understood as introduced by God). The implication of this view was understood at different rates in different sciences. It caught on most slowly in biology, where only in the nineteenth century did Charles Darwin manage to explain the regularities in the bodies of plants and animals (e.g., that a bird’s tail is suited for flight) by natural selection, without postulating that they were preconceived that way by God. Since the seventeenth century, scientists have thus systematically endeavored to explain events and things in nature as the result of physical processes, and physical processes have been conceived of as quantifiable. Step by step, biological and chemical processes, too, had come to be seen as physical processes such as the movement of atoms. The tendency to exclude reference to God or divine intention in explaining things and events in nature became gradually more and more widespread.3

It is also possible to argue that, for instance, evolution

The Enlightenment which God operates to It took a long time before the awareness of the scientific discoveries of the achieve creation. Similarly, early seventeenth century and their implications reached all segments of scientific experiments ultiEuropean society. This awareness slowly filtered from scientific circles mately require the assumption that they are repeatable to all segments of society, and its social and political implications could according to the same not have been more profound. If God does not intervene in nature, then method and under identical it is even less credible that he has predestined social events and strucconditions, and one may feel compelled to postulate God tures. If there is no divine order in human society, guaranteed by the to guarantee the repeatability movements of planets and astrological influences, then it becomes hard of experiments. to defend social privileges based on birth and the status of the family. If an individual’s position in society is not predeterIf there is no divine order in human mined by God through the movements of the stars, society, then it becomes hard to defend then it becomes plausible to argue that all humans are social privileges based on birth and the born equal and should be able to exercise equal politistatus of the family. cal rights. As the discoveries of the newly emerging itself is the medium through

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science became more and more available to the general public, their implications increasingly resulted in political demands. In a situation of political and economic crisis, as in France at the end of the eighteenth century, this newly acquired awareness led to a revolution and the destruction of the old system of feudal privileges. This period, in which the ideas of the new scientific understanding of nature became widely accepted and in which the general public was becoming aware of their implications, is called the Enlightenment. The term is predominantly used to refer to the intellectual trends in Western Europe during the eighteenth century. The implications of the Enlightenment for all European societies were immense, one important consequence being that the Church’s influence was substantially eroded. Yet, the ideology of the Enlightenment had consequences for all segments of the social structure. For instance, immediately after the revolution, the French government decided to rationalize the system of measures. This led to the introduction of the metric system and enabled one and the same system of measurement to be used throughout the entire country. Standardization helped commerce, introduced competition on a national level, and as a result eroded numerous local privileges. In all segments of society, the Enlightenment meant that the old established practices and privileges could survive only if they could be justified using rational arguments. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined the Enlightenment as the rejection of tutelage. Traditions, authorities, and social structures cease to be convincing if they cannot be defended by rational arguments. Kant was careful to emphasize that his era was not Kant defined the Enlightenment as the an enlightened era—in which society is organized on rejection of tutelage. rational principles—but an era of enlightenment. It was a time of increasing awareness of the implications of rationality. The king of Prussia (where Kant lived) could expect the obedience of his subjects in deeds, but not in thoughts. Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment

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thus turns out to be an emphasis on what is called intellectual integrity in the Introduction to this book: being aware of the implications of one’s thoughts and beliefs and not yielding to authority or peer pressure. We have seen that Socrates emphasized the importance of giving exclusive authority to rational arguments and not yielding to fashions and social pressures; in a way, Kant was saying that in the Enlightenment, this position was becoming increasingly widespread. Nevertheless, a proclaimed commitment to rational arguments can be a mere slogan. The idea that practices in a certain field of human activity need to be rationally justified and that they will not be credible if they are not in concordance with the postulates of the newly emerging science can lead to serious restructuring of the most fundamental aspects of the dominant worldview. But when rationality becomes a fashion, it can also lead to superficial cocktails of crude pseudorational arguments. Similarly, the awareness that the use of science and technology can improve the quality of things resulted during the Enlightenment in a naïve faith in progress, whereby any change, merely because of its novelty, could be regarded as an improvement. Obviously, this need not always be the case, but today, too, we often forget that the availability of science and technology does not only mean that we can make better things than our predecessors; it also means that we can make greater errors and often make things much worse than one could have in the past. During the Enlightenment, architectural theorists found it hard to avoid the temptation of pseudorationality and naïve faith in progress. By the late seventeenth century, it became less and less credible to justify the use of proportions in architecture (or in the arts in general) by referring to ideas about the harmony of the world. As a result, it became difficult to find an explanation for human aesthetic preferences. Renaissance theorists spent a lot of time trying to define the proper proportions for the elements of the classical orders. They based their decisions on visual judgments and the Vitruvian tradition—but they ultimately believed that the proportions they defined were explainable in musical terms and

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predetermined by God. By the end of the seventeenth century, justification that relied on the harmony of the world ceased to be convincing—but then how was one to justify the claim that certain proportions are, for instance, appropriate for certain classical orders? Separated from speculation about astrology and music, questions pertaining to beauty gradually grew into a separate and autonomous discipline. During the eighteenth century, the very word aesthetics started to be used as a term denoting the problems of beauty and the arts. Certainly, some architectural theorists still continued to write as if nothing had happened. The French theorist François Blondel (1617– 1686), in his lectures at the French Academy for Architecture between 1675 and 1683, still justified the proportions of the architectural orders by referring to musical harmony and the proportions of the human body. In contrast, architect Claude Perrault (1613–1688) tried to deal with the classical orders in a way that appeared to be in line with the trends of the time. Having noted that various Renaissance authors disagree about the proportions of the elements of the classical orders, he decided to resolve the problem by finding the mean of the proportions proposed by those authors. Obviously, it remains utterly unclear why the arithmetic mean of the ratios proposed by various Renaissance authors would provide the right proportion for the elements of the classical orders, but because the procedure relied on the use of mathematics, it seemed “scientific.” Such attempts to introduce rational arguments into architectural theory, which appear crude to us today, were widespread among the theorists of the time. They reflect an era of great doubt. It became hard to explain what architects were doing if they were not producing buildings that reflected and participated in the By the end of the seventeenth century, it harmony of the world. Is there anything architects do became hard to explain what architects that cannot be done as well by ordinary builders or were doing if they were not producing engineers? If the proportions architects apply to their buildings that reflected and participated designs are not a reflection of the harmony of the uniin the harmony of the world. verse, then it may well be the case that such a discipline

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cannot be rationally defended. Various authors and theorists attempted to provide credible answers to these questions, but their attempts to formulate rational arguments were usually feeble and easy to refute. Before Immanuel Kant formulated the formalist program in his Critique of Judgment in 1790 (to be discussed in the next chapter), no convincing answer to this dilemma seems to have been produced. The French architectural theorist Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–1769), in his Essay on Architecture, argued that architecture is an imitative art and that its elements (especially the classical orders) are representations of the original hut made by the first humans. Starting from this assumption, never justified, Laugier dismissed much of the contemporary architectural practice. For instance, since the primitive hut consisted of post-and-lintel structure, architects should not use vaults, a feature whose principles of design contradict the simplicity of the first structure. Similarly, Laugier argued, architecture should imitate nature; since nature does not use square profiles in its creations, architects should not use pillars or pilasters. Pediments should not be used above windows since they are representations of roofs; a building normally has its real roof on the top, and it makes no sense to put another one below it. Since, in his view, columns represent the legs of a building, it is wrong to place them on pedestals, which also represent legs. (It remains unclear why columns represent legs or, if they do, why pedestals cannot represent shoes.) Laugier’s typical procedure was first to state arbitrarily that an architectural element represents something and then to judge the use of that element by examining how consistent it is with this arbitrary narrative about what the element represents. He leaves unmentioned the alternative narratives that could be constructed, while at the same time suppressing any consideration of architecture’s purely spatial and visual properties. Obviously, various “rational” arguments can be produced by starting from various arbitrary ascriptions of representation. Such an architectural theory may sound in tune with the fashions of the time, but it fails to convince anyone who does not agree with its arbitrary ascriptions of meaning.

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Philosophy of the Seventeenth Century and the Enlightenment Having lived in a period when the entire understanding of the world was demolished and replaced by a new one, philosophers of the Enlightenment era were forced to give priority to the questions of knowledge, its certainty, and what makes it possible. The philosophical discipline that attracted the most interest during the Enlightenment was the theory of knowledge, or epistemology. Changes in the worldview did not happen overnight. Aristotelianism still remained a widespread way of understanding nature through the seventeenth century; during that period, for instance, books on natural sciences typically relied on final causes. The philosophical establishment, centered in universities, remained conservative and slow in grasping the full extent of the intellectual revolution that was taking place. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, many prominent philosophers worked in the universities. But the philosophers who carried out cutting-edge work in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were rarely attached to universities—at least not until the final decades of the eighteenth century, when the new ideas had become dominant and widely accepted. The major breakthrough in the philosophy of the seventeenth century is associated with the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes lived the life of an independent scholar, and he not only worked in philosophy but made major contributions to mathematics and the sciences as well. In philosophy, his most important work is Meditations on First Philosophy. The book is a collection of six essays, or “meditations,” in which Descartes formulates, in a particularly radical form, the question of what can be known. He defines Descartes defines true knowledge true knowledge as that which is known clearly and as that which is known clearly and distinctly. The essays start with the question, can one distinctly. not be wrong about something? Human senses can go wrong and fool us. It is even possible that some all-powerful demon makes us err in all our inferences. Everything we think about and believe we know may be just a dream. So the question becomes, can we know

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something with certainty? Or can there be some knowledge about which we cannot be wrong? Descartes answers this question by observing that we are still aware of our own thinking; and if we are aware of our thinking, we must be aware of our own existence as well. “I If you think, you must also exist. think, therefore I am” is the famous maxim on which Descartes bases his resolution of the problem. If you think, you can’t be wrong that you exist. However, this answer itself cannot yield much beyond the cognitive subject, the bare “I.” It still remains an insurmountable problem to prove the existence of anything else except our own existence. The rest of the world may be just a dream or a theater performance staged by a powerful demon. For generations of philosophers to come, this problem became an important challenge to solve—known as the problem of the external world. It has been generally accepted that Descartes’s reasoning proves the existence of “I,” the thinking subject—and the challenge is how “I” can further prove the existence of the world outside itself. Descartes himself provided a solution, but it has been widely regarded as less than successful, and almost no philosopher has been convinced by it. His argument points out that among the ideas of which he is aware is the idea of the most perfect being (i.e., God). Now, Descartes argues, what is most perfect must also be the most real. If something is absolutely perfect, it cannot lack the property of existence. Thus, the very possession of the idea of the most perfect being, according to Descartes, entails that such a being exists. Also, since such a being is absolutely perfect, it would not allow Descartes to be deceived about the existence of the world outside himself. Therefore, the world exists and Descartes is not merely dreaming it, nor is he seduced by a demon’s deception. The flaws in Descartes’s argumentation are numerous, and one should not be surprised that almost no one accepts that Descartes really proved what he intended. But he formulated an important problem—that of the existence of the external world and the certainty of knowledge about it—and by doing so, he opened a new era in the history of philosophy.

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Probably the most important figure among Descartes’ followers was Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza lived in Holland; he was of Jewish origin, but because of his religious views, he came into conflict with and was expelled from the Jewish religious community. Like many people of his time, he was fascinated with the precision of mathematics, and he wrote a treatise on ethics following the model Euclid used to write about geometry: he stated a number of axioms and then derived theorems from them. Spinoza’s important thesis, which would be very influential in later centuries, was that God was not separate from the world but immanent in it and identical with nature. When Descartes argued that he possessed the idea of God as the most perfect being in his mind, this idea was obviously not meant to have been derived from experience. Descartes assumed that it was constitutionally present in his mind, as if it were inborn. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this would lead Roughly speaking, European continento the debate about whether all knowledge comes from tal philosophers of the Enlightenment experience or whether some ideas are inborn. (We era sided with the view that some have already seen that Plato believed the latter and ideas are inborn; British philosophers Aristotle the former.) Roughly speaking, European assumed that all knowledge comes from continental philosophers of the Enlightenment era experience. sided with the view that some ideas are inborn; British philosophers assumed that all knowledge comes from experience. For some of the arguments discussed later in this book, some of their views are of particular importance. John Locke (1632–1704) thus denied that there can be knowledge that does not ultimately derive from experience. He criticized the view that some knowledge can be inborn. Prior to experience, in his view, the human mind is like a piece of blank paper, void of all characters and without any ideas. George Berkeley (1685–1753) turned Descartes’s problem upside down: Descartes struggled to prove the existence of the material world; Berkeley denied it and argued that such a thing as a world outside the thinking subject would be contradictory. He argued

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that matter and material things simply cannot exist; in his view, the existence of sensible things consists in their being perceived. David Hume (1711–1776) observed that Berkeley’s arguments “admit of no answer and produce no conviction.” He is the third great British philosopher of the Enlightenment, and for our further discussion, his teaching about causality is of particular importance. He argued that neither the causal relation between two elements nor the claim that every event has a cause can be demonstrated. We assume that there is a necessary connection between cause and effect, but this is only a customary habit of having seen one event follow another; in other words, an association reinforced by repetition. This understanding of causality triggered Kant’s critical philosophy, leading to the most significant philosophical synthesis of the Enlightenment.

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Immanuel Kant, whose definition of the Enlightenment was discussed in the previous chapter, is arguably the most influential philosopher of the modern era. His ideas constitute an exceptionally comprehensive elaboration of the implications of various intellectual positions widespread in the Enlightenment. The impact of his views in all fields of philosophy (either through their adoption or rejection) is widely felt and extremely profound. Kant was born and raised in the German town of Königsberg in eastern Prussia (today, this is Kaliningrad in modern Russia). He spent his life there and taught numerous subjects at the local university and, in addition to his work in philosophy, made important contributions to the sciences. For instance, he actively contributed to astrophysical debates about the origin of the solar system. Kant’s most important philosophical works are Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790). The first of these three books discusses the theory of knowledge, the second ethics, and the third aesthetics. To understand the wider perspective of Kant’s views and the implications of his philosophy, it is particularly important to consider the first book. The third book is important because of its impact on aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and thereby on architectural theory. Critique of Pure Reason: Judgments The central topics of Kant’s first Critique are the limits of human knowledge and the propensity of human reason to attempt to resolve questions that are beyond its reach—in particular, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the infinity of the universe. But Kant comes to these questions after an extensive consideration of human cognitive capacities, starting with a number of simple observations about human knowledge and gradually building up to the hardest questions. It was mentioned in the previous chapter that Enlightenment philosophers extensively debated the question of whether some knowledge may be inborn to the human mind or whether all knowledge comes from experience. Kant’s position is that all knowledge starts

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with experience but that not all of it derives from experience. He calls the kind of knowledge that does not derive from experience a priori. Such knowledge is characterized by certainty and concerns something that is necessary (typically things that simply could not be different). For instance, one may never have counted so far as to know that 23,765 + 475,869 = 499,634, so one cannot know from experience that this is true. Nevertheless, it is mathematically impossible that this would not be true. Similarly, a person may have never seen a regular geometrical polygon with twenty sides, but he or she can still know from geometry that such a polygon cannot have a sum of internal angles greater or smaller than thirty-six right angles. A posteriori knowledge, however, is knowledge derived A posteriori knowledge is derived from from experience, and it pertains to things that could be experience; a priori knowledge is indedifferent. The house in front of me is green, but it could pendent of experience. have been blue had it been painted differently. In the introduction to this book, we saw that a proposition is that which we say to be true or false. Kant operates with judgments as propositions. A judgment is a proposition that somebody knows or believes to be true. The Platonist understanding of propositions is that they exist and can be true or false, regardless of whether anyone thinks them; 2 + 3 = 5 is true even if all humans die out. But what Kant calls judgments always belong to a thinking subject. Kant differentiates between analytic and synthetic judgments. Both kinds of judgments state that some object has a certain property. Analytic judgments are true because this property is included in the definition of that same object. For instance, “all bachelors are unmarried men” is true because the concept of bachelor includes the property of being unmarried. With synthetic judgments, this is not the case. For instance, in “this bridge is yellow,” the concept of “this bridge” does not necessarily include “being yellow.” From the fact that something is a bridge, it does not necessarily follow that it is yellow. All judgments whose truth is known a posteriori therefore have to be synthetic: we know their truth from experience and not by considering the concepts they include. Vice versa, all

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analytically true judgments are known a priori: we don’t need experience to tell us that all bachelors are unmarried men, since a married person simply does not count as a bachelor. Mere analysis of the concept bachelor is enough to tell us that the judgment is true. However, Kant argues, we know some judgments to be true independent of any experience, while, at the same time, no analysis of the concepts they contain will help us establish that they are true. For instance, as in the above example, I may have the concepts of the numbers 23,765 and 475,869, but none of them includes the concept of 499,634. So this judgment is synthetic, and it is also known to be true a priori. Mathematical theorems and physical laws tend to be synthetic judgments and true a priori. For instance, it is a synthetic judgment that every event has a cause—I cannot know about causes merely by analyzing the concept of an event. But it is also something that I do not know merely from experience—if I were to know that it is true from experience, I would have to check all events that ever happened and see that each of them had a cause. Rather, I know this because it is inconceivable for an event not to have a cause. Kant’s next step is to ask how such knowledge can be possible. If we do not derive the knowledge that such judgments are true from experience (because they are a priori) nor merely from their content (because they are synthetic), then where does this knowledge come from? Critique of Pure of Reason: Knowledge, Its Origin and Limits The question may seem to be a philosopher’s hairsplitting, but it turns out to be extremely important. An astronomer may calculate the position of planets in advance, but why do they actually follow the paths and move with the speed that the astronomer has calculated? The astronomer knows their future position on the basis of his or her own reasoning and mathematical calculations. But how is it that the planets actually behave according to those calculations? The same question can be asked about any physical event whose outcome is predicted in advance by a physicist

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on the basis of known physical laws and mathematition of planets in advance, but how is it cal calculations. A mathematical calculation is ultithat the planets actually behave accordmately a mental process—but how can it be at the ing to those calculations? A mathematisame time the rule according to which bodies behave? cal calculation is ultimately a mental We cannot conceive of two physical bodies being in process—but how can it be at the same the same place at once or imagine an event without a time the rule according to which bodies cause. Similarly, we cannot imagine more than one behave? straight line between two points in space. That is how the human mind functions—but how does it happen that these limits of human imagination are also regularities of the material world? Kant puts this question in a more general form by asking how it is possible that there are regularities in nature: why isn’t nature in an absolute disorder, in a rhapsody, as he puts it. His answer is that such regularities are not the properties of the things themselves but are imprinted on our experience by our own cognitive apparatus. Those regularities of the world without which we cannot imagine the world are the result of the processes that make us know things. We cannot know what things-in-themselves are like independent of our cognitive processes. All our knowledge about the world is acquired on the basis of the mental processes that convert our interaction with things-in-themselves into our experience. (By things-in-themselves, Kant means “things-as-they-are-themselves.”) For this reason, all knowledge that we acquire a priori is bound to be the result of our cognitive apparatus, not a property of things as they are. All we can know is based on our experience, which is constituted through our cognitive apparatus. One way of understanding how we get to know things would be to say, for instance, that external objects reflecting light cause physical processes in the human eye, which then cause further processes in the nerves, and so on. But for Kant, such an explanation involves a physical causality that is itself merely an aspect of the matrix that our cognitive apparatus imposes on our cognition. It is not certain that external objects cause anything, he argues. Rather, our mind organizes our experience according to certain An astronomer may calculate the posi-

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principles, and one of these principles is the necessary organization of events into causes and effects. About half of Kant’s most important work, the Critique of Pure Reason, is dedicated to cataloguing the cognitive processes that convert the human interaction with things-in-themselves into experience. Kant starts with the senses. We cannot observe things outside space and time—we cannot perceive material things without conceiving of their being in time and space. This means that space and time are not properties of the world but matrices our cognitive apparatus For Kant, things are not really in space uses to arrange our perceptions. Things are not really and time, but rather, our cognitive appain space and time, but rather, our cognitive appararatus organizes our experience of the tus organizes our experience of the world according world according to space and time. to space and time. It provides us with the knowledge of objects as knowledge about shapes in time. Kant uses the German word Anschauung to label this section of our cognitive apparatus; some English translations render it, not quite accurately, as intuition. In any case, Anschauung is the part of the human cognitive apparatus that forms our knowledge about things around us as shapes in time. Knowledge we acquire through the senses is further processed by our understanding, which is the capacity to form judgments. We cannot form judgments about something without such judgments pertaining either to a single thing, a number of things, or all things. Kant again infers that the fact that our knowledge can pertain to only one of these three options (there is no fourth option) is not the property of the things themselves but of the way our experience is organized according to the concepts of singular, multiple, or all. He calls such concepts categories. Principles also structure our experience. For instance, nothing can have contradictory properties: a thing that is red and not red at the same time is impossible to imagine; it cannot exist. Also, all things exist within one single time. It is impossible to conceive of a situation in which there would be more than one time or that things exist in more than one time. For instance, it is both impossible to imagine and impossible

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to experience events that are neither consecutive or concurrent with each other but simply in two parallel and different temporal orders. Similarly, everything that comes about must have something it proceeds from by some rule. It is inconceivable, and indeed it does not happen, that things just come about from nothing. For Kant, these principles are not what things-in-themselves are actually like; it is rather the way our cognitive apparatus organizes our experience of things. Such principles of understanding are the principles of human reasoning about things, and they determine the limits of what can be experienced in our interaction with the world. They are the necessary conditions of any possible experience. Kant can consequently give a new answer to the old question about the existence of the world outside the human mind. It is pointless to ask that question, he would say, because we simply cannot know what things-in-themselves are like. We cannot know about them independent of our cognitive apparatus, which There can be no knowledge independent determines what our possible experience of the of our ability to know. world is. There can be no knowledge independent of our ability to know. Kant then goes on to analyze the propensity of reason (which he sees as a higher section of the human mind than understanding) to apply such principles of understanding to questions about the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and infinity versus the finiteness of the universe. By systematizing various arguments that can be made and their counterarguments, Kant shows that these questions are irresolvable by means of logical reasoning and on the basis of the a priori principles of our understanding. Starting in the next chapter, we shall see the wide variety of responses made to Kant’s philosophy and how the reaction (criticism or defense) has formed philosophical thinking over the last two centuries. A particularly persistent line of criticism has been that Kant, when describing human cognitive processes and by assuming that some of them are a priori, assumes their universality; that is, he believed that they were

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the same for everyone. In line with the ideology of the Enlightenment and its trust in human rationality, Kant did not view the human reasoning capacities that he catalogued as being dependent of the groups, such as culture, to which individuals belong. He assumed that Kant did not view human reasoning they were universal and that the necessary conditions capacities as being dependent on of any possible experience were the same for all indithe groups, such as culture, to which viduals, regardless of their cultural, ethnic, or racial individuals belong. He assumed that background. Since the rise of cultural relativism in they were universal and that the the nineteenth century, this aspect of his philosophy necessary conditions of any possible has often been criticized. At the same time, it is not experience were the same for all easy to make such criticism specific and state which individuals, regardless of their cultural, cognitive capacities are lacking among the members of ethnic, or racial backgrounds. certain cultural groups. The principles of human cognition that Kant catalogued are so fundamental that it 1 is hard to imagine what cognition that lacks them would be like. There is This view implies that indino known culture whose members can perceive things outside space and viduals who belong to different time or whose members’ experience is organized in more than one fully groups, such as cultures, have different cognitive apparatuses independent temporal order. If there were cultures that organized their and consequently structure experience in ways radically different from ours, we could neither commutheir experience of the world in nicate with them nor understand them. They could not convey to us their radically different ways. During the twentieth century, it was experience, and we would not know about it. even fashionable to say that Cultures themselves are groups of individuals, and because they experience the one knows about them on the basis of one’s own cognitive apparatus. One world differently, people from different cultures inhabit differcannot simply say that such groups exist and that membership in them ent realities. It does not help determines an individual’s cognition without explaining how human cogto argue that this view is not nition provides knowledge about such groups. If we try to talk simply scientific and that, for instance, science shows that people have about groups (cultures) without explaining how we know that they exist, similarly functioning brains, we are going to face the problem of proving their existence. Kant’s critics eyes, and so on. Kant’s critics are saying that there are such things as cultures, and cultures make our often reject science as merely a way of understanding the cognition work in a certain way.1 However, the view that all knowledge world that is typical for is culturally derived makes the proponents of this view vulnerable to the “Western” (i.e., European and question of how they know that there are cultures. When they talk about American) societies.

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cultures, they assume the existence of the external world. In other words, we are back to Descartes’s old problem, in its pre-Kantian form. The criticism of Kant’s Enlightenment tendencies thus often turns out to be merely a return to pre-Enlightenment philosophical positions. Kant did not live long enough to read the works of his critics, but it is easy to see that from his position they were writing philosophical checks that they would ultimately not be able to cash. Beauty Kant developed his views on aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment, which is his late work. Rather than proposing one single aesthetic theory, Kant offers a number of different aesthetic theories and deep insights that are often best considered separately, without looking for one coherent aesthetic system. The opening section of the book is the part that interests us the most for its impact, direct and indirect, on the architectural debates of the next two centuries. The important aspect of the judgment of beauty, Kant argues in the opening section, is that it is independent of any concepts one may associate with the things one judges to be beautiful. In dealing with things around us, we regularly subsume them under concepts. For instance, I perceive something and then recognize that it is green and a chair. In other words, I subsume it under the concept of something green and the concept of a chair. I could also subsume it under the concept of a piece of furniture or of something I can sit on or under many other concepts. We have seen that understanding deals with concepts, and since, for Kant, concepts do not contribute to the beauty of things, this means that (within his schema of cognitive capacities) the judgment of beauty According to Kant, the judgment of is purely a judgment of the products Anschauung—the beauty is disinterested, subjective, and part of the cognitive apparatus that deals with shapes independent of any concepts one may in space and time. associate with the things one judges to It may seem surprising that Kant is argube beautiful. ing that beauty is independent of concepts such as chair

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and green. The point is that an object is to be judged beautiful purely on the basis of its perceived properties (e.g., shape or color) and not because we subsume it under (or classify as) the concept of an object that has a certain shape and color. The green color of a thing is going to contribute to that thing’s beauty because it stands in a particular relationship with other properties of that thing (its other colors, its shape) and not because we classify the thing as green (i.e., become aware that it has the same color as other green things). What Kant achieves by arguing for nonconceptual aesthetic judgments is a ground from which to say that such judgments can be impartial. If I am to judge something independently of any concepts, then I will not be able to favor a certain work on the basis of my personal attachment to it (e.g., because it reminds me of my childhood or because it was made by my compatriot); such attachments are always conceptual. Kant’s important point is that the judgment of the beauty of an object must be disinterested. Obviously, any interest I can have in an object will have to be conceptual, and nonconceptuality of the judgment of beauty implies disinterestedness. This means that beauty is not an objective property of a beautiful thing. Objective here means a property that belongs to the thing, such as “being hard” or “being fast.” Rather, beauty is subjective, Kant says. Subjective here does not mean, as it does in everyday usage of the word, “relative to individuals.” Rather, it means that the judgment of beauty is the result of the subject’s (i.e., that person’s) cognitive mental processes. It is sometimes said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; Kant’s position could be described as the view that beauty is in the mind of the beholder. At the same time, Kant does not say that judgments of beauty are generally valid for everyone or universal. When people make judgments that However, he does point out that when people make are genuinely nonconceptual and judgments that are genuinely nonconceptual and disindisinterested, they expect that everyone terested, they expect that everyone else will make the else will make the same judgment as well. same judgment as well. They cannot see that someone

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could think differently without being partial. What people expect is that everyone should have a similar capacity for judgment; if the same things are judged by people who have the same capacities for judgment and their judgments are impartial, they will judge things the same way. From what Kant says, it is only one step further to the idea that when human beings base their judgments purely on the shape of an object, their similar (or the same) cognitive capacities should provide similar (or the same) aesthetic judgments. This position was indeed later taken by some of Kant’s formalist followers. Since judgments of beauty are nonconceptual, Kant also infers that it is impossible to state a rule that would determine which objects are beautiful and which objects are not. His point is that rules always have to work with concepts: One cannot know that a certain rule applies to a certain object without subsuming that object under the corresponding concept. For instance, if I see a thing, contemplate its shape, derive visual pleasure from it, and formulate the judgment that it is beautiful, I have made a genuine aesthetic judgment. I may then subsume that thing under the concept of a rose and state, “This rose is beautiful.” I may have even been aware that the thing was a rose from the beginning. What matters is that I have based my judgment on the contemplation of its shape and not on the concept with which I associate it. If I try to apply and follow a rule and rely on the argument that “all roses are beautiful, this is a rose, therefore it is beautiful,” then in order to apply this rule, I need to start by subsuming the thing in front of me under the concept of a rose. In that case, I am no longer making an aesthetic judgment but a logical argument. The opening section of Kant’s Critique of Judgment thus formulated an aesthetic theory that was concise in its reasoning and convincing in its assumptions. What is, after all, the purpose of talking about beauty if one does not say how the judgment of beauty can be impartial? Assuming that the judgment of beauty is always partial makes it difficult to claim that declaring something beautiful is anything more than empty

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and meaningless praise. But Kant’s basing beauty on nonconceptuality substantially reduces the range of arts whose products can be said to be beautiful. Architecture and music fare reasonably well on this account (although Kant himself wasn’t fond of music). In painting or sculpture, any enjoyment that comes from the representative aspects of the work of art— what they express, represent, imitate, or mean—is bound to be regarded as separate from their beauty. In a way, one could say that Kant was advocating nonrepresentational and abstract art more than a century before its time. As for poetry or literature, it is utterly unclear how they can be regarded as beautiful by Kant’s account, since they are both fully dependent on concepts. As a result, Kant’s most vehement critics were bound to come from the field of literature. Formalism The idea that some things are judged to be beautiful (or some objects can be enjoyed as they are, can be ascribed some other aesthetic properties) indeindependent of our previous knowledge pendent of the concepts, ideas, or meanings we associabout them, our prejudices, or the ate with them is called formalism. The idea is that some conceptual content we contribute when objects can be enjoyed as they are, independent of our we think about them. previous knowledge about them, our prejudices, or the conceptual content we contribute when we think about them. Our associations are always our own; but some things are available for our enjoyment regardless of what we may think about them conceptually. Aristotle had already said that some things can be enjoyed by themselves, and similar views were expressed by Alberti, but the formalist system that Kant articulated at the beginning of his third Critique is commonly regarded as the birthplace of formalist aesthetics. Many early reactions to Kant’s aesthetic ideas were strongly negative. They were a result of the rise of Romanticism and the rejection of the Enlightenment’s values, and they came mainly from the positions articulated in the world of literature. In 1854, the musical theorist Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) published his book, On the Beautiful in Formalism in aesthetics assumes that

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Music, which promoted the formalist position. The book had wide circulation and marked the beginning of the Kantian-formalist revival in aesthetics. Hanslick, who largely relied on Kant’s terminology, described the enjoyment of music as one of the functions of the Anschauung. Hanslick argued against the view that what matters in music is to convey and express emotions or to cause them in the listener. Such enjoyments of music are pathological in his view. An educated listener will never pay attention to his or her emotional reaction to a musical piece but will rather concentrate on the specific musical aspects of the composition, the relationship between the tones and rhythm. What matters is the work of music itself and not our knowledge about the external circumstances in which the work was created. Hanslick discusses a similar problem in the visual arts, where art historians often concentrate on knowing as much as possible about the lives of individual artists and show little interest in the works of art themselves. Conrad Fiedler (1841–1895) elaborates similar ideas in the realm of the visual arts in his book, On Judging the Works of the Visual Arts (1876). Fiedler defines taste as the aesthetic sensibility on which we rely in judging works of the visual arts. Educated taste is quick and definite in its judgments, he says. Fiedler paid great attention to In Fiedler’s view, interest in artistic combating the approach to works of the visual arts that value begins where interest in the judges them on the basis of their nonartistic properties. intellectual content of the work stops. Interest in artistic value begins where interest in the intellectual content of the work stops. Even if the artist intends the work to express a certain thought, the artistic force of the work does not depend on this thought. It is also important to leave aside the various forms of learned knowledge about the arts, which concentrate on the nonartistic aspects of artworks. If we concentrate on the artistic aspects of an artwork, then its historical perspective (on which art historians concentrate) or the abstract ideas the work may express (which may interest a philosopher) are of no relevance. Fiedler also adopted Kant’s view that what matters in the visual arts are nonconceptual judgments. He says that

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to achieve the fullness of experience, a person should refrain from subsuming the work of art under any concepts. However, modern educational systems, he complained, insist on developing the capacity to subsume the work under concepts and have negative effects on the public’s ability to enjoy the works of art. The nineteenth century saw the rise of art history as a discipline. The fact that the discipline was originally part of history departments meant that artworks were increasingly seen as historical documents of their epochs or periods. For historians, artworks were not interesting for their artistic merit, but as illustrations or documents of certain historical trends of their time. Both Fiedler and Hanslick noticed the historians’ tendency and complained about it. In architectural history, too, this led to a dramatic shift of interests. Since the Renaissance, architects had been studying, systematically surveying, and analyzing architectural works of the past in order to learn from them. Obviously, the selection of what mattered, which works were to be studied or surveyed, was based on aesthetic preferences and architectural interests. Palladio surveyed Roman temples extensively to learn from them; Antoine Desgodetz similarly produced measured drawings of Roman temples so that architects could study them. This approach has remained an important part of the discipline of architectural history. But in the nineteenth century, another approach arose, motivated by the historian’s need to study buildings as historical documents, and it became central to the art historians’ approach to architectural history. Geoffrey Scott (1884–1929) fully developed the formalist approach to architecture in his book, The Architecture of Humanism (1914). The book was widely appreciated and read through the twentieth century, although its main points directly contradict the modernist architectural theory that was dominant throughout that period. Scott strongly insists on nonconceptuality and disinterestedness when judging architecture. A large part of his book, therefore, describes the four

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types of fallacies that commonly occur when architecture is judged on the basis of concepts and ideas associated with it. The Romantic fallacy, as he describes it, is the tendency to see a symbol of something else in architecture and suppress judgments based on its purely visual The fallacies that Scott described properties. Instead, architecture is judged on the basis consist in replacing judgments based on of the idea one arbitrarily ascribes to it. Scott spends a architecture’s purely visual properties lot of time showing the randomness of various meanby judgments based on various ideas ings ascribed, for instance, to Renaissance and Gothic and “meanings” arbitrarily ascribed to architecture. The mechanical fallacy is the tendency to architectural works. judge architectural works as technical achievements, and the ethical fallacy is the tendency to confuse the ethical with aesthetic judgments of architectural works. The biological fallacy judges architectural works according to their position in a line of development: A work by Bramante is appreciated not on the basis of its inherent qualities, but as the precursor to Palladio’s work. But, Scott remarks, Bramante’s architecture has its own intrinsic values, regardless of any development to which it may have contributed. In his analysis of these four fallacies, Scott carefully describes how they suppress the consideration of architecture’s visual and spatial qualities to base their evaluation of an architectural work on various associations one has with the building. It is certainly proper to condemn architecture if it offends one’s moral feeling, he says, but one should not confuse ethical with aesthetic judgment. Similarly, works of architecture are sometimes great achievements of building technology, but aesthetic evaluation of architecture is not the same as evaluation of technological achievement. Scott held Renaissance and baroque architecture in particularly high esteem. We have seen that after the collapse of the great theory, the architectural theorists of the Enlightenment struggled to explain or defend the relevance of the old Renaissance and baroque design practices and theories. If there is no order of the world in which certain proportions pervade the universe and appear in the movements of the planets, the human body, and music, then how does

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one explain the preference for certain ratios in design? Why should one design buildings with the classical orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) proportioned in a certain way? Scott’s answer is that certain shapes (especially those of the classical orders) have been worked on by generations of architects. The world’s best architects spent their lives adapting and improving them, trying to find the right relationships between parts. Successful innovations were adopted and further improved by subsequent generations; unsuccessful ones were disregarded. Classical architecture, according to Scott’s point of view, thus turns out to be an experimental science, like any other.

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An important result of the Enlightenment was a new understanding of the human position in the universe and, with it, a different understanding of human society. The Enlightenment brought the re-examination and gradual rejection of the traditional system of social organization that had existed in Western Europe for centuries. It became hard to defend the elaborate systems of privilege based on birth that had dominated preEnlightenment social structures. Demand for the political equality of all citizens gained unprecedented force—and indeed, one of the first acts of the French Revolution in 1789 was the Declaration of Rights of Men and Citizens. The revolution replaced the king and aristocracy with a democratic system based on the principle of equal rights for all citizens. Through the Napoleonic wars that followed, the impact of the French Revolution and the reasoning that motivated it spread across the entire European continent. Wherever the French revolutionary army arrived, it brought the new understanding of the human being as a citizen who shares equal rights with other citizens. This ideology abolished numerous old privileges based on inheritance, tradition, or birth. The aristocracy and the Church lost their special status, and various other segments of society were affected by the profound changes. Powerful sections of European society had good reason to feel threatened by the egalitarian ideology The fundamental aspect of the that was exported from France. The fundamental aspect Enlightenment was the belief that some of this ideology was the belief that some rights belong rights belong to human beings as such, to human beings as such, on the basis of their common on the basis of their common reasoning reasoning capacities. Without the Enlightenment faith capacities. that reasoning capacities are commonly shared by all humans, demands for universal human and political rights would be meaningless: Why should individuals deprived of the capacity to reason be given the right to make decisions they cannot properly make? The Rise of Romanticism German intellectuals generally supported the French Revolution in its early stages, but as the revolutionary armies crossed into Germany, introducing

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political equality, many of them felt that their privileges were threatened and turned against the revolution and the ideology that led to it. The rejection of the values of the Enlightenment, which started in the late eighteenth century in Germany, is called Romanticism. Even before German intellectuals felt threatened by the French Revolution, early romantics resented the and rejected the Enlightenment’s claim domination of French culture and language that accomthat reasoning capacities are universally panied the expansion of the Enlightenment. They felt shared by all humans and that human threatened by and rejected the Enlightenment’s claim cultural achievements have universal that reasoning capacities are universally shared by all value. humans and that human cultural achievements have universal value. If all humans share the same reasoning capacities, then the achievements resulting from these capacities—and consequently the scientific and artistic achievements of different cultures—will be comparable. At the same time, it is reasonable to expect that scientists and artists working in a certain kind of environment (large urban centers, political stability, centralized government) will achieve more than those working in less favorable circumstances. Arguably, in the eighteenth century, the French achieved more than anyone else. German romantics felt threatened by this fact and the French cultural influence that resulted from it, and in opposing it, insisted that the achievements of different cultures are incomparable. The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), for instance, in an essay about the cathedral of Strasbourg, celebrated its Gothic and German style. The French and Italians, in his view, did not have their own architectural styles but merely copied the ancient Greeks. While Enlightenment thinkers emphasized the universal rationality of human beings as the most Instead of being interested in that significant characteristic that ultimately differentiwhich is shared by all humans, romantics ates them from other species, romantics put forward celebrated the individual’s membership less rational aspects of human life, such as emotion; in a specific collective, such as tradition, instead of being interested in that which is shared by ethnicity, race, or age. Their views are the all humans, they celebrated the individual’s memberorigin of modern debates about identity. ship in a specific collective, such as tradition, ethnicity,

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1 We shall see in later chapters that these debates continue even today. A very good literary description is in Thomas Mann’s novel, Magic Mountain (1924).

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race, or age. (Today, people who emphasize cultural or national identity often articulate similar positions.) The thinkers of the Enlightenment based their faith in reason on the successes of science and mathematics in explaining the world; romantics, who often came from the world of letters, mistrusted science and often had little understanding of mathematics. The proponents of the Enlightenment celebrated the progress of science and often overestimated its capacity to solve problems; their opponents often denied that even sciences such as medicine improve the human lot at all.1 The thinkers of the Enlightenment wanted to see human society organized according to the principles of universal human rights, equal laws for everyone, the public responsibility of governments, and transparency in the organization of the state, but they often failed to understand that human society might need time to adjust to their ideas. Romantics insisted on the privileges that derive from membership in a group, often rejected the organization of society on rational principles, and denied, in various forms, the idea that one can attribute rights to individuals independently of the customs of the social groups to which they belong.

Historicism and Herder It is by no means accidental that romanticism brought increased interest in the philosophy of history—a philosophical discipline that, for the past two centuries, has exercised a greater impact on architecFor the past two centuries, the philosotural theory than any other. Later in this chapter, we phy of history has exercised a greater shall see that certain positions in the philosophy of hisimpact on architectural theory than any tory directly provided the intellectual framework that other philosophical discipline. enabled the formulation of modernist architectural theory in the twentieth century. The term historicism is 2 used to describe the view, articulated in various forms by various philosoIn architectural history, the same phers and historians, that human decisions and reasoning are historically term is sometimes used with a determined.2 different meaning to refer to a situation when architects derive For the thinkers of the Enlightenment, history preinspiration from historical works. sented a problem. If the world can be fully and rationally explained by

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physical processes (such as the causal interactions between atoms), then this should apply to human thinking as well. In that case, human thinking, which enables people to do or decide to do various things, is ultimately a result of physical processes. It follows that human beings and human history, as well as the history of the universe, are comparable to a clockwork mechanism. Also, one may assume that humans have free will, either because the mechanism that is the human mind is structured in some way that enables it or because the human soul is a different, immaterial kind of substance that is added to the body and not subject to mechanical determination. On both counts, historical events result from individual human decisions (or decisions of large numbers of individuals, in the case of large events, such as wars). Both positions imply that there is no purpose in the history of mankind: Everything that happens in history is an accidental result of the decisions of individual human beings. From this point of view, history has no aim; it is only one event after another. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant pointed out that human actions can be explained in two different ways: as a result of the same causal forces that explain other physical processes or on the basis of some kind of separate causality of thoughts, such as free will, that is independent of material causality. One way or another, human decisions and the historical events that result from them are the outcomes of individual humans’ mental processes. This view leaves no space for postulating a higher aim or purpose in historical events. However, in a later article, “The Idea of General History,” Kant explicitly addresses the question of whether there may still be some purpose in human history. To explain what he means by this, he states as an example the purposeful structure of biological organisms. One should bear in mind that Kant lived a century before Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution explained the purposeful structure of living creatures (how it is that a bird’s tail is well adapted to flying) by natural selection. Because the theory of evolution was unknown to him, Kant still had to assume that Nature (conceived of as a conscious force) acted with purpose when creating living creatures, that their structure was preconceived

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by Nature. When he talked about Nature, it was in much the same sense that medieval authors talked about God. Consequently, Kant’s question about the purpose of history was whether history was pre-organized by Nature, as was the case with the bodies of plants and animals. His response in the article is that history does have a purpose and that Nature’s intention is to guide the human race toward a civic society that provides For Kant, the purpose of history is the the greatest possible freedom for all its members and specific political organization of human limits an individual’s freedom only when this freedom society, which roughly corresponds to would obstruct the freedom of others. For Kant, the the Enlightenment principle of equal purpose of history is the specific political organizapolitical rights for everyone. tion of human society, which roughly corresponds to the Enlightenment principle of equal political rights for everyone. However, he never discussed whether the purposefulness of history is limited to the political development of society or whether there may also exist a purpose in human intellectual history and the history of human culture and creativity. If there exists a purpose in human political history, why should there be no purpose in the history of science, art, or philosophy? But then, if human achievements in science, art, or philosophy were the results of some deeper purpose in human intellectual history, then human reasoning capacities could not be universal, as the Enlightenment thinkers believed and as Kant assumed in his Critique of Pure Reason. In that case, reasoning capacities would depend on an individual’s historical position, the individual’s placement in Nature’s preconceived plan. Kant does not develop his ideas in this direction, but after his death, such ideas would dominate German philosophy for almost two centuries. The tendency to see in human reasoning capacities a manifestation of an individual’s historical or social context can be observed in the work of Kant’s disciple, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder particularly contributed to the articulation of the ideas of early Romanticism, as well as the formulation of the philosophy of history as a discipline. His

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formulation of romantic ideas preceded the revolution in France, and he articulated them well before romanticism became a dominant factor in the German intellectual scene. His ideas became influential two or three generations later, and Herder’s influence was largely a result of the fact that romantics came to share many of his anti-Enlightenment concerns and respond similarly to the challenges of the Enlightenment. In rejecting the ideology of the Enlightenment, Herder ultimately came into conflict with Kant. His unsuccessful attempts to engage in a public philosophical debate with his old mentor substantially affected the early reception of his ideas; in his later years, Kant was a hugely authoritative figure in German philosophy and as long as he was alive, his very presence slowed down the progress of romanticist ideas. Herder’s interests predominately concentrated on literature; he was much more a man of letters than a philosopher. He insisted that the creativity of individuals was just a manifestation of the creativity of their ethnic group, Volk. Consequently, Herder promoted the study of folklore arts and literature. Although he insisted Herder insisted that the creativity of that human creativity was a result of an individual’s individuals was just a manifestation of ethnicity, he was not a nationalist; nor did he assert the creativity of their ethnic group. the superiority of certain nations or races. Rather, he insisted that the intellectual achievements of various cultures cannot be compared or valued against each other. In opposition to Kant, Herder denied that there can be nonconceptual aesthetic appreciation and insisted that works of art needed to be understood in their context. (Obviously, if one needs to know about the historical or social context in which a work of art was created to appreciate it, this knowledge has to be conceptual, and the idea of nonconceptual enjoyment loses its significance.) In Herder’s view, a language is not merely a tool to convey thoughts. Human thinking cannot be separated from the verbal articulation of thoughts; rationality cannot be separated from language. (We have seen in the introduction to this book that this idea subsequently came to dominate philosophy in the twentieth century.)

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Finally, Herder substantially contributed to the formulation of the topics of the philosophy of history that became its main themes for the next two hundred years. In his view, history is the march of God through nations; the spirit of laws, times, customs, and arts is a result of divine intervention. The idea of the Spirit of the Time, Zeitgeist, that fascinated modernist architectural theorists originates from Herder’s philosophy of history. For Kant, the fundamental aspects of human rationality were independent of an individual’s social context; for Herder, they were constituted by the group, ethnicity, and historical situation to which the individual belonged. Hegel The most influential of all German philosophers in the generation that followed Kant was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). His work is probably the most comprehensive philosophical system in the history of philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, one of Kant’s central problems was to explain the fact that the order in the world coincides with the regularities of human cognition. His question was how it can be that what we cannot imagine or conceive of is also impossible in the world. Kant’s solution, we have seen, was to say that this happens because our cognitive apparatus organizes our knowledge in a certain way; we cannot have knowledge of that which our cognitive capacities cannot articulate. We can know the world only in such a way as it can be represented to us by our thinking. Our thinking represents the world as rational (e.g., physical events are mathematically definable), but we cannot know what it is really like. In contrast, Hegel’s approach was to say that the world itself is rational. For Kant, the world appeared to have rational structure because the human cognitive apparatus imposed that strucFor Hegel, the rationality of the world ture on our experience of the world. But for Hegel, the inheres in and constitutes things rationality of the world inheres in and constitutes things themselves. themselves. One could say that Hegel’s point was that

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since reasoning can occur only through concepts and since things that make up the world behave rationally, then the world itself has to consist, in some way, of concepts. Even if there were no human mind to think, the world would still be rational. Reality, Hegel insisted, is rational and, conversely, what is rational is real. The concepts that make up the world must therefore be objective; they are not the subjective thoughts of a single human being. This view is called objective idealism. The non-human Reason that thinks the concepts that make up the world—whose thinking is the world—is God himself. God (which is the same as Reason) does not exist apart from his creation (i.e., the world), and one could describe Hegel’s God as the world’s rational structure. Hegel, one may recognize here, derived much from Spinoza (see the last section of chapter 3), whose ideas were widely popularized and discussed in German intellectual circles in the eighteenth century. Hegel’s next important point was to observe that there are logical connections between the concepts that make up the world. Some concepts can be logically derived from others. Logically derived, again, could be described as a process of thinking; and again, one should remember that this thinking is not occurring in a single human individual, but rather it is the world itself—or more precisely, God’s thinking—that constitutes the world. Hegel describes how concepts derive from each other in a logical order, whereby some concepts are logically prior to others. The starting concept, from which all other concepts derive, is being. Hegel always derives these concepts from one another in three-step procedures, a method called dialectics. The idea is that a concept implicitly contains its opposite and that this opposition is ultimately resolved in a higher synthesis. For instance, the concept of being implies its opposite, non-being, and this opposition is overcome in the synthesis of these two concepts, which is becoming. Hegel differentiates between understanding, which clearly separates between opposites, and reason, which accepts the identity of the opposites. Reason overcomes the results of understanding. Hegel uses the German word aufheben to describe such a relationship, which means both abolish and preserve. (The English

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phrase to put aside has the same double meaning.) As his deductions of concepts progress, each higher phase abolishes and preserves, at the same time, the contradiction present at the lower level from which it derives. Hegel’s ambitious intent was to provide a full explanation of the world, nature, history, and human institutions by means of such triads. His system is consequently divided into logic, philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of Spirit. It presents a system of conceptual triads, which are further divided into smaller triads. Human instituHegel’s ambitious intent was to provide tions, law, morality, art, religion, philosophy, and state a full explanation of the world, nature, are discussed as the phases, or stages, of the philosohistory, and human institutions by means phy of Spirit. The connection between various stages is of his dialectics. supposed to be logical and not temporal. Nevertheless, Hegel does imply that, for instance, the ideas of philosophers are “abolished and preserved” in the works of subsequent philosophers that historically follow them; in other words, the historical order of philosophers ultimately stands for the logical order of the ideas they have articulated. Similarly, he divides architecture into symbolic, classical, and romantic. The first of these corresponds to Egyptian and Mesopotamian architecture; classical architecture is Greek, and romantic architecture roughly covers what we call the romantic and Gothic. These are clearly historical phases. Ultimately, the logical order that drives Hegel’s system coincides with the historical order, conceived of as development; like everything else, the development of architecture is God’s thinking about it. God’s thinking (which is identical to God himself) thus becomes history, and the development of human activities and institutions (including architecture) is identical with God’s thinking order. History is not just one event after another; it is one concept (one of God’s “thoughts,” one could say) derived from and following another. At the same time, since God is identical According to Hegel, human thinking, with his thinking, history is God itself. beliefs, and institutions are the stages Human thinking, beliefs, and institutions through which Reason (i.e., God) are the stages through which Reason (i.e., God) manimanifests itself. fests itself. World history is the march of Reason, the

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necessary movement of the world Spirit, as Hegel puts it. In the introduction to his Philosophy of History, Hegel points out that people have often seen the presence of divine Reason in the regularities and purposefulness of the works of Nature (we have already seen how important this theme has been through the history of human thought). But if this is so, Hegel says, then God should be even more sought in the rational structure of human institutions. Hegel’s philosophy of history is in many ways a comprehensive synthesis of Kant’s and Herder’s positions. Kant talked about Nature and Herder about God as the force that determines the march of history; Hegel called this force Reason. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel attempts to provide the logical deduction of the various stages (concepts) of human history. In his view, history, and in particular human institutions and culture, are the fields of Reason’s full realization. Since Reason is contained in (identical to) the world and is its history, it follows that every event that has happened was the will of Reason and consequently rational and just. The serious danger of this position is that it can be understood as the justification for various forms of oppression because they are perceived as God’s will. Freedom is the main principle and final aim of Reason’s manifestation in history, Hegel assures us, although, admittedly, history is a “slaughter bench,” as he puts it, and the periods of happiness are its empty pages. Hegel is thus not a relativist, although he does assume that human institutions, intellectual achievements, and personal rights are the results of historical development. He rejects the view that specific historical contexts are incomparable, as well as the view that one should not compare intellectual achievements, political institutions, and social customs that have derived from various cultural circumstances. A relativist view is, for instance, that there can be no universal moral norms nor can one ascribe political rights to individuals independently of the context in which they live. From this point of view, it would be wrong to criticize societies that practice cannibalism or slavery, burn women alive when their husbands die, or in various other ways suppress the rights of specific groups, since such criticism means judging these

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cultures according to the standards of one’s own culture. Contrary to this kind of relativism, Hegel defended the universality of human rights, such as the rights of property, freedom of religious beliefs, the equality of human beings before the law, and so on. His point was that freedom is the goal of world history, and this goal is consequently the criterion against which all human institutions are to be measured and evaluated. Hegel does imply that the values one adopts are the result of one’s social context, but his historicism does not end up in relativism. Nevertheless, the dictum “what is real is rational and what is rational is real” can be understood as a justification of the maxim “might is right.” It can be taken to mean that whatever system of oppression is currently in place, it is historical reality and therefore rational, and one should not try to oppose it but always enthusiastically participate in it; otherwise one is retrograde and trying to work against historical development. This is a dangerous argument since it is equivalent to saying that, for instance, those Germans who opposed Hitler in 1933 were wrong because the Third Reich was the rising political reality of the moment. In fact, it is much healthier to think that human society changes all the time; some changes are for the better, some make things worse. One has to make one’s own judgments from one’s own perspective. In In modern mass society, one is often modern mass society, one is often bullied by phrases bullied by phrases such as “this is where such as “this is where things are going” or “there is no things are going” or “there is no going going back” as responses to a genuine criticism that back to” as responses to a genuine certain practices make social life worse. Obviously, criticism that certain practices make social such phrases are often used by those who have vested life worse; such phrases are often used interests in a certain kind of change. They want to by those who have vested interests in a advertise the fulfillment of their particular interests as certain kind of change. an unavoidable historical trend. But even if something is an unavoidable historical trend, this does not mean that it is good. It is often difficult but very important, in the face of such arguments, to retain one’s own judgment and not to yield to pressures of this kind.

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Marx As a professor at the University of Berlin, Hegel exercised a huge influence on his students. His understanding of history was particularly important for the generation of German thinkers who succeeded him. One important question, however, remained. Hegel identified the moving force of history with Reason (God). Even a religious believer may want a more specific description of the causes of historical events than the statement that they are God’s will. By the nineteenth century, many people would have welcomed an answer more aligned with the contemporary materialist science of the time and the resulting atheist worldview. Such an answer was provided by Karl Marx (1818– 1883), the German philosopher whose teachings became the core of the communist ideology. Marx replaced Hegel’s Reason with the forces of economy. The main engine of all historical events, in his view, is the sphere of production. According to Marx’s description, the history of Marx replaced Hegel’s Reason with the human society features two confronting classes: those forces of economy. that produce material goods and those that appropriate the results of their work. In ancient times, the two confronting classes were slaves and slave owners; in the Middle Ages, peasants (serfs) and aristocrats; in modern capitalist times, capitalists and proletarians. These classes are in permanent conflict with each other, and the transition from one system of production (e.g., medieval) to another (e.g., capitalist) is always accompanied by major historical turbulence, such as revolutions. Class conflicts and class interests manifest themselves in all fields of social life. From the Marxist point of view, the French Revolution, for instance, was not merely a result of the Enlightenment. Rather, the ideas of the Enlightenment became politically powerful because they suited capitalists’ class interests. The argument is that the idea of equal political rights for all citizens would not have become a political force without the economic interests that promoted it—de facto, it meant that peasants would be allowed to leave their villages and freely look for work in cities, that aristocrats had no right to stop them. Such an idea became relevant and politically powerful when—and because—it provided

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a cheap labor force for French capitalists. Similarly, the French revolutionary government’s centralization and the introduction of the metric system meant that it now became easier for capitalists to sell their products to a wider market; the capitalists’ economic interests determined the form of the rationalization of French life after the revolution. The French monarchy was doomed not because of the Enlightenment, but because it stood in the way of capitalist economic growth. Marx further observed that class conflicts, over the long run, brought greater freedom to the oppressed classes. He dedicated much attention to the analysis of the economy of the capitalist system of his time. According to his analyses, the struggle for profit between capitalists must gradually lead toward the reduction of wages and the increasing impoverishment of the working class. Marx also described how capitalism produces regular cyclical economic crises. In his view, these internal contradictions of the capitalist system must lead toward the ultimate proletarian revolution, whereby the capitalist system and private property will be abolished. In the resulting communist society, social and class differences will not exist. Marx based his theories on his observations of midnineteenth-century social circumstances in England. The working class in England at that time was indeed utterly destitute. At the same time, a series of revolutions in France through the nineteenth century (1830, 1848, 1871) profoundly shook European society and provided the model on which Marx based his predictions. Marx believed that the ultimate proletarian revolution would start in some economically advanced part of Europe and spread from there. However, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through trade unions and peaceful political pressures, the working class of Western Europe was gradually improving its lot without a revolution. When the communist revolution came, in 1917, it happened in Russia, the poorest of Europe’s great powers, and it was not the result of a genuine proletarian uprising but rather a coup organized by the Bolshevik party and led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924).

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3 It can be argued that the political stability of the most economically prosperous countries in the world today largely depends on securing privileged access to the labor market for their own citizens by an elaborate system of work permits that excludes noncitizens. If the masses of the Third World had direct access to this labor market, this would lead to an enormous decrease in salaries for the citizens of these prosperous countries, with substantial negative consequences for political stability. Nevertheless, it is hard not to note that the impoverishment of the Third World has so far resulted in the expansion of nationalism and religious fanaticism, rather than in anything that resembles communist ideology in its traditional Marxist sense.

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Starting from Marx’s theoretical views, Lenin inferred that it was not enough to let historical processes and class struggle work on their own. Rather, in his view, it was necessary to actively participate in history by organizing a political party that would work toward creating a revolutionary situation. The revolution, in his view, needed to be fabricated. At the moment of a deep social and economic crisis caused by World War I, communists managed to seize power in Russia in 1917. There may be a tendency to dismiss Marx’s analyses and especially his predictions by pointing out that they have proven wrong; the development of West European and North American societies did not go in the direction of a constant impoverishment of the working class, nor did it result in a communist revolution. However, someone who wanted to defend Marx could say that such impoverishment is indeed occurring on a global scale, that the working class in developed countries has been bribed by its capitalists to participate in the exploitation of the proletariat of the Third World.3 Marx differentiates between the economic base and superstructure. The former includes relations within the system of material production, such as class relations; the latter, institutions (governments, religion), philosophy, arts, or morality. A specific level of technological development requires a particular model of relationships in production, which then brings about a corresponding type of superstructure. Superstructures are thus instruments in class struggle; culture and intellectual life are ultimately to be understood as results of class struggle. One of Marx’s famous dicta was that human beings’ consciousness does not determine their social being (i.e., their interaction with society), but rather their social being (interaction with society) determines their consciousness. Lenin went a step further and insisted that intellectual life in its entirety should be judged according to the principle of partisanship: All intellectual positions, including scientific theories and philosophical views, are either in the service of revolution or in opposition to it. No thinking can be independent of class interests; class interests always motivate it.

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Nevertheless, both Lenin and Marx held science in high regard; they believed that science ultimately provides true theories of how the world works. They did not argue that the truth of scientific theories itself is the result of the social context in which these theories were formulated. A substantial part of their efforts in promoting communist doctrines consisted of showing that their views were true and scientific because they were based on economic analyses. However, a number of Marxist philosophers in the twentieth century were prepared to give up the objectivity of science to argue that all truths, including scientific truths, were mere products of the social (historical) position of a scientist. Lenin himself had difficulties with one of his highranking officials, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928), who argued that proletarian culture and sciences, including mathematics and astronomy, should be different from bourgeois sciences. (Lenin thought that proletarians should be taught proper mathematics). Similarly, many other Marxist thinkers in the twentieth century assumed that an individual’s beliefs about scientific theories were the result of his or her position in the class struggle. The German Marxist Karl Korsch (1886–1961) argued that there were no immutable truths (e.g., mathematics); what we call “truths” are mere tools in the class struggle. According to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), there is nothing particularly true about specific scientific theories—rather, their truth consists in their social acceptance, the fact that they prevailed historically. Obviously, once one takes such a relativist position, it follows that Marxist philosophy itself cannot be true. Rather, its “truth” becomes like anything else, a mere product of social circumstances. Historicism in the Early Twentieth Century The research of German nineteenth-century historians established the modern methodology of historical scholarship. Their work, however, was greatly influenced by Hegel, and they typically assumed the existence of a deeper order in history. Following Hegel, German historians

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and thinkers were often inclined to believe that the thinkers were often inclined to believe larger picture of historical events is not merely the that the larger picture of historical result of millions of individual initiatives by individevents is not merely the result of millions ual humans, their thoughts, decisions, and actions, of individual initiatives by individual but rather that these individual human actions are humans, their thoughts, decisions, and the result of the greater picture and predetermined actions, but rather that these individual by a larger trend. Even in present-day German, the human actions are the result of the word used for the humanities is Geistesgeschichte, “the greater picture and predetermined by a history of spirit.” The underlying assumption is that larger trend. it is always the spirit of a group (class, culture, ethnicity, and so on) that manifests itself in and explains the actions and creativity of individuals. Underlying this view are some of the central questions of the philosophy of history: Are human collectives to be understood as sums of individuals, or are they, in some sense, irreducible to the mere sums of individuals? Does membership in a group explain (and therefore determine) the creativity of an individual? Is the creativity of a group the sum of individual creativities, or is the creativity of an individual a manifestation of the creativity of the group? What was, for instance, the Enlightenment? Was it some kind of a spiritual substance that landed in France in the eighteenth century and forced all French intellectuals to think in a certain way? Or was it some kind of intellectual infection, like a flu, that made all intellectually active Frenchmen think in a certain way? Or was it, in contrast to these two views, merely a name for the thoughts, actions, and beliefs of millions of people who were exposed to similar intellectual challenges, such as the collapse of the old worldview, the emergence of modern science, and the intellectually strong urban environment of Paris? The view that the creativity of individuals is the result of their membership in a group is called collectivism or holism, while the opposing view, that the creativity of collectives is the sum of individual creativities, is called individualism. Typically, a collectivist historian will argue that individuals have certain beliefs (on which they base their Following Hegel, German historians and

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creativity) because they belong to a certain group and that their mem4 bership in the group makes certain other beliefs inconceivable for them.4 An individualist historian may From this point of view, individuals belonging to a certain group have also argue that certain ideas certain thoughts or beliefs in the way that animals or plants have cerwere inconceivable to certain individuals (e.g., Plato could tain biological properties, because they belong to a certain species. (A not conceive of nuclear physgood example of the collectivist position is Erwin Panofsky’s view that ics), but for such a historian, homogenous space and the concept of infinity were inconceivable before this merely means that through his individual contacts, Plato the Renaissance. As we have seen, Panofsky argued that ancient Greeks, could not have acquired the as ancient Greeks, were constitutionally incapable of conceiving of space as knowledge necessary to cona consistent, homogenous, and infinite medium.) The group that is said to ceive of nuclear physics. determine the intellectual capacities of individuals can be culture, historical period, phase in the development of Spirit, ethnicity, race, class. The choice of the collective will often depend on the ideological position of the historian (e.g., right or left wing). The argument that human thinking and intellectual life are fully determined by the individual’s membership in a collective was asserted particularly strongly among German thinkers in the years that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I. The view was in many ways an equivalent of the determinist claims that had conThe view that human thinking and stituted an important intellectual tradition in Germany intellectual life are fully determined ever since Luther. We have seen earlier that in Luther’s by the individual’s membership in a view, all human actions and thinking were predetercollective was asserted particularly mined by God. For Hegel-inspired thinkers, the hisstrongly among German thinkers in the torical context became the will of God. In his Decline years that followed Germany’s defeat in of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) thus World War I. argued that human intellectual life was the product of cultures, which he conceived of as similar to biological organisms: Cultures are born, achieve their peak, then decline and gradually turn into civilizations, periods when genuine creativity is replaced by mass consumption. Individual creativity and intellectual capacities are the result of an individual’s historical position in the development of the respective culture to which he or she belongs. The Greco-Roman culture, as he describes it, was

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predominantly visual; its mathematics was geometry, its architectural manifestation the Doric temple. Spengler also describes the magical culture that encompasses the late Roman empire, Byzantine, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. This culture was characterized by an architecture of vaulted, enclosed space; its mathematics was algebra, its visual art mosaic and arabesque. Modern Western (“Faustian”) culture is characterized by abstract thinking and the concept of infinity; its mathematics is calculus, and its architectural manifestation the Gothic cathedral. Spengler’s book is heavily loaded with historically inaccurate claims that members of various groups are not able to conceive of some specific ideas—such as the claims that Russians cannot do astronomy or comprehend Darwin’s theory of evolution, that the Copernican system would be incomprehensible to an Arab, and that ancient Greeks and Romans were incapable of writing history except as chronicles of contemporary events. In spite of its numerous erroneous historical statements, the book enjoyed extremely wide circulation and was seriously received. More generally, the welcome reception of the claims that other groups “can’t do it” (even when such claims are easily refuted by well-known examples) is an interesting phenomenon of twentieth-century cultural studies. Writing in 1929, the Austrian architectural historian Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) observed with approval that an important aspect of historical research of his time was the rejection of the view that human collectives are sums of individuals. He observed that the dominant view, which he also approved, was that individuals are mere products of the groups to which they belong. Another characteristic of contemporary history writing that he described was the rejection of the view that there is anything like a universal human nature or rationality in the form postulated by Kant. The view that historical events are the blind result of individual decisions and actions was also widely rejected, and the generally accepted view was that historical events are the results of the movement of Spirit. Sedlmayr reported with approval. In other words, the right way for a historian to explain the creativity of individuals is to classify

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these individuals in the context of the groups to which they belong: It is assumed that they could not have decided to act differently. It remains unsaid whether these classificatory groups should be races, cultures, ethnic groups, classes, or some others. Sedlmayr was notorious for his rightwing political views and joined the Nazi party a couple of years later. The political events of the early 1930s and the Nazis’ rise to power made many historians who were active in Germany reconsider the assumptions and implications of the collectivist views of history writing that they had been trained to follow. Some of them, such as the great art historian Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001), rejected collectivist history writing. Erwin Panofsky, whose collectivist views on the pre-Renaissance concept of space we considered earlier, gradually came to reject collectivAccording to Panofsky, humanist history ist history writing in his later years as a result of politiwriting is marked by the attribution cal events. Panofsky left Germany in 1933 and settled in of free will and universal rationality to the United States. In 1938, in opposition to collectivist historical subjects. history writing, he formulated the method of humanistic art history, an approach that rejects the idea that individual human creativity is determined by the group to which the individual belongs and assumes that individual humans possess free will and universal reasoning capaci5 ties.5 When defining individualist and collectivist positions, he reminded his Panofsky’s methodologireaders of the debate between Erasmus and Luther (described in chapter 3) cal efforts were not always as a debate between two paradigmatic views. Although Panofsky does fully appreciated, and in the decades after World War II, he not mention Sedlmayr, his own essay in many ways was a polemic against was unjustifiably reproached Sedlmayr’s views, in the way that Erasmus opposed Luther. Panofsky’s by colleagues such as Ernst essay on humanistic art history, one could say, thus completed a major Gombrich for not rejecting holist history writing. cycle in the philosophy of history by returning to the position Kant had formulated in the Critique of Pure Reason. If human beings possess free will and reasoning capacities independent of their historical position, then their thinking and decisions cannot be the result of some preconceived plan of history, and history is no more than one event after another.

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6 I differentiate here between modernist and modern. Insofar as modern means contemporary, every architecture is modern in the time when it is built. During the early Renaissance, Gothic architecture was indeed referred to as modern. Architects who design classical architecture today are often referred to as “modern classicists.” Modernist, however, designates a position that presumes to know what kind of architecture is appropriate for a certain time; a modernist architect will design and a modernist theorist will evaluate architecture in accordance with such a belief.

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Architectural Modernism In the architectural theory of the same period, however, the impact of historicist ideas was just starting to be felt. “A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit....Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style,” wrote Le Corbusier (1887–1965) in Towards a New Architecture, barely a decade before Panofsky immigrated to the United States. This new architecture, Le Corbusier assures us repeatedly through the articles that make up the book, is a result of technological development. In a manner similar to Marx, he states that “economic law inevitably governs our acts and our thoughts.” If we accept this interpretation of his views, then Le Corbusier’s mention of a “new spirit” is merely a stylistic phrase: Architecture is done in a certain way in a certain period because of the dictates of technology and economy. Good architecture conforms to these dictates. However, Le Corbusier also says, that “style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special character.” This would suggest a type of historicism different from Marx’s and more similar to that of Hegel or Spengler, whereby individual creativity in various fields are manifestations of a single spirit, a state of mind that permeates individuals’ activities. Many years later, talking more generally about twentieth-century intellectual trends, Gombrich summarized this kind of view as marked by the assumption “that all the manifestations of an era—philosophy, art, social structures, etc.—must be considered as expressions of an essence, an identical spirit. As a result, every era is considered as a totality embracing everything.” The dilemma was well known to other proponents of modernist architecture: Were they to conceive of their revolution in architecture as merely a result of new technology and a response to the economic interests of their clients, or was there more to their endeavors?6 Could the architectural revolution in which they were participating be the result of an all-pervading Spirit of the Time and in some way irreducible to the commercial needs of clients and society? Or was it merely the result of the

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application of newly available technology? If one sees explained as merely a result of new in new architecture merely the result of new technology technologies and the commercial and economic interests, these forces assert themselves interests of clients, or were modernist on their own anyhow; if it is all about technology and architects participating in a revolution economy, then modernist architecture would not require that was the result of an all-pervading manifestoes to be promoted. In that case, there would be Spirit of the Time and in some way no modernist movement or need for CIAM conferences.7 irreducible to the commercial needs of Nor is it indeed clear that the main visual, formal, clients and society? and spatial characteristics of the modernist style actu7 ally derive from available technology: Flat roofs leak even with our most CIAM is the abbreviation for sophisticated technologies; symmetrical plans are often easier to execute, International Congress of and their seismic qualities are certainly easier to calculate. Modernist Architecture, the organization that contributed In their highly influential book International Style to the rise of modernist archi(1932), Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson argued that ninetecture in the period between teenth-century architecture failed to create a unified style because of the 1928 and 1959. difficulties of reconciling classical and Gothic revivalism with the new methods of construction. One would thus again think that in their view, technology ultimately determines the style. But then, when discussing the international style they advocate, Hitchcock and Johnson observe that it is impossible to organize and execute a complex building without making some choices that are not wholly determined by technical and economic concerns; consciously or unconsciously, an architect must make design 8 decisions. In making these design decisions, Hitchcock and Johnson For instance, Hitchcock and observe, even functionalists, who claim to shun aesthetic considerations, Johnson point out, that even follow in design the international style that these two authors describe.8 the architects who claim to be uninfluenced by aesthetic Technological and economic concerns are thus insufficient to explain the considerations cover rise of the new style. Since the very concept of style means that many their brick with stucco in architects make similar decisions, and since Hitchcock and Johnson point order to achieve a smooth, continuous surface, although out that these decisions are not technologically or economically motivated brick is “from the practi(very much as we have seen in the case of Le Corbusier), it is hard not to cal point of view the most conclude that they rely on the Hegelian assumption that there must exist satisfactory surfacing material in general use.” some other force, spiritual, that drives architects’ decisions. At the same Should the rise of modernism be

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time, it is unclear how this kind of Hegelian position can be squared with the emphasis on technology and science that constitutes, arguably, the fundamental aspect of the modern era. If the scientific understanding of the world is the crucial aspect of modernity, and it leaves no space for spiritual forces in the explanation of the world or human history, then we have to ask, how modern is the modernists’ understanding of their architecture in the first place? When it comes to aesthetics, modernists, much like romantics, had to reject the idea of purely nonconceptual aesthetic evolution—and with it formalism in aesthetic matters. The consideration of whether a certain building is appropriate to its time is always a conceptual judgment that requires subsuming a building under the concept of a creation in a certain time. If all architecture has to be appropriate to its time to attract positive aesthetic evaluation, then all aesthetic evaluation of architecture has to depend on the conceptual evaluation of whether it is appropriate to its time. Modernists have to be antiformalists unless they are to accept buildings with Doric columns in modern times. An architectural movement that preaches that certain architectural shapes express certain ideas is de facto an organization for promoting a certain set of conceptual associations related to architectural works. It is only in recent decades that historical scholarship has started examining the social and cultural forces that led codifying the understanding of a certain set of shapes and architectural solutions as appropriate to modern times. In other words, it is impossible to deduce logically flat roofs, the absence It is impossible to deduce logically flat of ornament, or asymmetrical plans from any specific roofs, the absence of ornament, or aspects of the twentieth century as an era. However, the asymmetrical plans from any specific widespread belief that these elements express a certain aspects of the twentieth century as an era. specific time is an interesting (and important) cultural phenomenon, and studying it is likely to explain how modernist architecture really came about. This means, however, explaining the rise of modernism not collectivistically, as the result of the Spirit of the Time, but individualistically, as the result of the specific challenges,

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influences, and problems that architects as professionals were facing in various periods of the twentieth century, as well as the economic interests of the profession and large offices or the impact of the self-promotion strategies of famous architects. The ideological foundation of the modernist movement derived from the dissemination of the collectivist conception of history that occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Le Corbusier was not the first to talk about the Spirit of the Time; the idea was introduced much earlier by Herder, who, we have seen, wrote about Zeitgeist. In the wider intellectual context, one could almost say that the central ideas of the modernist movement intellectually belong to the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. The fact that these ideas so slowly gained currency among architects merely shows how isolated the profession was from the intellectual trends of its time.

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Historicism—and, more generally, the collectivist understanding of history—became the dominant approach to understanding human society in the final decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. Philosophers, at the same time, were exposed to new challenges, and their work had to respond. A particularly influential trend was the rise of scientific psychology, which opened the gate to numerous new philosophical problems pertaining to the functioning of the human mind and the ways it acquires knowledge. Until 1933, German scholarship dominated European intellectual life, but then, as a result of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, many intellectuals left Germany for Great Britain and the United States, where they established the modern paradigms of English-speaking scholarship. Intentionality: Brentano and Husserl The German-Austrian-Italian philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was the first to formulate the problems that subsequently came to dominate twentieth-century philosophy. His most significant contribution was the re-introduction of the concept of intentionality, which had previously been widely discussed by medieval philosophers. Brentano also made major contributions to the formulation of psychology as a scientific discipline. One should be careful not to confuse the philosophical technical term intentionality with the English word intention; the two words have the same origin but mean different things. What philosophers call intentionality pertains to the directedness of a mental act or a thought to something. “Directedness” here means that a thought is always about A thought is always about something, something; it is impossible to have a thought that is not and what philosophers call intentionality about something, in other words, a thought without conpertains to the directedness of a mental tent. When I think about a table, my thought is about the act or a thought to something. table—but what is in my mind is a thought with its content directed to the table, not the table itself. This sounds simple enough, but if one thinks about it carefully, one inevitably arrives at difficult questions. The problem many philosophers came to struggle with was to explain what we think about when we think about nonexistent things,

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such as a winged horse called Pegasus or a fictional character by the name of Hamlet. There is nothing in the world that our thoughts about Hamlet or Pegasus would be about, although it seems wrong to say that a thought about Hamlet is about nothing. It is even unclear how we can differentiate between Hamlet and Pegasus. Pegasus does not exist, so it is nothing; Hamlet likewise. But if two things differ, they must have some different properties— while things that do not exist cannot have any properties. It follows that we cannot say that Hamlet is different from Pegasus. Things that do not exist cannot be different. It does not help to say that they differ in our minds, because in our minds are thoughts and their contents, not Hamlet or Pegasus themselves. To answer such problems, some disciples of Brentano suggested that existence was a property like any other and that things can have various other properties without having the property of existence. Following this suggestion, it should be possible to say that there is a winged horse named Pegasus that does not exist—but this is ultimately counterintuitive since one is used to thinking that things either are or are not. Brentano was a charismatic teacher, and many of his students came to play major roles in the intellectual life of Germanspeaking countries at the turn of the century. In philosophy, his most famous disciple was Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl is known as the principal founder of phenomenology and thus one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The history of the term phenomenology goes back to the eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth century, Hegel actually gave the title Phenomenology of Spirit to one of his important works. The Greek word phainomenon means “appearance,” and phenomenology is generally understood as a discipline that studies and describes appearances, the way things appear in human experience, as opposed to the disciplines that study what things really are and how they come about. Phenomenology is thus conceived of as a descriptive discipline, and it describes the contents of human consciousness. Husserl’s approach was to bracket the questions about the existence of things and the world and study the contents of pure consciousness.

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Consequently, intentionality was a crucial concept and the starting point of Husserlian phenomenology. Some contents of thoughts correspond to things in the real world, while some do not. Nevertheless, they all constitute human experience. Husserl’s aim was a discipline that would describe pure consciousness—that is, the conHusserl endeavored to create a tents of consciousness independent of the way they discipline that would describe pure relate to the physical world; a discipline that would consciousness—that is, the contents of set aside (“bracket,” as Husserl would say) questions consciousness independent of the way about the existence of things that the contents of conthey relate to the physical world. sciousness are about, as well as the world that contains those things. In the early decades of the twentieth century, phenomenology was not only a philosophical position but also a real movement centered around Husserl. Various philosophers who participated in the movement worked on phenomenological approaches to various fields of human experience. In aesthetics these endeavors turned out to be particularly fruitful. An important figure, whose writings are often overlooked by architectural theorists, is Roman Ingarden (1893–1970). Ingarden’s The Ontology of the Work of Art (1962) surveys the problems related to the question of what a work of art (or architecture) is—as we have seen earlier, philosophers phrase this question by asking about the ontological status of the works of architecture. Ingarden compared the works of architecture to the works of music since both arts are non-imitative. Works of music can be understood as abstract entities (similar to Plato’s Forms) that are only discovered, rather than created, by the composer, or as performances (physical events), or even merely as a set of notes written down on a piece of paper. Music is similar to architecture, and architectural works are, in principle, reproducible in various locations, like works of music. Nevertheless, Ingarden observes that we would find it reprehensible if every European city were to build a copy of the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame. He also imagines a technical device that would produce an immaterial phantom building purely by means of light, one that would

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look entirely like a physical one (and include the possibility of movement through interior spaces). Aesthetically, he thinks, such a virtual building would still lose “somewhat” of its aesthetic value because a work of architecture is “founded in a real building.” He thus anticipated some of the debates about digital architecture well before computers came into use. Ingarden also noted that a work of architecture is a cultural object—a church (essentially a pile of building material) becomes a church by an act of dedication the same way a piece of cloth becomes a flag. The cultural role of certain objects defines the behavior of individuals toward these objects. For instance, one and the same stonemason can be very noisy when repairing the church but will behave with silent respect when he enters that same building in order to pray. In the first context, the church is a building site for him; in the second, it is a house of prayer. Ingarden thus articulated a number of theoretical problems related to architectural works (repeatability on different sites, the impact of cultural context on the way they are perceived) that would become the constitutive aspects of the phenomenological approach to architecture as formulated by Martin Heidegger’s follower, Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000). Heidegger and Being and Time Of all Husserl’s collaborators, it was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) who ultimately came to exercise the greatest influence. Husserl expected Heidegger to formulate the phenomenological approach to history and helped him obtain his first teaching position at the University of Marburg in 1923. Heidegger’s book Being and Time (1927), was widely recognized as an important work, and when Husserl retired, Heidegger inherited his position at the University of Freiburg. By this time, their paths were clearly diverging. In fact, as early as 1919, Heidegger had told Husserl that pure consciousness was merely derived from historical consciousness by the suppression of its historicity. Heidegger was sympathetic to historicism and the view of the human position in history that we have seen dominated German intellectual life through the 1920s.

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In 1933, when the Nazis came to power and Husserl was exposed to numerous humiliations for his Jewish background, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, became the president of the university, and in public speeches promoted the Nazi ideology. Although he withdrew from the position of university president within a year, he remained an ardent Nazi. Even after the war, he never expressed regret about his contribution to the Third Reich. In some periods of his life, at least, he seems to have regarded his political engagement as directly derived from his philosophical views. After the war, he was removed from teaching for a period of time, as part of the western Allies’ attempts to de-Nazify Germany; but in 1951 he was reinstated as a professor. When he died in 1976, he was generally regarded as one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century. His involvements with the Nazis, as well as his silence about it after the war, have forever remained controversial and widely debated issues. Those sympathetic to his philosophy have tried to argue that his actions were merely a result of his political naïveté or that he was attracted to the Nazis as a result of one specific period of his thought— but from this perspective, however, it has always been difficult to explain that he remained unrepentant, even after information about the Holocaust and concentration camps became widely known and confirmed. The critics saw his support for the Nazis as a direct result of his philosophy—but since his thinking went through a number of phases, it is in fact hard to correlate all of it with the Nazi ideology. Heidegger’s writing justifiably qualifies as some of the most incomprehensible philosophical prose ever written, which has often led to accusations of obfuscation and even charlatanry. His pretentious, ponderous, and highbrow tone has often been mocked in sharp satires by some of the most prominent men of letters of the twentieth century, including Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Gabriel Marcel. Nevertheless, even such a difficult book as Being and Time is not incomprehensible if it is read systematically and if new concepts and terminology that the author

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introduces from time to time are noted when they are explained and their further employment carefully followed. Heidegger opposed Husserl’s idea that one should study the contents of thoughts by bracketing questions about the existence of things and the world. In his view, the contents of our thoughts are precisely determined by the fact that we are beings in the world. Consequently, we cannot claim to obtain a disinterested, presupposiAccording to Heidegger, we cannot tion-less view of things; our understanding of things is claim to obtain a disinterested, always already predetermined by our prior understandpresuppositionless view of things; ing. Ever since the ancient Greeks, philosophers’ most our understanding of things is always important efforts have been directed toward trying already predetermined by our prior to find that which is real behind the world of appearunderstanding. ances; to search for what remains present in spite of all change (Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s essences, Descartes’s or Kant’s cognitive subject, and so on). The aim has been to achieve a disinterested, detached, impartial, and objective view of that which is—but in Heidegger’s view, the result of such an approach is that the world becomes dead for us. The term Heidegger uses for human existence, understood as inseparable from its context, is Dasein. Dasein is always thrown into a concrete situation and community; it is determined by its future options and, to a lesser degree, by its past. Heidegger’s project was thus to provide an understanding of the world that is independent of the scientific (objective) worldview and an interpretation of human life and work that is independent of the technological manipulation of the human environment. His philosophical views are not a mere rejection of science and technology; rather, they constitute an attempt to formulate a worldview that is independent of the elementary premises of modern science and technology. Heidegger’s much celebrated work, Being and Time, describes the position of the human individual in his or her world. Only the first part of the book was published—that is, the section that analyzes the nature of Dasein and its position in time. The full book was actually never completed. The question the book is intended to discuss, and one that

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in Heidegger’s view had been neglected for the last twenty-five centuries, is that of the meaning of being. In his view, this question can be understood only in relation to that which understands being—that is, the individual human, Dasein itself. The important characteristic of Dasein is that it questions the meaning of being; as Heidegger says, it is a being that relates to being with understanding. In German, the term Dasein, which Heidegger uses for human existence, literally means “being here.” A human being is essentially a “being-in-the-world”; this “in” is to be understood not just spatially, but as habituation, inhabitation by something. Dasein is “thrown into” a certain situation (context of life), and its options are always already predetermined. The understanding of Dasein as being-in-the-world makes it pointless to ask the philosophical question about the existence of the world outside the human subject, the way philosophers have been asking it ever since Descartes—the same question that, we have seen, Husserl tried to “bracket” and study as the content of pure consciousness. For Heidegger, this question makes no sense because it implies that a human being can be conceived of as somehow outside its world, as bracketed from its life context. He insists that a human being is always in its world. Kant wrote once that it was a scandal for philosophy that it was unable to prove the existence of the world outside of the human subject; Heidegger says that the real scandal is that such proofs are still being attempted over and over again. A fundamental aspect of being-in-the-world is care, which is again marked by its temporality. Care is an important aspect of Dasein’s position in the world, and one of its manifestations is the care not to be different. Dasein’s efforts are largely directed toward doing things the way one (an impersonal anyone) does them. The result of this effort is averageness and the loss of authenticity. Dasein’s problem is the resulting inauthenticity of its existence. Everyday life, with its pressures to conform to the way most people conduct it, makes it very difficult for Dasein to live an authentic life. Dasein typically loses its authenticity in everyday

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life. The loss of authenticity is a fall into inauthentic inauthentic everydayness. everydayness. Heidegger describes everydayness as a whirlpool or vortex that forces us into being the way one (an impersonal anyone) is. A Dasein escapes itself and what it could be into being the way one (again, understood as an impersonal anyone) is. We become aware of our authenticity only in extreme situations, for instance, when facing death; as Heidegger puts it, no one else can die our death. His critique of the loss of authenticity in everydayness amounts to an exceptionally thoughtfully articulated critique of modern mass society. Fear helps Dasein regain its authenticity. By this, Heidegger does not mean merely a fear of something, but rather Angst, existential fear that is not related to any particular thing in the world. Dasein also faces the call of conscience to regain its authenticity. This call calls Dasein away from being the way one (an impersonal anyone) is. It remains unclear from whom this call originates (who the “caller” is), since Heidegger merely says that “it calls.” This, he points out, does not allow us to assume that a non-Dasein-like being (he does not even articulate the possibility that this could be God) could be the caller. Who the caller is, Heidegger points out, cannot be determined in the world; the caller is rather the Dasein itself in its uncanniness, “a pure ‘to’ in the nothing of the world” as he puts it. The voice of conscience is closely related to Dasein’s fundamental guilt, which Heidegger identifies with Dasein’s thrownness in the world. Guilt (again, not related to any particular action) is a fundamental and constitutive aspect of a human being; every particular guilt deriving from some action derives from this original being-guilty. Dasein is fundamentally guilty, and this guilt, which precedes any knowledge, enables the call of conscience. Heidegger’s description of the human position in the world, as provided by Being and Time, is thus obviously heavily colored by a specific Christian (mainly Protestant) worldview. Being and Time has sometimes been described as an attempt to provide a description of the Protestant understanding of human existence while omitting any reference to biblical The loss of authenticity is a fall into

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mythology. One could compare the Christian understanding of creation with thrownness, guilt with the teaching about original sin, authenticity with salvation through fear of death, and so on. It is much less clear whether non-Christians or even non-Protestant Christians would be prepared to follow Heidegger or understand the human position in the world along these lines.1

For instance, those Christians who base their theology on the Greek original of the New Testament will be unlikely to accept the teaching about original sin and Heidegger’s equivalent concept of guilt. The understanding that human beings inherited sin from Adam occurred in Western Christianity as a result of a Latin mistranslation of the New Testament verse Romans 5:12 and has been subsequently emphasized by those theologians (like Luther) who denied free will.

Heidegger and the Nazis Scholars have spent much time analyzing the sharp bend in Heidegger’s thought that occurred after the publication of Being and Time in 1927 and the way a series of changes in his views ultimately kept him from completing the book. In Germany, the years between 1927 and 1933 were gloomy and portentous, on the one hand, while exceptionally intellectually productive on the other. Heidegger’s first major published work after Being and Time was Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), in which he tried, in accordance with his interests, to reinterpret Kant’s discussion of epistemological problems in the Critique of Pure Reason as an ontological one— that is, to approach Kant’s discussion of human cognition from the point of view of his interest in the problem of being. Those scholars who study Heidegger’s thought regard this book as an important document about the way Heidegger’s views evolved, but it has never exercised any significant influence on the study of Kant. In spring 1929, shortly before the publication of the book, Heidegger presented some aspects of his interpretation of Kant at a three-week meeting of philosophers in Davos, Switzerland. An important event during the meeting was an organized public debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). Cassirer was mentioned earlier in this book as the person who influenced Erwin Panofsky’s views on the history of perspective. In 1929, he was regarded as one of the most prominent German philosophers, second maybe only to Husserl. He was also the first Jew to become the president of a German university. Heidegger, following the publication of Being and Time, was a fast-rising star. In the debate, Cassirer defended the traditional approach of German

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Kantian philosophers (neo-Kantians) from Heidegger’s attacks. Much of the debate pertained to the problem of the finitude of the human being and the question of whether it was a job of philosophy to liberate the human being from or fully expose it to fear. Cassirer’s view was that philosophy can liberate a human being only as much as the human being can become free and that it is, in principle, possible to liberate oneself from fear. In the judgment of the younger observers, Heidegger came out as the victor in the debate since he appeared to stand for deeper, metaphysical questions, while Cassirer defended traditional humanist positions. Few participants at the colloquium in Davos could have foreseen that Heidegger’s rejection of traditional humanist values would eventually have political implications. On January 30, 1933, Hitler became the German chancellor, and on April 21, Heidegger was appointed to the position of president of Freiburg University; nine days later, he joined the Nazi Party. He remained the university president for only a year, but he was a loyal Nazi Party member until 1945 and in his writings praised the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. In his notorious presidential address of April 27, 1933, he spoke of the joint rootedness of students and tutors in the German university. The spirit of a nation, he said, comes from the preservation of the forces that derive from blood and earth, and these forces provide strength for the deepest shaking of the nation’s Dasein. In Being and Time, the word Dasein referred to the existence of the individual; in his speech, Heidegger transferred it to the life of the nation. He then rejected the concept of academic freedom, which he saw as purely negative, as a freedom from coercion. Academic freedom, in his view, is to be replaced by three commitments of equal importance: to the nation; to the relationship of the nation to other nations, which may require readiness for military duty and the ultimate sacrifice; and, finally, to the spiritual mission of the German people. The address leaves no doubt that Heidegger fully recognized from the beginning and enthusiastically embraced the direction that the Nazi government was leading the German people.

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Among scholars, however, there is much debate about the compatibility of his position in 1933 with his previous philosophy.2 As has even pointed out that mentioned, Dasein in Being and Time is that of an individual human being, not Dasein as described by Heidegger in Being and Time of a nation. It is not clear how the condemnation of the inauthenticity of life in is compatible with liberalmass society can be combined with embracing the crudely populist ideology political conceptions of the of the Nazis. Being and Time appears to be written by an antimodern, possibly individual. religious, conservative; it can be said to be potentially It is not clear how Heidegger’s antidemocratic and elitist—but precisely because of condemnation of the inauthenticity of this, one would have expected its author to remain aloof life in mass society can be compatible rather than to give public support to the Nazis.3 Two years after the war, the French with his embracing the crudely populist ideology of the Nazis. philosopher Jean Beaufret (1907–1982) addressed Heidegger in a letter that indirectly asked the question about his views on 3 the Third Reich and his participation in the recent historical events. The Oswald Spengler is a good letter was carefully couched in the form of purely philosophical questions, example of such a conservasuch as whether it was possible, after everything that had happened during tive, right-wing rejection of Nazi populism. He was World War II, to give meaning again to the word humanism. It also asked sympathetic to the Nazis what the relationship was between ontology (i.e., Heidegger’s favorite philbefore they came to power and osophical discipline; it studies being) and ethics. possibly even voted for them in the elections of 1933. But Heidegger’s answer to these questions came in the form when they came to power, their of an essay called “Letter on Humanism” (1947). In his response, Heidegger crudeness and primitivism soon rejects humanism as “metaphysical” because all humanism tries to explain irritated him in the extreme. Within half a year, he produced that-which-is without asking about the truth of being. Since Roman times, an anti-Nazi pamphlet that he says, humanism assumed that it was clear what a human being was—a had an exceptionally wide rational animal, in some form or another. Yet, he says, although biology circulation. There followed a government-sponsored camand chemistry explore the human body scientifically, it is not at all clear paign against him in the Nazi that the essence of a human being can be explained organically (or even media; he was isolated by the as a combination of a biological body with a spirit or an immaterial soul). regime, though not arrested, and he died three years later. In his view, this is like believing that nuclear physics explains the nature of matter, while it is not clear whether nature may be hiding it precisely when approached from a scientific point of view. Understanding humans as individual persons is a dubious assumption from Heidegger’s point of 2

Some very recent scholarship

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view—and he sees in it an extension of the understanding of the world as consisting of individual objects. Dasein is, however, characterized by its thrownness into its life context. Heidegger thus rejects humanism insofar as it holds that human beings are persons or rational Understanding humans as individual animals or corporal beings endowed with a soul and persons is a dubious assumption from reason. This rejection is nevertheless not to be underHeidegger’s point of view. stood as antihumanism. It does not deny the dignity of man, Heidegger says. Rather, in his view, traditional humanism does not appreciate the human being enough. The human being is much more than a person, a body with a soul and intellect, or a rational animal; the person needs to be understood in a more fundamental way. This deeper understanding that Heidegger advocates is that man is the neighbor 4 of being.4 Ultimately, this is a vague and arguably insufficient description This being, he warns us, is not for a view that is intended to replace traditional humanism. to be understood as God. Technology, communism, and nationalism, Heidegger explains in his essay, are results of the emphasis on production through the rational manipulation of natural resources. They derive from the understanding of the world as things. Nationalism, he argues, cannot be canceled through humanism, since it is “the subjectivity of humans in totality. It carries out its absolute self-affirmation.” As for ethics, Heidegger opposes any ethical evaluation, since ethical evaluation is always subjective; evaluation converts that which is evaluated into an object. Instead of an ethic of norms, Heidegger talks about the light that enables us to differentiate between good and bad (the latter he also calls “ferocious”). Metaphorically, Heidegger speaks about being “called” and “kept” by being as the basis of acting ethically. Only being, he says, enables the good to achieve grace and the ferocious to finish in disaster. “Letter on Humanism” thus ends up in a full (or almost full) denial of human ability to choose freely between good and bad. Heidegger’s Significance for Contemporary Architectural Theory Heidegger’s lecture, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1951), directly addresses architecture by discussing the relationship between building and dwelling.

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Heidegger starts by pointing out that buan, the ancient Germanic word for “to build,” originally meant “to dwell.” From this he infers that building is dwelling. This kind of argument implies an important methodological move whose full significance must not be overlooked. What Heidegger assumes is that language is more than a conventional means of communication whereby words change their meaning through history. Rather, his assumption is that historical changes in the meaning of individual words (which linguists would ascribe to various historical trends and coincidences), and especially the origin of a certain word, can reveal the actual nature of things. Language, he says, speaks about the Heidegger assumes that the study of the nature of things. Heidegger thus points out that in the historical origin of and changes in the language of the ancient Goths (a group of Germanic meaning of individual words can reveal tribes from the early centuries of the Christian era), the actual nature of things these words the word for dwelling was wunian, and it acquired the refer to. meaning “to live in peace.” Another Germanic word with the same meaning was fry (related to modern English “free”), meaning also “saved.” From all this, Heidegger concludes that to dwell is to be within the limits of a free, that is, safe space. The view that studying what things were once called can help us understand what they actually are certainly requires some justification. Why should we, after all, assume that the use of certain words by semibarbaric central European tribes fifteen centuries ago can provide us with relevant insights into anything except the history of Germanic languages? The response is that the very assumptions of this question are wrong. The question implies that languages are a result of human interaction, whereas, in Heidegger’s view, human beings dwell in their language. A language is thus not a mere communicative convention used by a set of individuals. Rather, it forms the possible experience of the world humans can have. (It is useful to compare this view with Kant’s. For Kant, the human cognitive apparatus constitutes the experience of the world, and this apparatus is the same for all humans. For Heidegger, language determines the possibilities of human experience of the world—and since a language is

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always the language of a group, cognitive capacities are in their language; language determines determined by membership in a group.) the possibilities of human experience Heidegger applies this same reasoning to of the world—and since a language the concept of space. The German word Raum, meanis always the language of a group, ing “space” (compare with the English room), originally cognitive capacities are determined by pertained to a limited space, a shelter, a piece of land membership in a group. cleared to a certain boundary. This understanding of space is to be contrasted with the abstract understanding of space as a system of distances, pure extension, without the individuality of places. Places are formed by means of buildings; purely mathematical description of distances between individual points is insufficient to explain the specific significance of a place. Human relationship to places is thus constituted through dwelling. The process of building makes a place by creating and connecting spaces. It is a kind of production, expressed in Greek using words with the root tec (for example, the Greek word techne, from which the modern English word technology derives). Such a production—and with it the tectonic aspects of architecture—allows something (e.g., a building) to appear as present. Building thus achieves its essence by creating places and connecting their spaces. Heidegger’s essay has significant implications for architectural theory. Take the example of an urban square. It may be thought that a square has certain architectural qualities on the basis of the shapes and the proportions of the buildings that form it, as well as other rationally definable properties, such as the functions it performs. An architectural intervention in an urban square may want to preserve or enhance its existing architectural qualities by preserving and enhancing these rationally describable qualities. Heidegger’s position, however, would be that such a strategy is going to fail because it relies on faith in the rational use of technology to achieve certain aims and on the belief that the qualities of a space are the result of its quantifiable properties. More generally, it is based on an understanding of space as a medium that enables quantifiable relationships among its segments and assumes that important properties of a place are In Heidegger’s view, human beings dwell

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definable by mathematical means (e.g., proportions of the parts of buildings). An urban intervention that is primarily concerned with visual, formal, geometrically definable properties of spatial objects is not going to get one far in Heidegger’s view. Rather, the important qualities of a place are the result of human relationships to the place, how humans dwell in it. A place acquires its qualities from the rootedness of people in their environment. In the present situation, when the primary concerns of our civilization are directed toward ecological problems and making our presence on the planet sustainable, Heidegger’s rejection of the understanding of the world based on science and his critique of technology may appear as attractive alternatives to the scientific worldview and technology-based attitudes. It is, however, much less clear that (or how) such a rejection can really constitute a viable alternative. In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger argues that the post-World War II shortage of apartments actually derived from the fact that mortals always have to search for the essence of dwelling, that they only have to learn to dwell. But the alternative view would be that there is no such thing as “the essence of dwelling” and that the shortage of apartments would persist until a sufficient number of apartments are built (as was ultimately the case with the post-World War II apartment shortage)—that the shortage of apartments is ultimately a technological problem. Heidegger’s position is credible insofar as one assumes that the rejection of science, technology, and human rationality is the only way for humans to improve their lot. The alternative view is that the solution to our problems is in more science and technology. It is important to understand that in this dilemma we are facing two radically different and incompatible worldviews. The proponents of science and technology can always point out that we need science to study (let alone resolve) the problems that derive, for instance, from global warming. For their opponents (and for those who reject the rational understanding of the world), science itself is a dubious project; indeed, they are likely to argue that the rational explanation of the world is a mere result of, and predetermined by, an individual’s thrownness into a social environment.

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Gadamer and Hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was by far Heidegger’s most influential student, and his book, Truth and Method (1960), has often been described as the most significant philosophical work written in German after World War II. Gadamer’s important achievement Gadamer’s important achievement was to was to formulate the problem of interpretation and formulate the problem of interpretation understanding as a fundamental philosophical proband understanding as a fundamental lem. Hermeneutics, the discipline that studies methods philosophical problem. of interpreting texts, had a long history in German Protestantism, going back to Martin Luther and the early Protestant discussions about various approaches to the interpretation of the Bible; Gadamer made it into a full-fledged philosophical discipline. When it comes to studying the philosophical problems of interpretation, Gadamer had a number of important predecessors in Germany, such as Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911). An important aspect of the hermeneutic theory of interpretation was the concept of the hermeneutic circle. The theorists of hermeneutics observed that the process of understanding and interpretation is always circular: the meaning of a segment of a text can be understood only in relation to the meaning of the whole text, while the meaning of the whole text is constituted by the meanings of its parts. For instance, when reading a text in a foreign language, one may come across an unknown word. In such a situation, one can often determine the word’s meaning on the basis of a wider context, while the proper understanding of this wider context is then further enhanced by the understanding of the 5 word.5 Another important aspect of these theories was the notion that the Even if one uses a dictionary, principles of the interpretation of texts can be expanded to the interpretaa hermeneutic circle will often tion of historical events. For instance, a general’s decision in battle needs to be necessary to select the correct meaning from the be understood in relation to the events during the battle or the wider hisnumber of possible meanings torical context of the battle. This notion led to the understanding of historithat a dictionary typically cal events as comparable to texts, since they may be interpreted by historians provides. using the same procedures as written material.

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Gadamer’s description of the hermeneutic circle assumes that every act of understanding requires projection—making assumptions about the meaning of what is said and then, by means of the hermeneutic circle, revising these assumptions. Such projections—and with them our understanding of the meaning of a text—always derive from our prejudices. In Gadamer’s view, there is no understanding without prejudices, and he criticizes the Enlightenment’s “superficial demand” that one should liberate oneself from prejudices. All thinking is determined by its horizon, its context. This applies both to the thoughts of the author who produced the text as well as to the thinking of the person who interprets the text. Texts need to be understood in their historical context; but at the same time, they can be understood only In Gadamer’s view, there is no from the perspective (horizon) of the person interunderstanding without prejudices. preting them. It is impossible to transplant oneself to ancient Greece to understand Aristotle; we have to understand him from our own horizon. Even that which we want to know about the meaning of the text (“does it mean this or that?”) derives from our horizon. Gadamer answers the important question that follows from this formulation—how we can understand a text written from a completely different horizon than our own—by saying that every understanding implies the fusion of horizons. At the same time, the understanding of a text, in his view, is not the understanding of the author’s intention, of that which the author originally intended to convey. Gadamer thinks that interpretation provides a better understanding of an author than that author’s own understanding of him- or herself. For instance, he says, when reading a text in a foreign language, we are aware of the grammatical structures that the author, being a native speaker, used intuitively. Similarly, an artist is not a competent interpreter of his or her artwork. But Gadamer is careful to point out that although every understanding occurs from a certain horizon, this does not mean that it is arbitrary. His approach to interpretation is not a free-for-all relativism.

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Every interpretation is in a language, Gadamer points out, and this applies even to works in nonverbal media, such as works of the visual arts or music. As a result, he strongly emphasizes the role of language and one’s linguistic background in approaching a work of art. Even though works of visual art or musical compositions do not seem to occur in a verbal medium (a language), Gadamer argues that they assume and require language. As he says, language keeps step with reason, and it is the language of reason; our experience of the world is constituted through our language. In other words, in his view, all thinking is verbal. Relating his discussion of hermeneutics to Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein, Gadamer says that hermeneutics covers the totality of Dasein’s experience of the world. This statement leads to his claim about the universality of hermeneutics for describing the human experience of the world. What this means is that all human experience of the world occurs in a form of interpretation and needs to be described by hermeneutics. To defend this claim, Gadamer dedicates great effort to the discussion of artworks. Insofar as he wants to assert that hermeneutics describes the totality of the human experience of the world, Gadamer has to Insofar as he wants to assert that reject the aesthetic, nonconceptual approach to works hermeneutics describes the totality of the of art—he must attack the formalist position that conhuman experience of the world, Gadamer ceives of the evaluation of a work of art as independent has to reject the aesthetic, nonconceptual of its interpretation. In other words, hermeneutics is a approach to works of art. discipline that deals with meanings. Gadamer also wants to assert that the hermeneutic approach to human experience is universal and that it accounts for the totality of human interaction with the world. Consequently, aesthetic experience must be shown to be fully based on the use of language. He therefore has to argue that our aesthetic experience is always based on the meaning of the work of art. To argue that artworks cannot be enjoyed independently of their meaning, purely on the basis of perception or our spatial thinking and imagination, Gadamer has to argue that perception is never a mere reflection of that which is given to the senses. He claims

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that seeing is always “articulated reading,” that it is always accompanied by meanings. Kant, we have seen, defined beauty as nonconceptual enjoyment; but for Gadamer (who plays down the formalist aspects in Kant’s aesthetics), perception itself has to be conceptual. Insofar as he assumes that perception always includes meaning, Gadamer minimizes the significance of visual and spatial thinking. He points out that we read a picture—and something becomes a picture for us—only when we recognize what it represents. Such a reading is always predetermined by the horizon of the observer, and a modern observer “does not only see differently; he sees different things.” Consequently, what matters in architecture is its conceptual properties—that is, its function and location. Art (or architectural) history, in his view, will study those works of architecture that contain something “worth thinking about.” When a work of architecture is an artwork, it does not merely constitute an artistic solution to a design problem, but it firmly holds to this solution, even when its present appearance is fully alienated from its original determination (purpose). Conversely, in situations where this original purpose has become incomprehensible, we cannot relate to the architectural work. For Gadamer, the visual, formal, or three-dimensional properties of a work of architecture are significant only insofar as they can be interpreted as relevant to the original determination (purpose) of the building. Innocence of the Eye When Gadamer dismissed formalism and assumed that all human perception is predetermined by the available concepts, he was relying on an understanding of human perception that was very widespread Rather than assuming that we first at the time. During the middle decades of the twentieth perceive and only then recognize what century, the idea that one can perceive only what one we have seen, many thinkers of the can classify (i.e., conceptualize) enjoyed great populartwentieth century argued that there ity. Rather than assuming that we first perceive and can be no perception independent of only then recognize (subsume under concepts) what we classification. have seen, many thinkers of this era argued that there

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can be no perception independent of classification. In Germany, before and during World War II, the idea was widespread among right-wing thinkers such as the Nazi philosopher Erich Rothacker (1888–1965) and the Nazi collaborator and art historian Dagobert Frey (1883–1963), who argued that human perception is racially predetermined.6 After World War II, however, the idea was picked up by the left wing as well. In 1947 the Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (1915- ) tested the way school children perceive coins and concluded that children from less affluent background see them as bigger than the children from a more affluent families. His experiments triggered a fig. 6 virtual industry of research during the 1950s, in which psychologists were Fraser spiral. These apparent spirals are actually circles, as trying to establish various ways in which human perception is affected by can be seen if one follows the previous knowledge and expectations. Ultimately, since knowledge and line of the spiral using the tip of a pencil. expectations derive from one’s social and cultural background, this body of research implied that human perception results from one’s social and cultural background. Much of this research concentrated on various optical illusions, such as the Fraser Spiral, which consists The view that “there is no innocent eye” of concentric circles that are perceived as a spiral. (fig. 6) was promoted by the art historian Ernst Another often cited example of the way human percepGombrich and from art history it spread tion is affected by conceptual thinking is the so-called to architectural history and eventually duck-rabbit drawing: it is sometimes perceived as a to architecture schools. duck and sometimes as rabbit, but never as both. (fig. 7) This research had a huge impact on the humanities during the 1960s; it became known under the phrase “there is no innocent eye”. Among art historians it was promoted by Ernst Gombrich (1909– 2001) in his book Art and Illusion (1960), and from art history it spread to architectural history and eventually to architecture schools. The idea that human perception is inseparable from classification is not philosophically unproblematic. Early in the twentieth

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century, Edmund Husserl dismissed it on the basis of the following argument: If we say that we perceive a thing (a white cube) only because we classify it in a certain way (as a white cube), this is like saying that we do not perceive its whiteness or shape but merely its similarity with other white or cubic things. The thesis would be that perceiving something is always perceiving that something’s similarity with other things. But in that case, perceiving that similarity amounts to perceiving that similarity’s similarity with other similarities, and so on. The argument that perceiving is inseparable from classification thus ends up in an infinite regress. Further, if we can perceive only what we can classify, it becomes impossible to explain our perception of things or properties that we have not encountered in the past. Finally, psychologists also came to realize that, in the case of illusions, we still perceive them even when we know that what we see is an illusion. Knowing that the Fraser spiral consists of circles does not save us from seeing a spiral. But if this is so, then our perception must be independent of our conceptual knowledge. In the case of the duck-rabbit drawing, if perception were not inseparable from classification, then we would be seeing either a drawing of a duck or a drawing of a rabbit, but never one and the same drawing. Such arguments have gradually led psychologists to formulate more complex theories of human perception. Modern psychology postulates an early phase of visual processing (“early vision”) that generates the understanding of the spatial layout and is not affected by conceptual thinking. For instance, the influential psychologist Zenon Pylyshyn (whose views on mental rotation were discussed in the introduction) argues that human visuality is impenetrable for human conceptual thinking. Although the view that “there is no innocent eye” is still often heard in the humanities (especially among art historians), for contemporary psychologists it is part of the history of their discipline and they usually refer to it as “1950s psychology.” Christian Norberg-Schulz: Phenomenology and Architectural Theory The Norwegian architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz is often

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regarded as the most prominent representative of the phenomenological approach to architecture. His numerous books and publications exercised a huge influence on architectural theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Norberg-Schulz’s first major theoretical book, Intentions in Architecture (1963), placed the discussion of architecture (and especially the perception of architectural works) in the context of contemporary scientific research in psychology. In later work, he increasingly relied on Heideggerian concepts and terminology. Even then, one should mention, he did not fully reject the scientific, psychological understanding of human beings, even as, he says, he found Heidegger’s formulations more illuminating. The Heideggerian turn in Norberg-Schulz’s later work (for instance, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture [1980], Meaning in Western Architecture [1974], or The Concept of Dwelling [1993]) largely consists of reviewing in a popular manner Heidegger’s views from the essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and illustrating them with architectural examples. Already in Intentions in Architecture, Norberg-Schulz argues that the perception of architectural works (and everything else) is inseparable from our preexisting knowledge about the things we perceive. Perception is thus the recognition of things already known from experience. For instance, when a person perceives a Norberg-Schulz argues that perception single thing while moving around it, the image in that is inseparable from our preexisting person’s retina (the back internal surface of the eye) knowledge about the things we changes with great speed, but the person nevertheless perceive. knows that he or she is moving around the same thing. For Norberg-Schulz, this awareness is based on that person’s preexisting knowledge (assumptions) about how things are and has to be conceptual. Norberg-Schulz does not take into account the possibility that nonconceptual spatial thinking (including mental rotation) enables us (or is necessary) to grasp that we are walking around a single spatial object. In his view, the analysis of physiological processes in the eye and the brain is irrelevant when it comes to explaining human perception; our perception is actually a result of our previous experiences.

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We have already seen in the case of Gadamer that this position faces a number of difficulties, including the problem of explaining the human ability to acquire new knowledge: If all we can perceive are the things that we know about from our previous experience, it becomes impossible to explain how we acquire knowledge about things we have never encountered before. When he comes to discuss this problem, Norberg-Schulz simply states that “the given world consists of objects we know.” How we get to know about these things in the first place remains unexplained. From this discussion of human perception in Intentions in Architecture, Norberg-Schulz concludes that one doesn’t perceive shapes, but meaningful forms, and that things are always perceived with meanings. This led him to an understanding of works of art and architecture as concretizing symbols. Through cultural symbolization, he states, architecture shows that daily life has meanings that transcend the immediate situation. In later work, when he started articulating the discussion of architectural meanings using Heidegger’s terminology, he reiterated in various ways the idea that people dwell in an environment when they experience the environment as meaningful. To dwell between Earth and heaven, Norberg-Schulz says, one must experience meanings; only when the man-made environment is meaningful can man be at home. To write architectural history, then, is to write about the meanings of architectural works. Norberg-Schulz provides a wealth of examples of the analyses of architectural meanings as he conceives of them. We thus read that the early Christian basilica represents heavenly Jerusalem, that the Gothic cathedral was heaven to its contemporaries, that during the megalithic period, the cult of ancestors was the starting point of symbolism and the people of those times took the stone for the symbol of the procreative force of their ancestors. In Mediterranean megalithic architecture, material symbolized the solidity and permanence found in mountains and rocks. Similarly, Norberg-Schulz states that in ancient Egypt, the landscape was the model for the layout of public buildings, which should symbolize an eternal environmental order. And the columns of the temple

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6 Certainly some Gothic men may have thought that they were entering Paradise when they entered a Gothic cathedral, and they may have even left written documents about their thoughts, but how can we say that all individuals who lived in that period thought the same?

7 Half a century before Norberg-Schulz, Geoffrey Scott observed about similar attempts to ascribe meanings to Gothic cathedrals that “any characteristic, real or imagined, of a mixed set of northern races, during a

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of Apollo in Corinth, Greece, lack swelling (entasis) to express “the more abstract, intellectual strength of the god.” However, it remains unclear whose meanings NorbergSchulz is reporting when he makes these statements. Were these meanings associated with specific buildings by their architects and builders or by the individuals who used them in various periods, or are these the meanings simply attributed to architectural works by modern historians? Are the meanings he states the meanings that some or all individuals associated with architectural works in the given era? In his writings, Norberg-Schulz systematically attributes such meanings to “man” of a certain era (i.e., an abstract collective), not “a man” or “men.” This implies that all individuals from a certain collective (“man” of a certain era) ascribed the same meanings to certain architectural works.6 But even if we accept this assumption of collectivist history writing, it still remains unclear how we can know what meanings people of a past era ascribed to architectural works and how the modern perspective of the historian affects his or her interpretation of these meanings. We have seen how careful Gadamer was to ensure that the fact that every interpretation is from a certain horizon does not mean interpretation is a free-for-all business. Although he argued that we may be able to understand an author better than he or she understood him or herself, this does not mean that we are allowed to arbitrarily ascribe meanings to an author’s work. The fusion of horizons is, after all, a fusion of our and the author’s horizon. However, Norberg-Schulz leaves Gadamer’s arguments unmentioned in his major books. At the same time, many of his meaning ascriptions simply cannot be documented, and from the point of view of scholarship in architectural history, they are mere fantasies.7 (How can we know what megalithic men thought about their walls; or say that for them, stone meant the procreative force of their ancestors; or describe the intention of ancient Greek architects when they omitted entasis on the temple in Corinth?) Nevertheless, Norberg-Schulz’s introduction of Heidegger’s views on architecture made in its time an important contribution to another point: the analysis of the relationship between space and

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place. Norberg-Schulz defined existential space as the Heidegger’s views on architecture space of human action, marked by the concepts of orimade an important contribution to the entation and identification. Such space is different from analysis of the relationship between scientific, mathematically definable space. Following space and place. Heidegger, he further described the concept of place, which is not merely a location and is marked by charperiod of several hundred acter, or the spirit of the place. A place, from this point of view, gives a years, is discovered at common identity to a group of human beings. The emphasis on the identifiwill in these cathedrals of cation of individual humans with their local environment does occasionally the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although it is sound, in his writings, like an articulation of a right-wing political position. more than doubtful how In Heidegger’s case, this jargon of “rootedness” had horrible political implifar such characteristics are cations. Norberg-Schulz never explains what happens with the individuals capable of being embodied in architecture, or, if embodied, who attempt to live outside the locality with which they are identified, but how far we, with our modern we are left certain that his is not a particularly cosmopolitan worldview. habits of mind, can extract Nevertheless, the Heidegger-derived discussion of them unfalsified, or, if extracted, how far they are place did enable Norberg-Schulz to describe the problems that derive from relevant to the quality of the the facelessness of modernist architecture and its impact on the urban enviwork.” Geoffrey Scott, The ronment. At the time he was writing, the global impact of modernist archiArchitecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste tecture on the urban environment was becoming painfully obvious, and the (New York: W. W. Norton, modernist urban interventions often led to the destruction of what people 1999), 51. called place. Norberg-Schulz embraced Heidegger’s rejection of technology and saw the reason for the loss of sensibility for place among architects in the attitude that reduces everything to what is measurable, the tendency to transform concrete place, with its identity, into a segment of abstract space in which everything is quantifiable. His descriptions of the ways that steelglass-concrete buildings had converted urban environments into nonplaces are convincing, and they belong to an established genre of architectural writings of their time. It is much less certain that an attempt to preserve the spirit of the place, in a way that precludes discussion of the formal and visual properties of buildings (there can be no such properties because there are only meanings), is likely to provide a solution to the problems that he was writing about and that we are painfully aware of today. Norberg-Schulz’s discussion of

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The great interest in philosophy and theoretical thinking that architects and architectural academics have manifested in recent decades has been part of a trend that has swept through the humanities everywhere in the Western world; scholars and theorists have increasingly felt the need to reconsider the theoretical bases of their various disciplines. In Englishspeaking scholarship, however, this interest has not been reciprocated by academic philosophers, who have rarely paid much attention to larger intellectual trends in the humanities. Through the twentieth century, the attention of English-speaking philosophers was predominantly oriented toward the sciences, and they tended to neglect the genuine philosophical problems faced by the humanities. A result of this, in the final decades of the twentieth century, was the rise of “Theory,” a widespread tendency for nonphilosophers—scholars with no formal training in philosophy—to work extensively on philosophical problems related to their disciplines and engage in the kind of intellectual efforts that in the past were mainly reserved for philosophers. The lack of philosophical training in such endeavors need not be a disadvantage; a great thinker can achieve powerful insights in philosophy even without formal training. However, one should also be prepared for the possibility that the results may resemble a nonarchitect’s attempt to design. The powerful insight is unlikely to be properly developed—which, in philosophy, means to acquire the form of a consistent structure of arguments. When reading such works, one should be prepared to disregard deficiencies (such as possible internal contradictions) and should not expect a fully formalized philosophical presentation. This can be a problem: There are good reasons why philosophers write in the technical language they use and why they avoid contradictions. If an author’s position is not developed into a logically consistent one, then, if we ask what he or she is saying about a certain problem, we may get diverse and mutually exclusive answers. It becomes hard to say, even after a careful analysis, what the author is talking about.

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French Intellectual Influence in the Final Decades of the Twentieth Century Because of the specific model of philosophical culture that characterizes French intellectual life, the rise of “Theory” in the English-speaking humanities (including architectural theory) has often appeared to be a French cultural invasion. At a time when English-speaking philosophers showed very little interest in the cultural life of their countries, French thinkers seemed to have much to offer. One should bear in mind that it would be a gross misunderstanding of French cultural traditions to translate the French word philosophe as an equivalent of the English philosopher or the German Philosoph. A much more accurate English translation of the French word would be public intellectual. On the one hand, French philosophes’ contributions to specific fundamental philosophiIt would be a gross misunderstanding cal disciplines, such as logic, epistemology, or ontology, of French cultural traditions to transfor the past three centuries have been remarkably late the French word philosophe as an meager in comparison with those of German and equivalent of the English philosopher or Anglo-American philosophers. On the other, French the German Philosoph. philosophes have been very productive as men of letters, engaged and actively contributing to French intellectual, cultural, and even political life—the kind of involvement typically eschewed by German, British, or American philosophers. French philosophes are often engaged with literature and write novels to explain and promote their ideas—while for German or English-speaking philosophers, literature is at best a pastime and something they rarely take very seriously. (Martin Heidegger is the most notable exception.) As a result, that which is recognized as philosophie in French intellectual life is much more rhetorical and much less concerned with the logical structure of arguments and the consistency of positions argued. Since the 1970s, because of their multifaceted intellectual interests and their rather relaxed attitude when it comes to philosophical technicalities, French philosophes were much better suited to respond to the philosophical interests of intellectual life in English-speaking countries

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than English-speaking academic philosophers. The relativism that French thinkers preached coincided with the interests of the American liberal intelligentsia and the formative experiences of the generation of 1968, while the language barrier and the notorious lack of clarity in their writings seem to have stimulated even greater interest. But one should not forget that the great impact of French philosophes on intellectual life in the United States and Great Britain came in a period of exceptionally vigorous philosophical research that has characterized English-speaking philosophy for the past half a century. If English-speaking philosophers lacked interest in the humanities, that was because they were doing a lot of interesting work themselves. Analytic philosophy (the approach to philosophy that dominated English-speaking philosophy departments during the twentieth century and will be discussed in the next chapter) is characterized by a strong emphasis on the logical structure and consistency of arguments. From analytic philosophers’ perspective, the works of French thinkers discussed in this chapter simply lack the necessary rigor to count as philosophy, their topics do not belong to mainstream philosophical disciplines (logic, epistemology, ontology), and the lack of clarity in writing is perceived as intentional obfuscation at best and as false intellectual pretence at worst. Even today, the French thinkers discussed in this chapter are not recognized as philosophers by most of the English-speaking philosophical community.1 For an architect or architectural theorist, it is important to bear this in mind, but also to be open to different approaches in order to profit from both sides and be able to use those ideas that are architecturally relevant.

classifies (in chapter subtitles) Ferdinand de Saussure as a linguist, Jacques Derrida as a linguist and literary theorist, and Michel Foucault as a historian and social theorist.

Nietzsche An important aspect of the romanticist reaction to the Enlightenment was the denial that there was anything universal about human beings—and particularly their rationality. Rationality came to be conceived of as relative to the collective to which the individual human being belongs. This collective could have been race, culture, class, ethnicity, or any other group, depending on the ideological position the individual author wanted to promote. In

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the work of the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), we find a different approach. Nietzsche rejected both rationality and the importance of the collective. Although he lived much earlier, his work was a great influence on French thinkers of the late twentieth century, so it seems more suitable to discuss him in this chapter. Nietzsche was born into a family of Protestant pastors, and in his youth, he prepared for a religious career; but as a university student, he switched to the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature. His subsequent academic career was thus in classical philology. The active years of his life were, however, plagued by a venereal disease, and, probably as a result of the disease, he spent the last ten years of his life suffering from insanity. Nietzsche was a great critic of religion and particularly Christian morality, which he saw as the morality of slaves. In his view, Roman slaves resented their masters, and since many of them were early Christians, this led them to formulate an ethics in which anyone who rises above the herd is bad. In opposition to Christian morality, Nietzsche glorifies the strong. “Might is right” can be said to be his main principle when it comes to understanding human society. In his view, ideas such as respect for other individuals, putting oneself in the position of others, or compassion derive from the fear of being dominated by the strong. He sees that the origin of such ideas is the desire to be safely and anonymously absorbed into the herd. Nietzsche was also deeply opposed to democracy or any humanitarian agenda in general. He even rejected the concept of the law of nature (such as physical laws), because he saw in it a reflection of the democratic impulses of the herd. He argued that natural laws—which imply equivalent outcomes in experiments under identical circumstances— were invented with the rise of the democratic spirit, analogous to (and in order to justify) the principle that all individuals should be equal before the laws of the state—an idea that he abhorred. In Nietzsche’s view, there are no facts, but only interpretations. One cannot even say that “everything is subjective” or relative to the views of individual human subjects, since that is an interpretation,

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too. Saying that everything is subjective would rely on the concept of the human subject—an idea that he dismissed as an invention. In one of his late texts, from the period when he was already a hospitalized mental patient, he denies reason, thinking, consciousness, and truth as fictions. Knowledge, he says, is merely a tool of power. Nietzsche made no effort to substantiate these claims, but one should not merely dismiss them as a madman’s raving. Equivalent views, we shall see throughout this chapter, were later systematically deployed by the French thinkers of the twentieth century and came to play a major role in architectural theory. A good illustration of Nietzsche’s views is his analysis of Socrates’ critique of rhetoric (as presented by Plato). Both Plato and Socrates dismissed rhetoric because it is an art of convincing that uses stylistic devices to produce an emotional reaction in the public, thus detracting from the logical consideration of truth, which, for Socrates and Plato, was the only thing that matters. But Nietzsche’s response was that demonstrating that something is true is merely a particularly efficient way of convincing people. Proving that something is true is thus no more than another rhetorical strategy. Nietzsche ultimately subsumes logic under rhetoric and sees philosophy as a way of writing fiction. This position has particularly appealed to the French thinkers discussed later in this chapter. Nietzsche’s antihumanitarian and antidemocratic sentiments were later well received by the Nazis. The Third Reich authorities distributed to their troops 150,000 copies of his book Thus Spake Zarathustra, to their troops, and it was among the three books most Nietzsche’s antihumanitarian and widely read by German soldiers in World War II. This antidemocratic sentiments were later means that those left-wing authors who want to incorwell received by the Nazis; those leftporate Nietzsche’s teachings into their position must wing authors who want to incorporate make a careful effort to distance themselves from the Nietzsche’s teachings into their position right-wing political implications of Nietzsche’s views. must make a careful effort to distance In the case of the authors discussed in this chapter, themselves from the right-wing political most of whom stood firmly in left-wing politics, this implications of Nietzsche’s views. typically meant that they were attracted to Nietzsche’s

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views that there were no facts, that everything was interpretation, and that the distinction between truth and falsity was merely a rhetorical strategy. Saussure and Structuralism The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was the first to articulate a number of theoretical ideas about language that subsequently came to play a major role in French intellectual life. Linguistics as the scientific study of languages became a discipline in the early nineteenth century. Before that period, scholars studied the grammar and literature of various languages, but this did not allow for systematic comparative insights into their history and structure. Early in the nineteenth century, it was discovered that a language of ancient India, called Sanskrit, had remarkable similarities with ancient Greek and Latin. By comparing the three languages, it became possible to reconstruct some elements of an original Indo-European language, from which almost all European languages, as well as major modern languages spoken in India today, derive. Starting from this discovery, linguistics developed as a systematic study of the evolution of languages. Such an approach, which studies the development of languages (or any other phenomenon) through time, is called diachronic. Saussure’s major contribution was to insist that one should also study the structure of a language at one specific moment and the way it functions in a given context independently of its development. This is called the synchronic approach. He differentiated between speech (the way a language is used in a specific situation or A diachronic approach studies the by an individual) and language, the system that enables development of a phenomenon through communication. In Saussure’s view, language is a time; a synchronic approach studies social institution, and it is constituted by the collective the structure of a phenomenon at one knowledge of the language in the minds of the indispecific moment and the way it functions viduals who use it; it could be compared to the totality in a given context independent of its of imprints in everyone’s brain or a dictionary of which development. every speaker has a copy. The signs and words that

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languages use to express concepts are arbitrary in the sense that any other word or sign could perform the same task, if such a function of a given word had been socially established. This is, of course, not a new view. Except for Plato and some mystics, few thinkers throughout history have denied that words or symbols are social conventions. But Saussure emphasized that it was the way individual signs (words) differed from other signs (words) that enabled them to function within the structure of Saussure emphasized that the way signs a language: If they did not differ from other signs, differed from each other enabled them they could not perform their function within a lanto function as signs in a language: If they guage. One of Saussure’s examples is the letter t: did not differ from other signs, they People write it in many different ways, and sometimes could not perform their function. two persons write this same letter in ways that have very little in common. Nevertheless, we can read the handwriting of both persons because each of them writes the same letter consistently in a certain way, and we can recognize the role that a certain shape performs in each person’s handwriting. So it is not the signs, voices, letters, or words that constitute a language, but rather the system of differences between these elements. “In the language itself, there are 2 only differences,” concludes Saussure.2 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course Saussure dismissed the view that a linguistic sign is a in General Linguistics (Chicago: link between a thing and a name and insisted that it stands for a relationOpen Court, 1995), 118. ship between concepts and sounds. (He assumed that writing derives from spoken language, a point that was later strongly criticized by the linguist and literary theorist Jacques Derrida [1930–2004].) In According to Saussure, language and Saussure’s description, language is not merely a system thought can be compared to two of signs that express thoughts. Rather, language and sides of the same piece of paper: It thought can be compared to two sides of the same piece is impossible to cut one side of the of paper: The thought is one side and the language the paper without cutting the other and it other side of the same phenomenon. It is impossible is similarly impossible to think without to cut one side of the paper without cutting the other; forming words. by analogy, it is impossible to think without forming

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3 Since from this point of view, we all think in some language, it is impossible to say what a real reality would be.

4 In fact, this example may be taken to undermine the point Saussure wants to make: If all thinking were really inseparable from the language one knows, then it would be impossible and not merely difficult to learn a language that relies on a different conceptual framework and articulates the world into a different reality. If Saussure were right, French speakers simply would not be able to learn Russian. Since this is not true, there must be some aspect of French speakers’ thinking that is not fully determined by their language.

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words. Since languages are social conventions, it follows that the social (linguistic) environment is decisive for the content of human experience. In other words, different languages organize human experience into different realities.3 This view was later repeated (as we have seen in the introduction) by the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. For instance, Slavic languages (such as Russian or Polish), Saussure says, differentiate consistently between the complete and incomplete aspects of verbs (such as the English “to look” and “to see”). Some languages, like French, do not make this distinction so systematically, and consequently, it is very hard for speakers of such languages to learn a Slavic language.4 Because one cannot differentiate (“cut”) language on one side without doing the same to thought on the other, Saussure implies that human thinking is fully and utterly delimited by the systems of verbal behavior available within a certain linguistic group. It means that there can be no (awareness of) physical reality, no facts independent of linguistic reality; reality (or what we know about it) is constituted by the language of a certain group. Half a century after Saussure’s death, Jacques Derrida fully developed the implications of this view. Saussure’s emphasis on the study of the structure of a language, as opposed to the history of its various aspects, attracted much attention in the various fields of the humanities. The idea to study the internal synchronic structure of institutions (how they function and not how they came about) became known as structuralism. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), for instance, applied this approach to the study of the social life of various tribes in Amazonia; he studied the interaction of different social institutions in tribal life. Similar methods were developed and applied in sociology, literary theory, and so on. Toward the end of the 1960s, the authors discussed later in this chapter gradually articulated the radical relativist implications of structuralism, and this position came to be known as post-structuralism. One of the French authors who participated in this development was the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915–1980). In his

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5 It is not clear that emphasis on human individuality in this sense is a particularly modern way of looking at the authorship of literary works. The ancient Greeks and Romans certainly assumed that the literary works they read were produced by authors.

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1968 essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes criticized the widespread approach of literary critics who make great efforts to reconstruct the original intention of the author of a literary work, that is trying to figure out what the author wanted to say. In Barthes’s view, the general public’s understanding of literature is tyrannically centered on the person, life, tastes, and passions of the author. This results in the tendency to seek the explanation of the work in the person who produced it. Such an understanding is a modern phenomenon, Barthes claims, and it derives from the widespread modern emphasis on human individuality. 5 In opposition to this view, Barthes advances the position (which he ascribes to the French nineteenth-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé) that language itself writes, not the author. Writing, in his view, implies impersonality. Barthes sees in authors mere scriptors (i.e., scribes), individuals whose intentions are irrelevant for the meaning of their text. The scriptor’s hand does not originate in the scriptor’s thoughts, in this view; its only origin is language itself. Once there is no author, it makes little sense to try to understand the text; to insist on what the author wanted to say is to impose limits on interpretation, to expect that one can determine the text’s final or real meaning. Instead, reading depends on the reader and is to be conceived of as independent of the author’s intention. But neither is the reader, according to Barthes, a person, an individual human being. Barthes conceives of the reader as the container (space) on which all elements (quotations) of writing are inscribed and none of them lost—such a reader has no history, biography, or psychology. It is important to compare Barthes’s position with Saussure’s views on language. For Saussure, language, as a social institution, is located in human minds; it is the knowledge and ability shared by the speakers of a certain language. But for Barthes, similarly to Nietzsche, there are no individual humans, either as potential authors or readers. For Saussure, language delimits the thinking capacities of individuals; but for Barthes, it is a force in its own right that somehow exists outside human society, insofar as society is understood as a set of individual human

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beings. Barthes’s radical denial of human individualindividualist civic values and individual ity came in 1968, and it strongly correlated with the human rights (for instance, rights of leftist critique of bourgeois society that was even more property) because they saw in the rights strongly articulated in France in those days than in of individuals the fundamental basis of the United States. The leftist intellectuals rejected capitalist, bourgeois society. individualist civic values (for instance, individual human rights such as the rights of property) because they saw in the rights of individuals the fundamental basis of capitalist, bourgeois society. Barthes’ views are to be understood in the context of the left-wing politics of his time. Since the “death of the author” subsequently became such a prominent theme in deconstruction, it is interesting to consider how this position compares with the position of the architect in society for the past twenty years. It may seem paradoxical that in the same period in which the dominant architectural ideology relied on theoretical positions that denied the significance of the author, the architectural profession was marked by the unprecedented glorification of individual architects. The widespread use of phrases such as “avant-garde architect” and “cuttingedge architect” is hardly compatible with the idea that individual creativity does not matter. In fact, in accordance with Barthes’s views, in the introduction to the catalog of the 1988 deconstructionist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the curator, Mark Wigley, stated that “the nightmare of deconstructionist architecture inhabits the uncon6 scious of pure form rather than the unconsciousness of the architect.”6 Mark Wigley, “Deconstructivist Although individual architects were celebrated as never before, if one Architecture,” in looks more carefully, one will recognize Barthes’s position in their attiDeconstructivist Architecture, eds. Philip Johnson and Mark tude toward clients and users of architectural works. If authorial intenWigley (New York: Museum of tion does not control the meaning of a text, this will be the case with the Modern Art, 1988), 10–20. architectural brief and the client needs that it expresses. If the individual reader of a literary work as an individual human being is irrelevant, then this is also the case with the users of architectural works. The “death of the author” in architecture is thus best observed as the rejection (or The leftist intellectuals rejected

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7 Or as Peter Eisenman observed elsewhere: “My work...is against the tradi-

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suppression) of functional concerns in design during the 1980s and 1990s. A widely cited statement attributed to the architect Peter Eisenman (1932–) is “I don’t do function.” Wigley’s view was that “function follows deformation.”7 Thus, attitudes toward the architect’s clients and other users of an architectural work provide evidence of the death of individuality proclaimed by post-structuralist theorists.

tional notion of how you occupy a house....And having a column in the middle of the bedroom so you could not put a bed in it certainly attacked the notion of how you occupy a bedroom,” “Peter Eisenman. An Architectural Design Interview by Charles Jancks,” Architectural Design, 58 (1988): 41–61.

Derrida and the “Metaphysics of Presence” Through the 1990s, no other thinker exercised such an influence on the humanities, including architectural theory, as Jacques Derrida (1930– 2004). In the humanities departments of English-speaking universities, he was perceived as the philosopher of the era, and his impact on architectural writings and theory of the same period was immense. The rise of deconstruction as the dominant theoretical paradigm in architecture during the 1980s and 1990s was fundamentally based on the influence of his writings. At the same time, the celebrity status that Derrida enjoyed in the English-speaking academy in those years did not go unchallenged. While he was famed as a philosopher, his works were hardly ever seriously considered by academic philosophers and philosophy departments, where he faced almost complete rejection, largely because of his notoriously convoluted and impenetrable style. Another important aspect of his work that significantly contributed to the poor reception of Derrida’s writings among academic philosophers was that he wrote about fields such as linguistics, literary theory and criticism, and even theology, rather than about the established philosophical disciplines. Derrida was in fact originally trained as a philosophe in the French tradition. While he started his intellectual career as an Edmund Husserl scholar, most of his work consists of philosophical interventions outside traditional philosophical disciplines. One should thus not be surprised that he acquired the status of a philosophical celebrity in various disciplines of the humanities without being recognized as a colleague by most philosophers.

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The main topics of Derrida’s works are formulated within the framework of or in opposition to the central concepts of Saussure’s linguistic theories. Many architects and architecture students who have tried to read Derrida without working through Saussure first have rarely profited from their efforts as much they Derrida cannot be understood without should have. Derrida cannot be understood without studying Saussure first. studying Saussure first. At the same time, Derrida’s opposition to Saussure is multilayered. The most widely known instance pertains to the status of writing. For Saussure, and for linguistics in general, writing has a derivative status: It is a notation of the sounds we pronounce. In European languages, notation corresponds, with different accuracy, to the voices that are pronounced. Also, children learn to write after they have learned to speak; people were able to speak before writing was invented, and some cultures do not know of writing even today. It is plausible to think, as Saussure did, that speech expresses thoughts, while writing is merely a sign of speech and thus a sign of a sign. Derrida develops an extensive criticism of this position. How can Saussure’s approach be called general linguistics (the title of Saussure’s book), Derrida asks, if it is concerned with one kind of sign, that is, spoken words? Also, Saussure’s very thesis that signs are arbitrary prohibits the making of a radical distinction between spoken and written signs. Insofar as they are arbitrary, it should not matter whether they are written or spoken. Saussure complained about the phenomenon (which he regarded as undesirable) that writing sometimes affects speech: People are sometimes led into mispronouncing certain words because of the way these words are written. Derrida, however, points out that this phenomenon precisely shows that writing is not merely a sign of speech but that speech can be a sign of writing. Saussure, of course, was not the first to privilege speech over writing; similar views can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle and were constantly repeated in various intellectual traditions. Derrida does not think that this privileging was merely accidental. His argument at this

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point becomes much less philosophical and much more, one could say, comparable to psychoanalytical interpretations. Just as a psychoanalyst explores the subconscious beliefs of a patient to discover his or her motivations, Derrida tries to recapture the underlying assumptions that have led to what he sees as the suppression of writing for the past twenty-five centuries. Voice, he argues, is assumed to indicate the immediate presence of the speaker; writing is thus perceived as secondary, voice as primary. Behind the emphasis on the priority of speech Derrida sees a wider emphasis on the idea of presence. When Derrida talks about the preference for presence, his statements are to be taken in the widest sense possible: Presence can be the presence (the assumed existence) of the author of a text or speech, or it can be a much wider concept, anything or anyone whose presence is believed to make human life more stable or knowledge more certain, including God. Derrida thus rejects the “metaphysics of presence,” which in his view has dominated Western thinking for the past twenty-five centuries. It is very important to understand properly the phrase “metaphysics of presence.” The very word metaphysics goes back to the Aristotelian tradition: It pertained to the block of Aristotle’s texts that came “after” (meta in Greek) his writings on physics and in which Aristotle attempted to prove the existence of God. Later, through the history of philosophy, the word came also to refer to philosophers’ attempts to resolve other irresolvable problems, such as the immortality of the soul or the infinity of the universe. For Derrida, the term has mainly dismissive connotations, similar to the way the English word mythology is sometimes used to disparage discussion of things that do not exist. Derrida thus uses the phrase “metaphysics of presence” to dismiss any talk about any implied presence in general; while it is understood that whatever is believed to bring stability to human life or certainty to knowledge must somehow be assumed to be present in order to provide that stability and certainty. Examples of the metaphysics of presence that need to be rejected are thus the assumptions of the presence of physical

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reality independent of our thinking or the idea of truth as corresponding with that reality, the idea that there are individual human beings whose thoughts are expressed in the texts they write and also philosophical conceptions such as Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s essences, Descartes’s or Kant’s thinking human subject, or Hegel’s Spirit. Another term that Derrida uses with negative connotations is logocentrism. In Greek, logos means “word” and also “rational argument” or “reasoning.” The modern English word logic derives from this word, as does the ending -logy in the names of many sciences. Derrida identifies logocentrism, which ultimately turns out to be the belief in the rational structure of the world, with phonocenDerrida identifies logocentrism, which trism, which is the belief in the priority of spoken lanultimately turns out to be the belief in guage. He implies the analogy between the belief in the rational structure of the world, with the presence of a rational structure of the world with phonocentrism, which is the belief in the the belief in the presence of a person (author) as the priority of spoken language. origin of speech and the source of its primacy over writing. In other words, the belief in the primacy of speech over writing derives from the belief that spoken words are closer to the original author and author’s intention than writing—a view that Derrida rejects. Similarly, he rejects the belief in the logical order of the universe—a belief that can be taken to assume the belief in the author of the universe (God). The analogy thus suggests that phonocentrism and logocentrism go hand in hand. However, such an understanding relies on analogies and departs from the ground of philosophical arguments. Derrida’s statements on the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism do not represent an explicitly stated system of logical arguments but rather rely on analogies and resemble psychoanalytic interpretations, for which reason they are among the hardest sections to interpret systematically when reading his work. For our purpose here, it may be enough to think about the architectural implications of the rejection of the metaphysics of presence. Architecturally, presence can be anything that implies a reference to the

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presence (existence) of human beings. The rejection presence includes the rejection of the of the metaphysics of presence includes the rejection interpretation of architecture and an of the interpretation of architecture and an architect’s architect’s work in relation to human work in relation to human activities—it thus boils activities and the function the building down once again to the rejection of functional considshould provide for. erations. It also precludes concerns with the human scale (the metaphysics of scale, as Derrida put it in one of his exchanges 8 with Eisenman), as well as the consideration of the site and context.8 As Jacques Derrida and Peter Wigley stated, “Contextualism has been used as an excuse for mediocrity, Eisenman, Chora L Works, ed. for a dumb servility to the familiar. Since deconstructivist architecture Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli seeks the unfamiliar within the familiar, it displaces the context rather Press, 1986), 95. than acquiesce to it.” 9 The rejection of the metaphysics of

9 Wigley, “Deconstructivist

Différance Because of his criticism of the view that writing derives from speech, it is sometimes inaccurately stated that Derrida claimed that writing comes before speech. In fact, he talks that way about arche-writing. By arche-writing, he means the system of differences that enables articulation of the elements of both speech and writing. If language is going to consist of repeatable elements, something must ensure the differentiation of these elements. As we have seen, Saussure’s view was that language consists of differences, and Derrida’s position fundamentally relies on this view. What enables differentiation is différance (spelled with a). The French verb différer means both to differ and to defer. Différance is not a word in French just as it is not in English; it is Derrida’s invention—and as he Différance is that which makes explains, it is neither a word nor does it stand for a differences between elements of concept. He lists what différance is not: It is neither sena language and concepts, their sible nor intelligible, it is not something that exists, nor articulation, possible. can it be represented by a sign. It is that which makes differences between elements of a language and concepts, their articulation, possible. Différance, the play of these differences, therefore cannot be a concept; it is rather the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual Architecture,” 17.

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10 It does not help to say that it is “not being the same,” because then we shall have to explain “not being the same” as “being different.”

11 More precisely, his phrase is “consciousness before signs.” Since signs are always social constructs, “consciousness before signs” would be a part of consciousness that is not fully reducible to social interaction.

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system in general. What Derrida discusses is thus a very difficult idea—a nonconcept that no words can express. A good way to grasp what he is trying to achieve when discussing it, is to try to explain, without examples, what difference (with an e) means in English. We know what various things or abstract ideas are: such as tables, chairs, serendipity, or recklessness. We can say how they differ. But what is difference itself?10 Can we say that difference itself exists? If it does, what is it like? If it does not, how can things be different? Différance is thus that which provides differences between the elements of a language and their articulation. This articulation results in the articulation of concepts, and arche-writing is a play of différance, Derrida says. We have seen that, according to Saussure, words and concepts are like the two sides of the same piece of paper. Derrida infers from this that human thinking is ultimately the product of the arbitrary systems of signs (their differences) that exist within a language. Very much like Barthes, Derrida dismisses the significance of authorial intention for the interpretation of a text. When he talks about the philosophies of Descartes or Hegel, he says that the names of these authors have no substantial value, but only name specific philosophical problems. The idea of the name of an author, he says, is “frivolous”; in arche-writing, proper names are erased. Names reserved for unique human beings belong to the myth of presence, the idea that there are individual humans whose thoughts are expressed in words and texts. Similarly, Derrida dismisses the idea of individual human consciousness as equivalent to the assumption of self-presence, ultimately yet another kind of metaphysics of presence.11 As in the work of Barthes, in Derrida’s writings, one can feel a worldview strongly marked by (leftwing) collectivism. For instance, he dismisses protests against the powers of the state or law made from the position of individual rights as “anarchistic and libertarian.” Such protests, in his view, generally rely on the idea of the self-presence of the individual and ultimately on the metaphysics of presence.

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However, if the author’s intention does not determine the meaning of a text, what is it that interpretations provide us with? How can we know that an interpretation is correct if its aim is not to reconstruct the intention of the author? Derrida’s point is that when one makes a sign, this can happen only by thoughts that involve There is nothing outside the text. other signs, and every sign is ultimately about another —Derrida sign. A reading cannot expect to step out of the text toward something else—for instance, the physical objects to which a text refers, what the author wanted to say, his or her beliefs, political views, and so on. Derrida’s famous statement is that “there is nothing outside the text.” This may again seem to be a strange proposition. Certainly, one is inclined to think that there is a physical reality outside books, and books are often about physical reality. Saussure dismissed, we have seen, the idea that words refer to physical objects and limited their function to the expression of thoughts, but his position did not preclude that thoughts themselves refer to physical things. After all, one cannot talk about things without thinking about them. Derrida turns this argument upside down. We can know about things only by thinking about them, and all thinking (according to Saussure’s view, which we have seen that Derrida endorses) is inseparable from language. To explain a thought, he argues, one has to refer to another thought, and this process extends into infinity. Since thoughts are assumed to be always in a language, any additional explanation is bound to produce more words, and we shall never extract ourselves from language. This means that there can be no physical reality outside texts, nor can there be any distinction between fiction and facts. Derrida’s position thus also implied radical relativism regarding facts and truth understood as relationships of texts to physical reality. All this, however, also shows that the fundamental aspects of Derrida’s position are rooted in Saussure’s linguistic theories in such a way that they lose much of their credibility if considered from the point of view of alternative linguistic theories.

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Deconstruction as practiced by Derrida is an approach to the interpretation of texts that mainly involves exposing their internal inconsistencies by revealing how they rely on the metaphysics of presence. Since both deconstruction and hermeneutics largely concentrate on the study of texts and interpretation and since they both delimit human experience to language, it is interesting to see how they differ. Hermeneutics, as promoted by Gadamer, still relies on the assumption that understanding is the primary aim of interpretation and tries to determine the meaning of a text in its context; it also includes the awareness of our From the deconstructivist point of view, limits in reconstructing the original context. From the however, the very idea of understanddeconstructivist point of view, however, the very idea ing is a dubious proposition, since the of understanding is a dubious proposition; as we have interpretation of texts merely generates just seen, the interpretation of texts merely generates more texts. more texts. The differences between Gadamer’s and Derrida’s approaches became particularly obvious during an encounter between the two thinkers that was organized in Paris in 1981. Gadamer gave a talk about the importance of goodwill in understanding; the ability to understand, he said, is the fundamental endowment of human beings, which enables communal life and dialogue. He emphasized the importance of speech and the immediacy of conversation, which provides better oportunities to clarify what is meant. But for Derrida, these were “inquiries into unfindable objects of thought.” Goodwill, Derrida reminded, is an important concept from Kantian ethics, and it assumes a willing individual human subject. He consequently saw in the idea of goodwill merely a metaphysical 12 construct.12 As for the idea of understanding through dialogue, he expressed In other words, the idea of doubts that he had ever experienced it. The encounter thus finished in a goodwill assumes the will complete impasse. of individual humans and consequently relies on the Later commentators were often inclined to blame metaphysics of presence. Derrida for the failure of the encounter and accuse him of sabotaging the exchange. But Derrida was in a difficult situation, since Gadamer’s talk was precisely pitched to score points for the ability of hermeneutics to deal

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13 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Miehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990) 41; John R. Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” The New York Review of Books, 30 (October 1983). The phrase “obscurantist terrorist” actually comes from Michel Foucault, whom Searle cites regarding Derrida: “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” Steven R. Postrel and Edward Feser, “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle,” reason.com, February 2000., http://reason. com/archives/2000/02/01/ reality-principles-anintervie/4.

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with verbal communication and understanding. An encounter of this kind could not have been successful without it being a defeat for Derrida. It is thus fair to say that he consistently defended his position. Nevertheless, the event does illustrate the limits of deconstruction when it comes to dialogue and understanding. Much stormier was Derrida’s exchange with the American analytic philosopher John Searle. At the time he entered the debate with Derrida, Searle was already widely renowned for his contributions to the philosophy of language; today, he is arguably the most influential living English-speaking philosopher. His work has made a huge impact on the philosophy of mind. It is hard to imagine two thinkers with more different views on what constitues a philosopher’s job than Searle and Derrida. Searle is the great master of writing clearly and explicitly about difficult philosophical problems. In one of their exchanges, Derrida observed that the “candor” of Searle’s writing was rare in French-language polemics, which tend to be “artful and indirect.” Searle, indeed, did not hesitate to refer to Derrida as an “obscurantist terrorist” in one of his book reviews.13 The confrontation started over Derrida’s interpretation of the work of the Oxford University philosopher of language John Austin (1911–1960), under whom Searle studied. In his essay “Signature Event Context,” Derrida criticized Austin’s refusal to consider “non-serious” speech acts. Searle, who took to defending the position of his deceased mentor, concentrated in his response on Derrida’s claim that what makes writing different from speech is the repeatability of elements. Contrary to Derrida, Searle argued that the permanence of writing is its main characteristic. From what we have seen above, it is clear that the repeatability of elements is important for Derrida because it enables the system of differences that constitute writing the way he understands it, or what he also calls arche-writing. Searle’s criticism would be valid if the concept of writing on which Derrida relied was the same as the everyday use of the term, but it was not. In his long and convoluted reply, Derrida was able to point

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out, rightly, that he was misunderstood; Searle should indeed have read his other works to understand the terminology Derrida was using. But Derrida’s victory, one could say, was also his defeat: By making this point, he defended himself as the author of the work discussed, and he defended the authorial integrity of his works—in other words, exactly what, throughout his opus, he systematically denied. Architecture and Deconstruction Modernism firmly held sway over international architecture for four decades after World War II. By the 1980s, many architects felt dissatisfied with the limited repertoire of forms that modernist architecture allowed. Some architects started experimenting, often ironically, with the use of traditional and classical elements in facade design; these experiments came to be known in those days as postmodern architecture. Outside architecture, however, the term postmodern came to be used for the French intellectual influence that was felt starting in the 1980s, and it is in this latter sense that the term is used in this chapter. Another equivalent term, less commonly used in relation to architecture, is post-structuralism. Eisenman was already collaborating with Derrida in the mid-1980s, but the impact of deconstruction on architecture really began after the 1988 exhibition of deconstructivist architecture in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Wigley’s essay for the exhibition 14 catalog is still one of the most succinct statements of the deconstructivist Wigley, “Deconstructivist program in architecture.14 Modernist architects strove to achieve the purity Architecture.” of forms such as cubes, cylinders, and spheres, Wigley argued; theirs was an architecture marked by harmony, unity, and stabilWigley argued that deconstructivist ity. Deconstructivist architects, however, discover and architects discover and locate “inherent locate “inherent dilemmas within buildings.” Architects dilemmas within buildings.” whose works were presented in the exhibition shared “the fact that each constructs an unsettling building by 15 exploiting the hidden potential of modernism.”15 Deconstructivist architects Ibid., p. 20. were thus revealing the internal incoherence of the cultural expectations

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projected on modernist architecture by the general program implied, in the form of the public the way Derrida deconstructed texts by showrejection of the metaphysics of presence, ing their internal incoherences. As we have already the rejection of the consideration of seen, the application of the deconstructivist program function, scale, and context. implied, in the form of the rejection of the metaphysics of presence, the rejection of the consideration of function, scale, and context. (In a 1989 letter to Eisenman, Derrida precisely expressed concerns about the capacity of such an approach to architecture to deal with social problems.) Wigley’s observations that deconstructivist architecture reveals the possibilities of disorder hidden in modernist formal systems were articulated into a clear system of design instructions by 16 Bernard Tschumi (1944–).16 Tschumi emphasized the importance of disA particularly good summary junctions, disruptions, dissociation, distortion, superposition, and fragis in his article “Parc de la mentation in architectural design. Such architecture, he argued, is a Villette, Paris,” Architectural Design, 58 (1988), 33–45. result of contemporary cultural circumstances, which are marked by the rejection of the belief in a unified human subject whose autonomy would 17 be reflected in the autonomy of the architectural work.17 Such an underTschumi does not define standing of architecture, in Tschumi’s view, is to be rejected in favor of the crucial term he is using: the post-humanist one, which stresses the dispersion of the individual autonomy. The context suggests that the term refers human subject and expresses the effects of this dispersion on the unified, to the unity of human needs coherent architectural form.18 in the individual persons for The relationship to the visual remained the fundamenwhose use architecture is built. tal theoretical problem of deconstructivist architecture. The emphasis on 18 conceptual thinking, conceived of as inseparable from its verbal articulaTschumi does not define tion (like two sides of the same piece of paper), ultimately leaves no space dissolution, but the text makes for drawing, which nevertheless remains a very important architectural it clear that he implies the denial of the human subject. medium. On the one hand, if one were to drop the assumption that all thinking is verbal/conceptual, then Derrida’s analysis of arche-writing, and with it the rejection of the metaphysics of presence, would become meaningless. On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that drawings are a kind of language to which Derrida’s analysis could apply: Signs in The application of the deconstructivist

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writing and verbal communication are arbitrary social it did provide, an important source of conventions, while drawings are analogous represeninspiration to a generation of architects, tations that represent because they resemble what they but it would be unreasonable to expect represent. An architect’s drawings normally pertain to find in it the philosophical basis of to a building to be built: An architect who conceived a coherent account of architectural of his or her drawings as equivalent to Derrida’s text practice in more general terms. and then worked under the assumption that there is no physical reality outside the text would soon be out of a job. Deconstruction can thus provide, and it did provide, an important source of inspiration to a generation of architects, but it would be unreasonable to expect to find in it the philosophical basis of a coherent account of architectural practice in more general terms. The impact of post-structuralist thinking was consequently much greater among architectural academics than among practitioners. It particularly affected architectural education, where its impact was not unproblematic. If concerns about function, scale, and context are to be rejected, because they stand for the metaphysics of presence, aesthetic qualities are relative, and it is engineers who worry about the structure of buildings, then it becomes unclear what architects actually do. It also becomes unclear what architecture students should be trained to do. In the best possible scenario, deconstruction left architects with the role of activists within a certain cultural context and with no specific contribution to society. Theirs was the role of public intellectuals active within a certain realm of visuality. This further entailed that there were no specific skills or 19 knowledge that architecture students needed to acquire during their eduA thoughtful theoretical cation. Architectural education from this point of view was no more than a recapitulation of this debate process of enculturation, in which students learn to behave, dress, and talk can be found in Garry Stevens’s book The Favored in a way that is considered culturally acceptable for architects—and this Circle: The Social Foundations position did have a substantial following among architectural educators of Architectural Distinction during the 1990s.19 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Deconstruction can thus provide, and

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Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari The influential French cultural historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is largely known for his histories of psychiatry, prison systems, and sexuality. His 1961 book, Madness and Civilization, analyzes the evolution of attitudes toward madness in Western culture since the Renaissance. The rise of faith in reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Foucault argues, brought a negative attitude toward madness that was not common in previous epochs. Because reason came to be seen as the essential human feature, a mad person was regarded as conceptually excluded from human society. Over the past two hundred years, mental patients have again acquired human status, but they are nevertheless seen as moral offenders, he argues. Foucault suggests that the psychiatrists’ authority is not based on their ability to cure (which they often cannot), but rather on their role as representers of the moral norms of society. Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish (1975) explored the history of penal systems. It included an analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, an architectural structure intended to improve the surveillence of prisoners. The multivolume History of Sexuality (1976–1984) studies the various methods that modern society has developed to control sexuality and the (allegedly) scientific disciplines that were developed (similarly as when it comes to dealing with crime) to ensure this control. Through the 1970s, Foucault increasingly concentrated on the relationships between power and knowledge. He studied the ways in which knowledge provides power over nature, while, at the same time, institutional power controls scientific knowledge. The strong relationship between power and knowledge that he postulated has often been criticized because it seemed to suggest that there was no truth outside specific regimes of power. The implication was that any liberation or critique of oppression in the name of “truth” is merely a substitution (or a demand for the substitution) of one system of power for another. Foucault’s two most philosophical books are The Order of Things (1966) and Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In these books,

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20 In 1998 two physicists, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, published a survey of the use of scientific terminology among contemporary French thinkers, and their assessment of Deleuze and Guattari was devastating. They found

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Foucault explores the possibilities of knowledge, as regulated by the language of different epochs. Grammar and logic define the kinds of statements and sentences that, in principle, can be considered as meaningful within a language. But, Foucault argues, in addition to grammar and logic, there are also additional underlying rules that define which statements are acceptable in a given cultural environment. For instance, for people who believe that a mad person is deprived of reason and therefore not human, the statement that madness is simply a disease of the mind makes no sense. Archaeology, as Foucault uses this term, pertains to the study of such rules, or, as he says, “discourse as practice.” (Discourse practices that are available within a community are then comparable to Kant’s a priori conditions of every possible knowledge, only they are limited to a certain cultural context.) Foucault introduces the word episteme (which means knowledge in Greek) to refer to the ways certain types of beliefs define the kinds of acceptable statements in a given period. The episteme of a certain era is the way objects of thought and experience are organized in that period. If a statement is formulated outside its proper episteme it is not going to be regarded as true or false; rather, it will be unclear what it means for such a statement to be true or false. Foucault concentrates on describing the respective epistemes of the Renaissance, classical period (i.e., seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), and modern times. The Renaissance episteme, he argues, for instance, was based on discerning similarities between things. Among the French thinkers whose work related to Foucault’s interests in psychiatry, one should mention Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992). Deleuze was trained as a philosophe in the French tradition; Guattari was a radical psychiatrist, involved in various revolutionary projects through the 1950s and 1960s. Deleuze published on the history of philosophy and wrote a number of works on philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), but it would be hard to say that his publications exercised influence on the scholarship pertaining to the works of these philosophers; rather, Deleuze used the works of these philosophers to

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discuss his own ideas. Much as was the case with Derrida, a lack of clarity in their writing fundamentally impeded interest in Deleuze and Guattari out of context and without among English-speaking philosophers. any apparent logic, at least if one attributes to these terms Another factor that marred the philosophical receptheir usual scientific meantion of Deleuze and Guattari’s works was their tendency to use technical ings.” “Any specialist reader terminology from other disciplines (especially sciences) in ways that have will find their statements most often meaningless, or little to do with the original meaning of that terminology. This produced sometimes acceptable but the impression of intellectual pretence.20 In any case, it would be quite banal and confused.” “What wrong to read Deleuze and Guattari the way one reads most philosophers, philosophical function can be fulfilled by this avalanche by trying to understand their ideas and arguments, how these arguments of ill-digested scientific (and correlate, and how their way of looking at things can affect one’s underpseudo-scientific) jargon?” standing of architecture. It is equally pointless to look in their books for Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (New a specific content or set of ideas systematically presented by the authors. York: Picador, 1998), 154–168. Rather, one should compare their writing to an ocean of words, in which All this obviously left a very a persistent diver may find a pearl—and to be sure, the pearl is going to be bad impression on analytic philosophers and suggested as much a product of the diver’s imagination as it really is there in what that Deleuze and Guattari are Deleuze and Guattari say. not serious thinkers. No doubt, the authors wanted it that way. Deleuze understood philosophy as the production of concepts, not an analysis of arguments. Since the content of the concepts he writes about changes through his writings, it is actually impossible to establish anything Deleuze understood philosophy as the like a coherent Deleuzian doctrine. It has been observed production of concepts, not an analysis that the texts of Deleuze and Guattari should be taken of arguments. rather as “prompts for creativity rather than as chains 21 of carefully planned reasoning.”21 Insofar as Deleuze and Guattari’s writAndrew Ballantyne, ings exercised influence on architecture and architectural theory, this was Deleuze and Guattari through very liberal interpretations of the various concepts they formulated for Architects (London: Routledge, 2007), 101. in their writings. For instance, Deleuze’s book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) attracted the attention of architectural theorists because of its discussion of the concept of the fold, which also played a role in early debates about digital architecture. John Rajchman (1946–) used this concept when he analyzed Eisenman’s project for Rebstockpark, in Frankfurt. “a great concentration of

scientific terms, employed

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Deleuze’s most important work before he initiated his collaboration with Guattari was Difference and Repetition (1968). A consequence of the political events of 1968 (students’ and workers’ riots and the paralysis of the academic, economic, and political system of France on a much greater scale than in the United States) was the increased interest among left-wing French thinkers for the concept of difference. In his book, Deleuze attempted to construct the metaphysics of difference. (For Deleuze, metaphysics does not have negative connotations, as it does for Derrida or Heidegger.) Deleuze and Guattari’s major joint project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, came out in two books, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The first book largely concentrates on a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, in which they see a capitalism-supporting doctrine; their discussion attempts to combine Nietzsche, Marx, and Freudian psychoanalysis to analyze human desires using the concept of desire-machine. Desire-production, as they describe it, is independent of individual humans and belongs to the world. In the 1990s, the final chapter of the second book attracted the attention of architectural theorists because the authors defined in it the difference between smooth space and striated space; the former is understood to be nomad space and the latter sedentary space. In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, one finds authors who do not make the effort to control the content of what their books say. Their books allow a great variety of readings; it is for every individual architect to explore whether one can find some stimulating ideas in their work. Post-structuralism’s and Postmodernism’s Discontents Post-structuralism and postmodernism were not only the standard, mainstream position in much of humanities academia The popularity of authors such as Derrida, through the 1980s and 1990s, but they also became a Foucault, or Deleuze in the end did much fashion. The popularity of authors such as Derrida, harm to the thoughtful reception of their Foucault, and Deleuze in the end did much harm to ideas. the thoughtful reception of their ideas. It is not at all

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clear that all people who enthusiastically cited French post-structuralists seriously read them. By the end of the 1990s, many people associated their ideas, approvingly or disapprovingly, with various relativist positions, which these authors did not necessarily share and certainly not in the crude form that was sometimes attributed to them. One could say that for many people, post-structuralism and postmodernism became associated with views such as “anything goes” or “everything is relative.” The critics saw in such radical relativism pseudo-intellectualism and a lack of intellectual rigor. The trend held sway over most humanities departments in English-speaking universities, as well as architecture schools. As mentioned, an important exception was philosophy departments, which remained remarkably unaffected by what they regarded as a deplorable fashion. A major blow for the proponents of post-structuralism and postmodernism came in 1996. The New York physicist Alan Sokal submitted to a leading post-structuralist journal an article about the liberal political implications of the physical theories of quantum gravity. Quantum gravity is a highly speculative idea about how to explain Sokal wanted to see whether an article certain physical phenomena unrelated to human daily “liberally salted with nonsense,” life, which actually cannot have any political signifiwould be published in a reputable cance. The article was written in the then-fashionable post-structuralist journal if it sounded post-structuralist jargon, cited prominent post-strucappropriate and “flattered the editors’ turalist authors, and included completely meaningless ideological preconceptions.” It did get sentences and claims about physics that were wrong at published. the most elementary level. As he later explained, Sokal wanted to see whether such an article, “liberally salted with nonsense,” would be published in a reputable journal if it sounded appropriate and “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” It did get published. Sokal then published an article in another journal in which he explained what he had done. The hoax turned out to be a huge embarrassment for the postmodernist academic establishment. Sokal himself stated that his motivation for writing and publishing the

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article was political: He was a leftist, and he believed and logical analysis were important that facts, rational thought, and logical analysis were weapons against the mystifications important weapons against the mystifications propromoted by the powerful to sustain moted by the powerful to sustain oppression. In his oppression. view, by undermining the credibility of logical analysis and rationality, postmodernists and post-structuralists, while posing as left-wingers, were de facto enabling the perpetuation of various forms of social oppression. The hoax was only the first and the most famous in a series of similar attacks on postmodernist ideology in the late 1990s. A computer scientist at Monash University, in Australia, wrote a computer program that generated postmodernist prose—it was possible simply to log onto the university Web site and download randomly generated post22 modernist articles of 3,000 to 5,000 words.22 They all consisted of perfectly Here is a citation from one meaningless sentences composed in the jargon of the style. Finally, in 1998, such article: “If one examines Sokal, together with the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont (1952–), struck capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject once again: They published a book (Fashionable Nonsense) in which they neotextual materialism or analyzed the use of scientific terminology, concepts, and theories in the conclude that society has writings of prominent French postmodernist intellectuals such as Deleuze, objective value. If dialectic distuationism holds, we Luce Irigaray (1932–), Bruno Latour (1947–), Jean-François Lyotard have to choose between (1924–1998), and Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007). The book clearly showed Habermasian discourse and that the luminaries of post-structuralist thought were intentionally using the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that terminology from sciences rhetorically to impress and even bamboozle the subject is contextualised their readers. Much of the criticism that was directed against postmodinto a textual nationalism that ernism and post-structuralism in the late 1990s was thus theatrical—and includes truth as reality.” And so on. it certainly had a much wider impact than, for instance, Derrida’s philosophical confrontations with Gadamer and Searle a decade earlier. One should, however, consider this type of criticism from the perspective of postmodernist and post-structuralist thinkers and academics as well. For the French thinkers discussed in this chapter, truth or rationality are mere rhetorical figures; they never asserted that, for instance, their understanding of physics (or anything else) was any better In Sokal’s view, facts, rational thought,

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than any misunderstanding. To say that a certain sentence about physics is true while some other is false means assuming that science ultimately reveals truths about physical reality—something that they vehemently deny. The important thesis of a thinker such as Derrida is precisely that there is no physical reality that human thoughts or sentences written by scientists could be about. From such a perspective, science can be only a play with words, like any piece of fiction. Thus, it makes no sense to criticize postmodernists and post-structuralists for trying to bamboozle their readers with the pretence of knowledge of scientific theories that they actually know nothing about: For them, there is no knowledge, scientific or otherwise, in the first place, and their readers would have been aware of this view. They can possibly be criticized for taking advantage of social positions and academic jobs that derive their prestige from the general public’s association of these positions with competence and knowledge—while they believe that there is no such thing as knowledge. Once the quest for truth has been However, from the point of view of post-structuralist removed from scholarship, it is not clear thinkers, rationality, truth, or intellectual rigor are that academia is left with anything else indeed mere tools of self-promotion. Once the quest but crude careerism; post-structuralists for truth has been removed from scholarship, it is not would simply add that it has always clear that academia is left with anything else but crude been like that. careerism; post-structuralists would simply add that it has always been like that. From their point of view, the “quest for truth” can be no more than another career-promotion strategy that happens to be out of fashion in the environment in which they operate. The criticism based on political values misses the point for similar reasons. Sokal, for instance, criticized the postmodernists’ antirationalism because, in his view, it made it impossible for the left to rationally analyze and criticize various forms of oppression. In the context of debates in a certain realm of American liberal and leftist intelligentsia, this kind of criticism makes perfect sense: After September 11, 2001, for instance, Sokal could have pointed out that their post-structuralist and postmodernist commitments incapacitated the left-wing critics of the Bush

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administration to argue that there was no factual evitruth, but only rhetorical strategies, it is dence that the Iraq dictatorship possessed weapons of impossible to argue that something is a mass destruction or participated in the terrorist attacks fact. One is then completely left at the on the United States. Once it is accepted that there is mercy of any campaign that the media no truth, but only rhetorical strategies, it is impossible may unleash in any given moment. to argue that something is a fact. One is then indeed left to yield to the most powerful rhetorical strategy that the media may unleash in any given moment. However, this kind of criticism assumes that when post-structuralists declare themselves as leftists, they genuinely want to combat various forms of oppression. From the post-structuralists’ point of view, this criticism would be mistaken since it assumes that expressions of one’s political views can be genuine—that, for instance, when individuals declare themselves as leftists, they genuinely express certain political attitudes. More generally, the assumption is that people actually have certain political ideas and ideals when they express certain political views. However, from the post-structuralist point of view, seeing things that way means relying on “unfindable objects of thought,” to use Derrida’s phrase from his polemic with Gadamer. For Sokal’s opponents, the fabrication of leftist narratives cannot stand for any genuine political attitudes because there is no narrative-independent reality of human thought that these narratives could be expressing. Sokal’s political critique thus misses the point because it relies on the belief in genuine political commitment that is, from the perspective of his opponents, merely another form of the metaphysics of presence. Criticisms of postmodernist and post-structuralist positions thus typically fail because they rely, in their arguments, on the assumptions that have been rejected from the start by the position they criticize: For instance, they assume that physical reality is really there and that truth and honesty matter in human affairs. These assumptions are difficult claims to prove, and most likely, they need to be taken as a matter of faith—precisely the kind of faith in certainty that Derrida dismissed as the metaphysics of presence. So there is, indeed, a more profound level at Once it is accepted that there is no

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which Derrida may be right. However, it is not at all clear that any thinking (philosophical or otherwise) can be done without making some assumptions, nor is it clear that the denial of physical reality, facts, and logic has much to offer to architects who want to design in the real world. Ten years into the twenty-first century, postmodernism and post-structuralism look like a phase that architectural theorists have invested much effort in but without much profit.

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For the greatest part of the twentieth century, the ways of doing philosophy in the English-speaking world differed sharply from those on the European continent. Analytic philosophy, as the approach to philosophy in Great Britain and the United States is commonly Philosophical training in analytically called, is strongly motivated by the desire to emulate oriented philosophy departments scientific research, while European, continental (prelargely consists of constructing and dominantly French and German) philosophers mainly demolishing arguments or examining see their work in the context of the humanities. The their compatibility; it differs sharply strong side of analytic philosophy is its intellectual from teaching in traditional philosophy rigor and emphasis on the analysis of arguments. departments in continental Europe, Philosophical training in analytically oriented phiwhere the focus is on studying the losophy departments largely consists of constructing history of philosophy and the works of and demolishing arguments or examining their comthe philosophers of the past. patibility; it differs sharply from teaching in traditional philosophy departments in continental Europe, where the focus is on studying the history of philosophy and the works of the philosophers of the past. Analytic philosophers insist on clarity of writing, but this need not mean that their writings are always easy to read, since they can be very technical. Their texts are marked by clear definitions and sharp differentiation between concepts; authors rely on predicate calculus, a way of structuring sentences that reveals their logical structure and is derived from mathematics.1 The particular strength 1 of analytic philosophy is that it states which arguments can be articulated Scholars from other fields of without falling into contradiction. the humanities, who are not In philosophy departments at English-speaking unitrained to think and argue this way, often do not recognize versities, the dominance of analytic philosophy meant that the teaching of when their concepts are not logic gradually replaced the teaching of foreign languages, without which sharp enough. When they it is often impossible to seriously study the works of philosophers who face an analytic philosopher’s arguments, they often react did not write in English. The study of the history of philosophy has been by saying that there may reduced, and it is assumed that students should be taught to do philosophy be some middle ground and not made to study its past. The widespread criticism of this approach between various sharply defined concepts, while the is that it often leads to the repetition of the mistakes of earlier philosophers.

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analytic philosopher’s point is that such middle ground is impossible because concepts have been precisely defined in a way that precludes a middle ground. Also, analytic philosophers are trained to look for counterexamples to every claim made; when this approach is applied to the texts of scholars from other fields of the humanities, they feel that their texts are being treated unfairly.

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Older generations of analytic philosophers fully rejected any involvement with continental, nonanalytic philosophy. In their view, it lacked rigor. In recent decades, however, the works of continental philosophers have been increasingly reinterpreted and their arguments presented in ways that conform to the standards of analytic philosophy. This trend has substantially contributed to a better understanding of continental philosophers’ work. Analytic philosophers have thus become more open to continental philosophy, while at the same time, their ways of phrasing arguments have become increasingly dominant among continental philosophers. At the present moment, the influence of phenomenology and deconstruction is waning, not only in architectural theory, but more widely in intellectual circles. Unlike twenty years ago, analytic philosophers are now showing more interest in philosophical problems outside their narrow disciplines, and with analytic philosophy being by far the most vigorous intellectual force on the market, one should expect its increasing influence in architectural theory as well. Even those theorists who want to continue working within phenomenological and post-structuralist paradigms will increasingly find that important studies on the works of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida rely on the analytic way of phrasing arguments. Early Analytic Philosophers In the second half of the twentieth century, it became common to associate analytic philosophy with English-speaking philosophical culture. This was not so from the beginning, and many of the early analytic philosophers came from central Europe. The German philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) is generally recognized as the first to formulate the numerous problems and questions that would eventually come to dominate analytic philosophy through the twentieth century. Frege was mainly interested in the philosophical problems of mathematics and logic and studied philosophically their mutual relationship. This led him to the formulation of a number of important problems in the philosophy of language—the discipline on which

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the efforts of analytic philosophers subsequently concentrated for most of the twentieth century. Frege differentiated between the sense and the reference of phrases and sentences. For instance, morning star and evening star refer to the same planet, Venus, although they express different thoughts. When it comes to reference, the sentences “the morning star is the morning star” and “the morning star is the evening star” say the same thing (that the planet Venus is the planet Venus). But if we consider their sense, they say different things: It is possible to know that “the morning star is the morning star” simply by analyzing the sentence, while the sentence “the morning star is the evening star” tells us something that need not be the case. Another problem that attracted the attention of early analytic philosophers was the question of the truth or falsity of sentences about nonexistent things. An example of such a sentence is “the presentday king of France is bald”: since France does not have a king, it seems hard to say whether such a sentence is true or false. Early in the twentieth century, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) proposed solving the problem by converting this sentence into another one that says the same and is clearly false: “There exists an entity which is the present-day king of France and that entity is bald.” (Converting an everyday sentence into another one that exposes its logical structure, whereby the resulting sentence is usually phrased using terms there exists or for every, is a good example of the way predicate calculus operates.) Like Frege, Russell counts as one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy; his contributions too were predominantly in the fields of logic and the philosophy of mathematics. Vienna was an important European intellectual center in the 1920s and 1930s, and a number of thinkers who contributed substantially to the rise of analytic philosophy lived there at the time. The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers who met regularly for philosophical discussions; prominent figures belonging to the circle were Otto Neurath (1882–1945), Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). The circle’s members’ interests largely concentrated on the

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philosophy and methodology of sciences—in fact, many positions they regarded as incompatible of them were practicing scientists at the same time. To with modern science, the members purge philosophy of the positions they regarded as of the Vienna Circle argued that all incompatible with modern science, they argued that all sentences whose truth cannot be sentences whose truth cannot be verified are meaningverified are meaningless. less. This argument was revolutionary in its time: In the past, many thinkers had argued that there was no God or that the soul was not immortal, but the members of the Vienna Circle simply dismissed any discussion of God or soul as meaningless. However, it turned out to be difficult to argue that being verifiable is necessary for meaningfulness. Many natural laws, for instance, can be verified only experimentally, and one assumes that they are laws because one assumes that experiments will always turn out the same way. Yet this assumption actually cannot be verified. To complicate matters further, it is not even clear how the claim that only verifiable sentences are meaningful itself can be verified. The members of the Vienna Circle spent much time and energy on refining their theories to respond to such problems. Under different political circumstances, the Vienna Circle might have been regarded as a group of intellectuals concerned with the philosophy of science and on the margin of political life. But in the Austria of the 1920s and 1930s, their views sharply contrasted with the conservative and nationalistic tendencies in wider Austrian society. Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich in 1938, but with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, intolerant chauvinism increasingly became the dominant force in the social and intellectual life of Austria. When Schlick, the circle’s founder, was shot by one of his students in 1936, he was described by the nationalistic media as the pivotal figure in the promotion of Jewish influence in Austrian culture and someone who had tarnished internationally the reputation of Austria as a pious country. The fact that the assassin had private reasons for the murder and that Schlick himself was not Jewish became irrelevant; when the Nazis came to power in Austria in In order to purge philosophy of the

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1938, the assassin was released from prison and joined the Nazi Party. By that time, other members of the Vienna Circle, who felt that there was no place for them in the rising tide of nationalism in Central Europe, had left Austria and settled in the United States and Great Britain. Another prominent philosopher who was born in Vienna and lived there in the 1920s was Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Wittgenstein was born into one of the wealthiest families in the AustroHungarian Empire. His family exercised a huge influence on the intellectual and cultural life of Vienna, but its members often suffered from emotional instability (three of his four brothers committed suicide). Brilliant and deeply insecure, admired and arrogant, Wittgenstein played the role of a romantic genius in ways rather uncommon for an analytic philosopher. In his youth, he studied engineering in Manchester, England, but under Russell’s influence switched to the study of philosophy at Cambridge. During World War I, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army; during the same period, he worked on his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in 1921. During the 1920s, he withdrew from philosophy because he felt he had resolved all significant problems with his first book. In those years, he worked as an architect for a period of time, and his architectural works were marked by the influence of Adolf Loos (1870–1933). (Later in his life, Wittgenstein would list Loos, together with Frege, Russell, and Spengler, as major influences on his thinking.) In 1929, he returned to Cambridge and re-initiated his academic career. The result of the last twenty years of his life was the book Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. Wittgenstein’s style is terse and succinct; his paragraphs are numbered, and he leaves it for the reader to establish connections between the various sections; his explanations Contrary to other philosophers, who often merely add new difficulties to the understandthought of the world as the unity of ing of the text. The topic of the Tractatus is the relathings, Wittgenstein conceives of the tionship between language, thinking, and philosophy. world as the unity of facts and defines it Wittgenstein defines the world as everything that is the as everything that is the case. case; contrary to other philosophers, who thought of the

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world as the unity of things, he conceives of the world as the unity of facts. A thought, he says, is a logical picture of the world. The important driving idea of the Tractatus is that the clarification of philosophical language can eliminate apparent philosophical problems by delimiting the topics one can meaningfully talk about; in his view, philosophy is the struggle against the bewitchment of our thinking by language. The important difference between Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle was that he did not share their faith in science or their rejection of mysticism. In the concluding sections of the Tractatus, he states that everyone has something that cannot be said, something mystical. The correct method of philosophy is to say only that which can be said (i.e., the statements that belong to sciences) and then, if someone tries to say something metaphysical, demonstrate that such statements contain signs without meaning. His conclusion is that what one cannot talk about, one should keep silent about. In his later work, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein proposed a different way of looking at language, whereby one should abandon the study of the meaning or reference of words for the study of their use. Behaviorism, Quine, and Searle Ever since René Descartes, many philosophers have been inclined to conceive of human thinking as something that is not ultimately explainable by material, physical, chemical, or biological laws. In that case, there would be two kinds of causality in this world: the causality of physical events and the causality of human thinking. Such a view is sometimes called dualism. Even today, thinkers who conceive of human thoughts as biochemical reactions in the human brain express this view more as an article of faith than a scientific truth: Ultimately, we do not know how human thinking results from the biochemical processes in the human brain. Early in the twentieth century, psychologists tried to overcome this problem by avoiding any consideration of internal human mental processes at all and by concentrating on the study of human behavior that can be clearly described, measured, and quantified.

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Internal human thinking is available only on the basis of self-observation (introspection), which, they argued, is unscientific. They thus conceived of the human mind as a “black box”: One can study the input (environment) and the output (behavior) but not what happens within the mind. The important figure in the early history of behaviorism was John Watson (1878–1958), who articulated the main tenets of behaviorism in a particularly radical form. In his view, human thinking is merely unexpressed talking; it is a process occurring in the larynx (the part of the human throat where vocal cords are located) and not in the brain. Because he believed that human behavior is fully explainable by the environment to which humans react (i.e., that output, or human behavior, is explainable as a result of input, the events in the human environment that cause it), he denied the significance of innate factors in the upbringing of children. His famous claim was that he could educate any child to become a specialist in any field: Upbringing as conditioning can achieve anything. From the 1930s through the 1970s, behaviorism was the dominant force in psychological research, especially in the United States. This approach to psychology completely converted the study of the human mind to the study of human behavior. Its Behaviorism completely converted the proponents insisted on explaining behavior without study of the human mind to the study of reference to inner mental processes, such as beliefs human behavior. or desires. Rather, everything was to be explained as the result of environmental influences, conditioning, and a reaction to specific stimuli. Implicitly, this view denies the free will of individuals and assumes that their behavior and actions are predictable and can be engineered, as is the case with any mechanical device. The rejection of the study of internal mental processes also included the rejection of the study of human visual imagination. During the 1970s, Roger Newland Shepard’s experiments with visual imagination (described in the introduction) were also important because they contributed to the abandonment of behaviorism in psychological research. Before Shepard, there were other criticisms of behaviorist doctrines: An important

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critic was Noam Chomsky (1928–), who pointed out that behaviorism cannot account for the way children acquire the knowledge of a language. Ultimately, by the 1980s, the interests of scientific psychology turned away from behaviorism, due to the rise of cognitive science. In the years after World War II, behaviorism exercised a huge influence on analytic philosophy. As a result of behaviorist biases and lasting almost until the 1990s, the dominant view of the majority of English-speaking philosophers was that all thinking is always verbal and in a language. Often, behaviorist assumptions (such as the rejection of visual imagination) would be taken for granted, without being justified or explained. In Willard Van Orman Quine’s extremely influential essay “On What There Is” (1948), one thus reads that it is impossible to have a visual idea of (i.e., imagine visually) a building like the Parthenon. Even when Shepard’s experiments about visual imagination became widely known and when psychologists themselves gave up on the more radical versions of behaviorism, prominent analytic philosophers, such as Daniel C. Dennett (1942–), remained among its last defenders, denying the possibility of visual imagination. All this could have contributed to the poor reception of the ideas of analytic philosophers by architectural theorists, although we have seen that similar ideas proliferated at the same time in the works of European continental philosophers as well. Few analytic philosophers were so influential in the second half of the last century as Quine, who worked in logic and the philosophy of language. His efforts were often directed toward reformulating these disciplines in accordance with behaviorist psychology. This means that he tried to explain the central concepts of logic and the philosophy of language without any reference to the content of human thoughts or consciousness. In his view, there can be no thoughts that are true or false, but only physical sentences, written or pronounced. Similarly, he endeavored to base his philosophy of language exclusively on the way words refer to physical things and to preclude any discussion of the ways words express the contents of human thoughts. This

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occasionally led him to make some very counterintuitive claims, such as the view that translation is impossible between languages whose speakers were not in some contact in the past. It is in the context of this domination of various dogmatic ramifications of behaviorism that one has to understand the groundbreaking significance of John Searle’s book, Intentionality (1983). Contrary to the dominant view at the time, Searle assumed that human beings have thoughts, beliefs, and desires whose contents (propositions) they express in a language. Language is thus a vehicle of communication and not a vehicle of thought. Searle revived the discussion of human consciousness and intentionality, which had been suppressed during the behaviorist era. We have seen that intentionality is the directedness of human thinking to that which it is about. In the past, many philosophers used to combine their interest in intentionality with various versions of Platonism. They argued that when people have beliefs, the objects of these beliefs are propositions in the sense that people believe that propositions are true or false. At the same time, they assumed that propositions exist somehow independently of the individuals that have these beliefs, often like some sort of Platonic Forms. Searle managed to avoid this trap by assuming that the object of a belief is what a certain belief is about. If someone believes that Palladio designed the villa Rotonda, then the object of his or her belief is a certain relationship between Palladio and the villa. There is no need to postulate an abstract proposition that exists outside the mind of the person who has the belief. Searle is at the same time a critic of exaggerated expectations from artificial intelligence and the hopes that computers can imitate human thinking. He does not think that processes that occur in a computer can be compared to human thinking. One of his arguments goes as follows: Imagine a room in which a person who does not understand Chinese receives papers with writing in Chinese and then, by working with manuals, generates responses. People outside the room who receive these responses and know Chinese may think that someone in the room knows Chinese, but that person is actually merely mechanically generating

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responses by using manuals. Searle’s argument is that the same applies to the expectations that computers can think, understand, converse, or translate. Computers can perform very complex operations that can be defined using formalized mathematical procedures, but human thinking is ultimately not reducible to formalized systems of mathematical operations, he contends. Consequently, it is naïve to expect that artificial intelligence on computer-like systems is possible. At the same time, Searle does not believe that human thinking is performed by a soul independent of the biological processes in the human brain; rather, his point is that while our thinking is biologically based, it does not have a form that can be imitated using the formalized mathematical systems with which computers operate. Analytic Aesthetics The dominant interests of analytic philosophers have often been quite remote from the disciplines that could have been interesting to architectural theorists. An exception was analytic aesthetics. In the early days of analytic philosophy, aesthetics played a marginal role; but since the 1960s, a substantial body of philosophical work modelled on analytic philosophy has been done in this discipline. Early analytic philosophers who attempted to work in aesthetics were concerned to establish it as a discipline that could be treated with the argumentational methods typical of analytic philosophy. Monroe Beardsley (1915–1985) and William Kurtz Wimsatt (1907–1975) thus received much attention for their article “The Intentional Fallacy,” which was directed against the Beardsley and Wimsatt argued that that idea that the intention of the author of a literary work which the author wanted to convey in a is relevant to the work’s aesthetic evaluation. In their literary work should not be taken into view, that which the author wanted to convey in a literaccount as important when judging its ary work should not be taken into account as imporaesthetic value. tant when judging its aesthetic value. This thesis rather resembles Roland Barthes’s thesis about the death of the author, however, Beardsley and Wimsatt recognize the existence and individuality of authors. They accept, for instance, the importance of the study of the biographies

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of poets, but they think that it is important not to confuse literary and biographical studies. The author’s intention, however, Beardsley pointed out in another paper, “An Aesthetic Definition of Art,” is still important when 2 it comes to defining an artwork.2 In his view, an artwork is something proMonroe C. Beardsley, “An duced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy aesthetic interest Aesthetic Definition of Art,” and provide aesthetic experience. It follows that saying whether something in What is Art, ed. Hugh Carter. (New York: Haven is an artwork does not depend on the aesthetic evaluation of that object: Publications, 1983), 15–29. otherwise, bad artworks would not count as artworks. Beardsley was also involved in a polemic with another aesthetician, George Dickie (1926–), who was known for his institutional def3 inition of an artwork.3 In Dickie’s view, the artworld decides what counts as George Dickie, “The New an artwork, and the artworld consists of artistic institutions and individuals Institutional Theory of Art,” who have opinions about art. Dickie’s view is that art is what is recognized as Proceedings of the Eighth Wittgenstein Symposium, 10 art. Such a definition enabled him to circumvent the need to state the prop(1983), 57–64.Publications, erty by which artworks would be separated from other artifacts. In his view, 1983), 15–29. any thing that people who deal with art call an artwork is an artwork, and anyone who presumes to have an opinion about art counts as the artworld. Beardsley’s criticism of this view was that “if being called ‘art’ by someone is all it takes for something (say, an earthquake) to be an artwork, then when we say something is art, we are saying no more than that 4 someone has applied this label to it.”4 Beardsley’s point is that the mere namIbid. ing of something in a certain way does not make it of the same kind as other objects that bear the same name: “To classify [artifacts] In Dickie’s view, the artworld decides what as artworks just because they are called art by those who counts as an artwork, and the artworld are called artists because they make things they call art consists of artistic institutions and is not to classify at all, but to think in circles.” Although individuals who have opinions about art. architecture was rarely mentioned in this debate, the positions advocated remind us of the positions that were 5 articulated during the 1990s in relation to architectural education: Are there See the previous chapter, the fundamental skills and knowledge that architecture students should acquire final paragraph of the section during their education, or can anything be called architecture and conseabout deconstruction and architecture. quently should students be merely trained to behave as architects?5

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Another important figure of early analytic aesthetics was Frank Sibley (1923–1996). Sibley is often credited with introducing into aesthetic debates the distinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic terms: aesthetic terms include evaluation but are not exclusively evaluative (for instance, unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene), while there are also terms that do not include evaluation (square) and those that are purely evaluative (excellent). In his view, aesthetic judgements cannot be supported by reasoning; it is impossible to infer the truth of aesthetic judgements from any number of nonaesthetic judgments. Sibley argued in favor of the objectivity of aesthetic judgments: In one of his examples, he imagined what would happen if some people saw colors while others did not. We normally assume a high level of agreement about colors; but seeing colors could be a rare ability shared only by some people, while most people could suffer from various levels of color blindness. In Sibley’s view, this is precisely the situation with aesthetic properties, whereby most people, even with effort, cannot notice the properties on which they see others agreeing. But this does not mean, Sibley argues, that the presence of aesthetic properties in artworks is a matter of arbitrary judgments or relative to individuals and their upbringing. In 1970, Kendall Walton (1939–) published a paper titled “Categories of Art” that subsequently exercised a huge influence on discussions about the attribution of aesthetic properties. Walton argued that aesthetic properties are always relative to the category in which we classify an artwork: for instance, to judge whether a certain mosaic Walton argued that aesthetic properties is “refined,” it is necessary to classify it as a Byzantine or are always relative to the category in Roman mosaic. A mosaic cannot be refined by itself, but which we classify an artwork: for instance, only in relation to a certain category. Walton considers as to judge whether a certain mosaic is an example Picasso’s painting Guernica. In contemporary “refined,” it is necessary to classify it as a society, this painting is recognized as dynamic, violent, Byzantine or Roman mosaic. and disturbing. But then Walton imagines a society in which guernicas are a category of painting. All guernicas in such a community have the same colors and shapes as Picasso’s Guernica, but their surfaces protrude from the painting. Some surfaces are rolling, others are sharp or jagged, and so on. In such a cultural environment, Picasso’s

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Guernica would count as a guernica. Since people in this society may associate protruding surfaces with expressiveness, they would find that Picasso’s Guernica, which has flat surfaces, is inexpressive and perhaps even dull and boring. For us, however, it is normal that a painting has flat surfaces. From these examples, Walton inferred that all attribution of aesthetic qualities always depends on the categorization of artworks. For almost three decades, his arguments were regarded as crucial when it comes to the rejection of formalism in analytic aesthetics. The classification of artworks is always conceptual, and deciding whether a certain mosaic is Byzantine or Roman necessarily implies subsuming it under the concept of a Byzantine or Roman mosaic. At the same time, if all attribution of aesthetic qualities depends on such classifications, then the formalist claim that aesthetic evaluations are nonconceptual ceases to be credible. A defense of the formalist position from such arguments was provided three decades later by Nick Zangwill (1957–) in his influen6 tial book The Metaphysics of Beauty.6 Zangwill spotted a weak position in Nick Zangwill, The Walton’s arguments: Walton never showed that categorization was necesMetaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca: sary for all attributions of aesthetic qualities. The moderate formalism that Cornell University Press, 2001). The book is a collection Zangwill formulated is based on the assumption that attributing some aesof research papers that thetic qualities to artworks indeed depends on their categorization, while Zangwill originally published at the same time the attribution of others does not, which then comfortably in the late 1990s. leaves space to argue that some aesthetic qualities depend exclusively on the formal properties of artworks and do not depend Zangwill spotted a weak position on the concept under which we subsume these works. in Walton’s arguments: Walton Zangwill’s early papers on this problem coincided with never showed that categorization the revival of interest in architecture’s purely formal was necessary for all attributions of properties, which resulted from the introduction of aesthetic qualities. Zangwill’s digital media into architectural practice and the influmoderate formalism assumes that ence of the early works of Greg Lynn. At present, for attributing some aesthetic qualities architectural theorists interested in formal aesthetic to artworks indeed depends on their properties, Zangwill’s work presents the most thorcategorization, while the attribution oughly articulated aesthetic position that they can rely of others does not. on in their work.

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It is common to divide twentieth-century philosophy into analytic and continental traditions and to see continental philosophy further divided between the major streams of phenomenological and structuralist/poststructuralist approaches. From the perspective of readers interested in architecture and architectural theory, this differentiation appears somewhat artificial. Through the twentieth century, both analytic and continental philosophers emphasized the importance of language, often assuming that all thinking is verbal and that language is not only a vehicle of communication, but also the exclusive vehicle of thought. Rather than help resolve the problems of architectural theory, for an architectural theorist concerned with visuality, this kind of view tends to introduce numerous new problems. Similarly, both continental and analytic philosophers, for the greater part of the twentieth century, disregarded the discussion of visual imagination and were inclined to assume that human perception and thinking were predetermined by the collective to which the individual belonged. Both sides rejected aesthetic formalism. While analytic philosophy has so far generally failed to stimulate much interest among architectural theorists, the approaches to architecture articulated within phenomenological and deconstructivist paradigms fully reflected these positions and consequently suffered from the imposition of an antivisual ideology on a fundamentally visual medium. Antivisual sentiments, we have seen, were already present in the The idea that all architecture has to fundamental assumptions of modernist architectural be judged as appropriate to its time theory: The idea that all architecture has to be judged ultimately means that no architecture as appropriate to its time ultimately means that no can be judged purely on the basis of its architecture can be judged purely on the basis of its visual and spatial properties. visual and spatial properties. “Appropriateness to time” is ultimately always a conceptual consideration and depends on one’s arbitrary association of certain shapes with a certain period. Considering the intensity of twentieth-century philosophy’s antivisual biases, it would have been hard for architectural theory to

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1 For a more comprehensive discussion of the views on developments in architectural theory that one can expect, see Branko Mitrovic, “Architectural Formalism and the Demise of the Linguistic Turn,” Log 17 (2009): 17–25.

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remain unaffected. Like any other field of the humanities, architectural theory articulates its ideas within the realm of what is credible in a given context, and the credibility of certain views is largely the result of their wider philosophical credibility. Architectural theory does not exist in a vacuum, although it may often take a long time for architectural theorists to pick up on what is going on in other disciplines. Their positions are often delayed responses to views that are commonly accepted in other disciplines. It is therefore reasonable to look at the present philosophical environment to try to estimate future developments in architectural theory.1 The current philosophical moment is largely marked by the demise of the linguistic turn and with it the belief in language as the central philosophical problem. Philosophers who would argue that all thinking is verbal have dwindled to a tiny minority. At the same time, analytic philosophy has been increasingly adopted by philosophers on the European continent; phenomenology and post-structuralism are not nearly such major intellectual forces today that they were some decades ago. The fact that their influence is on the wane, however, does not mean that analytic philosophy in its traditional form is taking over. The scope of analytic philosophy has changed and substantially widened in recent decades, while its methods of analyzing arguments have increasingly expanded into new philosophical disciplines as well as the study of the philosophers of the past. Ten years into the twenty-first century, architectural theorists who want to look outside the phenomenological and post-structuralist paradigms that the discipline inherited from the 1990s are encountering a radically changed intellectual environment. The demise of the linguistic turn has meant that argumentational premises about visuality, once precluded by the assumption that all thinking is verbal, are back on the table again; because of Nick Zangwill’s work, formalism is a viable option in aesthetics, while the claim that “there is no innocent eye” does not sound nearly as convincing as it did two decades ago. The revival of the credibility of formalism in aesthetics

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coincides with the increased interest in visual and meant that argumentational premises formal properties of architecture, which has been felt about visuality, once precluded by the ever since the introduction of computers into the proassumption that all thinking is verbal are fession opened new visual and formal opportunities in back on the table again; because of Nick design. At the same time, in the philosophy of history, Zangwill’s work, formalism is a viable the various collectivist agendas from which architecoption in aesthetics, while the claim tural modernism derived its strength (and which are that “there is no innocent eye” does not necessary to introduce the concept of the appropriatesound nearly as convincing as it did two ness of architecture to its time) are nowadays under decades ago. attack by new intentionalism—the idea that the author’s intention, and not the environment, ultimately determines the content of intellectual artifacts. In this context, it is interesting to think about future developments in architectural theory: What kinds of philosophical influences will affect architectural theory the most in the next ten or twenty years? Because of the demise of the linguistic turn and the introduction of digital technology into architectural practice, it is reasonable to expect that the philosophical problems pertaining to visuality will receive additional attention. This may lead to renewed attention to theorists such as Leon Battista Alberti and Geoffrey Scott, who paid great attention to the theoretical problems related to architecture’s visuality. Interest in post-structuralist thought is already in decline, and it is reasonable to expect that, should this book have a new edition in a number of years, the chapter about post-structuralism may need to be reduced and the chapter about analytic philosophy enlarged to respond to the current interests of architects and theorists. In any case, one should bear in mind that philosophy should enable architects and theorists to question and examine their theories, rather than provide ready-made answers and philosophical theories to be “applied” in architectural theory, as has been the case with phenomenological and post-structuralist doctrines in recent decades. For this to happen, it is important to promote a wider philosophical culture among the theorists and practitioners of architecture—and this has been the main aim of this book. The demise of the linguistic turn has

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Acknowledgments Even short books, if they are conceived and planned over long periods of time, tend to accumulate numerous debts. It was almost two decades ago, during my doctoral studies in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, that I became aware of the complex status of philosophy in architectural theory courses. This awareness was largely derived from the fact that I had studied both architecture and philosophy in Belgrade before going to Penn. I thus owe much to my Belgrade tutors, Zivan Lazović and Miloš Arsenijević, who greatly influenced my philosophical development. The actual idea to write an introduction to philosophy for architects and architecture students came to me during my fellowship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2007. The book would not have been possible without extensive leaves granted by my home institution, Unitec Institute of Technology, and the understanding and support of my Head of Department, Tony van Raat. For the past three years, I have received much encouragement for the project from and profited from conversations with Adrian von Buttlar, Brian Fay, Christopher Martin (who was also my doctoral adviser in philosophy), Hagi Kanaan, Ian Verstegen, Mike Austin, Nick Zangwill, Nadja Kurtović-Folić, Robert Nola, Samir Younés, and Thierry de Duve. Cameron Moore, Renata Jadrašin-Milić, and Richard Archbold have read various sections of the manuscript, and their comments have been immensely helpful in the preparation of the final version. My exceptional gratitude to Karen Wise for her help with written English and to Cameron Moore for the technical help in the preparation of the manuscript, index, and illustrations.

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Bibliography The intention of this bibliography is to propose further readings in relation to the specific topics discussed in the book. Philosophical texts (and especially books written by philosophers) often require greater attention in reading than architectural texts. Armchair-based reading habits are not going to get one far in philosophy. Typically, reading a philosophical book requires taking notes, making summaries, and re-reading them to grasp the full framework of the author’s ideas. It is particularly important to note technical terms as they are introduced in the text. Such terms may re-occur a couple of hundred pages later, and one may miss the author’s point if one does not remember the original explanation. The most important thing in reading a philosophical text is to concentrate on the line of argument, how the author presents and defends the point he or she is trying to make, and what counterarguments he or she must engage. Are these responses successful? What kinds of counterarguments did the author fail to consider? A careful reader may also develop his or her ideas about the order in which the author organized the arguments and presented them. Many great philosophers did not write in English; philosophical books are notoriously among the hardest texts to translate, and when it comes to reading philosophers in a language one has not mastered, one is often advised to compare a couple of translations and possibly read them in parallel. At the same time, because philosophers typically write in a very technical language, they often use a relatively small vocabulary, and one need not have studied a foreign language to an advanced degree in order to be able to read philosophical works in that language. A huge publishing industry caters to the philosophical interests of the general public, and many introductory texts can be used to read more about the philosophical problems discussed in this book. The works of some philosophers, such as Plato, René Descartes, or Friedrich Nietzsche, can be approached by a lay reader without much preparation. Arguably, this applies even to some of Martin

Heidegger’s works (even Being and Time), although Heidegger generally requires very disciplined and well-organized reading habits, as well as careful note taking. Reading other philosophers, such as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, requires more preparation and preferably reading a number of books about their philosophy before embarking on some of their books. For most of the major philosophers, a vast number of books present their views in English. Most of them are reliable, especially those published by major publishers. However, their authors, consciously or unconsciously, are likely to emphasize their own interests and disregard what does not interest them; some of them may also be trying to advance their own interpretive approach to a certain philosopher. General philosophical encyclopedias are a good place to obtain preliminary information about the ideas of individual philosophers. A well-known one, although old and not useful when it comes to more recent philosophers, is the multivolume The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1967). A very good source is also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is easily consulted on the Internet. Because philosophers often react or relate to the works of their predecessors, one is generally advised to read them in the relevant philosophical context. This is why reading a couple of general survey histories of philosophy is always a good idea. Two well-reputed ones are Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and Frederick Copleston’s multivolume History of Philosophy. (Both books are available in numerous editions by various publishers.) Those readers who want to read more substantially on individual philosophers should consider Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Companion series. The books in this series are collections of essays, typically edited by major scholars who have worked on individual philosophers and have selected the individual contributors to specific volumes on the basis of their previous work on individual problems. The extensive and up-to-date bibliographies are a particularly valuable aspect of these books. Instead of being interested in the work of individual philosophers, one may want to know more about specific philosophical disciplines and study philosophical debates on

Bibliography

certain topics. Some publishers have series on the philosophical problems in certain fields, such as the Routledge Companions and Blackwell Guides to various fields of philosophy. Architects and architecture students are particularly likely to be interested in aesthetic problems. A good introduction to the philosophical debates in aesthetics is Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction, ed. Oswald Hanfling (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992). Another good way to approach aesthetics is to read a good survey book on the history of aesthetics; the classic in this field is Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz’s History of Aesthetics (available in a number different editions). Introduction A very useful reading that can accompany the Introduction is John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). A good summary of the debates about relativism is by Maria Baghramian, Relativism (London: Routledge, 2004). Willard Van Orman Quine discusses the problems of translation between radically different contexts in his book Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). Many readers will find his writing very technical. For Donald Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism, see his essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1984), 183–98. The idea that human thinking is fully determined by culture has lost much of its credibility in recent decades, and today many authors tend to emphasize the inborn aspects of human mind. For a presentation of such arguments, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate. The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003). For the history of the view that all thinking is always verbal, see Michael Losonsky, Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For research on nonverbal thinking, see José Luis Bermúdez, Thinking Without Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). A good collection of research papers on visual imagination is Ned Block, ed., Imagery (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). Chapter 1: Plato A good summary of the view of pre-Socratic philosophers is in the first two volumes of W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek

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Philosophy, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962–75). There are three main sources about the life and ideas of Socrates: Plato’s writings (especially Apology), Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and (crudely unfair) Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds. All these books, especially Plato’s dialogues, are available in a great number of editions and translations. Except for a couple of very difficult dialogues, such as Parmenides, Plato’s writings are easily accessible to a novice in philosophy. Apology is a classic, and readers with architectural interests will want to look into his discussions of aesthetic problems in the dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus. The dialogue that has probably influenced architectural theory the most through the centuries has been Timaeus; it provided the starting point for the discussions of theories of proportions. For the theory of knowledge, one should look into the dialogues Meno, Theaetetus, and Sophist. Useful commentaries on Timaeus, Theaetetus, and Sophist were written by Francis McDonald Cornford in Plato’s Cosmology (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997) and Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (New York: Dover, 2003). For Plato’s political views, see his dialogues Republic and Laws. The classic book on optical corrections is Henry Goodyear, Greek Refinements: Studies in Temperamental Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912). Obviously, this book is very old and does not rely on modern research on the archaeology of Greek temples—but it does provide a discussion of the elementary facts on which the later debates were based. For the modern scholarship on optical refinements, see Lothar Haselberger, ed., Appearance and Essence: Refinements of Classical Architecture: Curvature (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1999). For a discussion of Palladio’s Platonism and a summary of the views of various authors who wrote about it, see chapter 4 of Branko Mitrović, Learning from Palladio (New York: Norton, 2004), 141–70. Chapter 2: Aristotle What has been preserved from Aristotle’s writings has reached us in an edited version of his notes, in which his line of thought is not always easy to follow. Aristotle is a difficult author to read for someone who is approaching his

Bibliography

philosophy for the first time. Trying to read the Metaphysics or Posterior Analytics without previous preparation is unlikely to result in much understanding. Luckily, there are a huge number of introductory texts and commentaries on his work—probably more than for the work of any other philosopher. The classic is W. D. Ross, Aristotle (available in numerous editions). Another good survey is the sixth volume of Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy. The standard edition of translations of Aristotle’s works is by Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Apart from this, the translations by Hugh Tredennick are particularly clear and true to the original. Commentaries on Aristotle’s individual works are also numerous—although they often tend to be technical and directed at readers who know Aristotle’s work well; they are often written to demonstrate the consistency and plausibility of certain interpretive approaches that the commentator advocates. Clarendon Press (Oxford) has a widely used series of commentaries with translations of particular works, edited by J. L. Ackrill and Lindsay Judson. A well-balanced general presentation of Leon Battista Alberti’s views on architectural theory is by Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969). For Alberti’s philosophical views, see Branko Mitrović, Serene Greed of the Eye. Leon Battista Alberti and the Philosophical Foundations of Renaissance Architectural Theory (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005). Erwin Panofsky’s “Perspective as Symbolic Form” is available in an English translation by Christopher S. Wood: Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991). For an analysis of Panofsky’s discussion of homogenous space, see Branko Mitrović, “Leon Battista Alberti and the Homogeneity of Space,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, no. 63 (2004): 424–39. Panofsky’s analysis of Euclid’s discussion of perspective is inaccurate, and his article needs to be read in conjunction with C. D. Brownson, “Euclid’s Optics and Its Compatibility with Linear Perspective,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, no. 26 (1982): 165–93. In architectural theory, one often discusses space or infinity, and even non-Euclidean geometries are sometimes invoked. It is therefore recommended at least to try to read

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Euclid’s Elements and to get a clear idea about the way the system of Euclidean geometry operates. The book is easy reading (even though it is mathematical), and there are numerous editions of the English translation by Thomas L. Heath. Chapter 3: The Rise of Modernity The classic presentation of the Great Theory in relation to Renaissance architecture is Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (available in numerous editions). The Enlightenment is obviously a huge topic, but debates about it do not properly belong to philosophy. Nevertheless, Immanuel Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment” (available in numerous editions) is useful reading. René Descartes’s Meditations and George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge are valuable reading experiences for anyone approaching philosophy. There is an enormous literature on authors such as Descartes, Baruch de Spinoza, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The volumes on these thinkers provided in the Cambridge Companion series are useful introductions to their thought and contain substantial bibliographies for those who want to know more. Chapter 4: Immanuel Kant Kant is a massive thinker and, alongside Aristotle’s, his is one of the most comprehensive philosophical systems in history. His writing is often very technical, and he has high expectations of his readers when it comes to systematic and disciplined reading. There are numerous good introductions to his thought and presentations of his views, such as Paul Guyer, ed., Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The Critique of Pure Reason is an immensely complex work. Reading it properly, with note taking, is likely to take months. It also requires the kind of concentrated reading that most people can do only a couple of hours a day. The Critique of Judgment is no easier to read, but for architects, it is really the first two “Moments” (the very opening section) that are relevant. This is where Kant formulates a fullfledged formalist aesthetics—though in many ways he abandons this initial position later in the book. A translation that can be recommended is the one by Werner S. Pluhar.

Bibliography

Chapter 5: Romanticism and Historicism There are numerous introductions to Hegel’s thought, some of which work too hard to adapt his positions to our contemporary worldview. One may therefore prefer Walter Terence Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (London: Macmillan, 1924). A little bit less systematic but therefore more popular is Frederic Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005). Hegel’s style of writing is notoriously impenetrable, but this is not the case with the notes from his lectures. Of all his books, Philosophy of History is the one that is most interesting to a reader with interests in architectural theory; it is not difficult to read, and the first quarter of the book, in which Hegel formulates his approach to the philosophy of history, is widely read. The standard popular introduction to Karl Marx’s thought is the Communist Manifesto. The classic survey of the philosophical views of Marx and his followers is Leszek Kołakowski, Main Current of Marxism (New York: Norton, 1978). Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West is long and (for the most part) entertaining reading, with little concern for facts but with many thoughtful and amusing insights, including some about architecture and its history. Hans Sedlmayr’s formulation of collectivist historical method is in his essay “The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought,” available in English in Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: OPA, 2001), 11– 32, especially 26–28. It is useful to read this essay alongside the opposing essay by Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1955), 1–25. Chapter 6: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics There are a number of general introductions to Edmund Husserl’s thought; most of them fall outside the likely interests of a person interested in architectural theory. A very thorough examination (if somewhat technical for a beginner) is Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (London: Routledge, 2006). Heidegger’s Being and Time is notoriously difficult to read, although it is not incomprehensible if read with good

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note taking and if notes are regularly re-read and attention paid to new concepts as Heidegger introduces them. The essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” is comprehensible for architecture students. It exists in various editions and can even be downloaded from the Internet. Charles Guignon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993) provides a legible and general survey of Heidegger’s thinking. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical works are more readable than Heidegger’s; in any case, Truth and Method needs to be approached with care, and reading it may take a couple of months. There are a number of good general introductions to hermeneutics that should be read before attempting to read Gadamer. Two are Jean Grondin, Introduction in Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) and Maurizio Ferraris, History of Hermeneutics (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996). A particularly useful collection of historically influential essays on human perception is Vision and Mind, ed. Alva Noë and Evan Thompson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 2–3. The classic formulation of the view that “there is no innocent eye” is Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1960) (available in numerous subsequent editions). For Bruner’s research, see Jerome Bruner and Cecile C. Goodman, “Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, no. 42 (1947): 33–44 (also available on the Internet). For the modern understanding that vision is impenetrable for conceptual thinking, see Zenon Pylyshyn, Seeing and Visualizing. It’s Not What You Think (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). Chapter 7: Philosophes and Philosophers For many people, Nietzsche is the first philosopher they read; he is a brilliant stylist and reads easily. One can recommend reading him directly, especially works such as The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spake Zarathustra. For the relativist aspects of his doctrines, see particularly Beyond Good and Evil (especially section I.22) and Will to Power (480/481). Nietzsche’s books are available in a great many editions and translations. The French authors discussed in this chapter are generally considered difficult to read, but a substantial sec-

Bibliography

ondary literature can help potential readers approach them. A masterpiece of clarity is Robert Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003). Another useful book to consider is Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is available in numerous editions, and reading it should not present a major problem. Philosophically relevant sections are the Introduction and Parts One and Two. Roland Barthes’s short essay, “The Death of the Author,” is available in translation in his collection of essays Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). It can also be downloaded from the Internet. Jacques Derrida’s writings are also notoriously hard to read. The two most significant pieces in the context of the discussion of this chapter are the book Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) and the article “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60. Secondary bibliography on Derrida is huge. One may find the following books helpful: Barry Stocker, Derrida on Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 2006); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). For Derrida’s encounter with Gadamer, see Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). For Derrida’s debates with John Searle, see Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988). A very good and cogent summary of Michel Foucault’s ideas is in Gutting, French Philosophy, 258–88. Gutting is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003). Philosophically, the most interesting readings by Foucault are The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) and The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973). Because of the discussion of the Panopticon, architects are particularly likely to be interested in his book Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

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For architects, the two most important pieces by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are the last chapter of their A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1992), 474–500, and Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Good secondary summaries are Tod May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the corresponding chapters in Wicks’s Modern French Philosophy (269–78) and Gutting’s French Philosophy (331–40). Charles J. Stivale, ed., Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005) summarizes individual concepts as they appear in Deleuze’s various works—an approach that is particularly useful, since, as mentioned, Deleuze’s books do not have a specific content that can be summarized and mainly consist of expositions of concepts. Andrew Ballantyne’s Deleuze & Guattari for Architects (London: Routledge 2007) presents some aspects of the works of Deleuze and Guattari that may attract the attention of architects. For examples of specific architectural discussions that relate to Deleuze and Guattari, see Greg Lynn, Folding in Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1993) and John Rajchman, Constructions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 10–35. The main texts pertaining to the Sokal affair are to be found in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (New York: Picador, 1998). Chapter 8: Analytic Philosophy Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy is easily accessed on the Internet and provides extensive articles about the majority of philosophers discussed in this chapter. A good general survey of early analytic philosophy is John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1970). Gilbert Ryle’s article “Theories of Meaning,” in British Philosophy in Mid-Century, ed. C. A. Mace (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 237–64, is a particularly good summary of early debates on the philosophy of language. A good collection of papers on analytic aesthetics is Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks at the Arts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977). Readers interested in contemporary formalism should read Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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Index A Alberti, Leon Battista, 49-54, 62, 66, 87, 191, 195 Analytic Philosophy, 145, 174-87, 189-91, 197 Aristotle, 32, 42, 55, 66, 74, 87, 123, 133, 155-57, 194-95 Athens, 27-9, 37, 43 Austin, John, 161 B Barthes, Roland 150-3, 158, 184, 197 Baudrillard, Jean, 170 Beardsley, Monroe, 184-5 behaviorism, 22, 180-3 Berkeley, George, 74, 75, 195 Blondel, Francois, 70 Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 107 Borissavlievitch, Miloutine (Borisavljević, Milutin) , 63 Brahe, Tycho, 65 Brentano, Franz, 117-8 Bricmont, Jean, 166-7, 170, 197 Bruner, Jerome, 136, 196 C CAD, 24, 51 Carnap, Rudolf, 177 Cassirer, Ernst, 125-6 CIAM, 113 Copernicus, Nicholas, 57, 64, 65 D Darwin, Charles, 46, 67, 97, 110 Dasein, 122-4, 126-8, 134 Davidson, Donald Herbert, 20 Descartes, René, 72-4, 84, 122, 156, 158, 180, 193, 195 Deconstruction, 152-3, 160-2, 164, 176, 185, 197 Deleuze, Gilles, 165-8, 170, 197 Democritus, 44, 66 Dennett, Daniel, 182

Derrida, Jacques, 145, 149, 150, 153-68, 170-3, 176, 197 Dickie, George, 185 Dummett, Michael, 18, 194 E Eisenman, Peter, 153, 157, 162, 163, 167 Enlightenment, 67-9, 72, 74-5, 77, 83-4, 87, 90, 93-8, 104-5, 108, 133, 145, 195 Epicurus, 66 epistemology, 72, 144-5 Erasmus, Desiderius, 61, 111 Euclid, 50, 54, 55, 74, 195 F Fiedler, Conrad, 88-9 formalism, 51, 87, 114, 135, 187, 189-91, 196-7 Foucault, Michel, 145, 161, 165-6, 168, 197 Frege, Gottlob, 176, 177 French Revolution, 93-4, 104 Frey, Dagobert, 136 G Gadamer, Hans Georg, 132-5, 139-41, 160, 170, 172, 196-7 Galilei, Galileo, 65 Ghyka, Mathila, 63 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 94 Golden Section, 63-4 Gombrich, Ernst, 111-2, 136, 196 Gramsci, Antonio, 107 Great Theory, 57, 64, 90, 195 Guarini, Guarino, 41 Guattari, Felix, 165-8, 197 Guernica, 186-7 H Hambidge, Jay, 63 Hanslick, Eduard, 87-9 Hegel, Georg Wilehelm Friedrich, 99-104, 107-9, 112, 113, 114, 118, 156, 158, 193, 196 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 21, 95, 97-100, 102, 115 hermeneutics, 132-5, 137, 139, 141, 160, 196

Index

historicism, 95, 103, 107, 112, 117, 120, 196 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 113 Hitler, Adolf, 103, 117, 126, 178 homogeneity of space, 195 Hume, David, 75, 195 Husserl, Edmund, 117-22, 123, 125, 137, 153, 196 I Ingarden, Roman, 119-20 intellectual integrity, 14, 69 intentionalism, 191 intentionality, 117, 119, 183 Irigaray, Luce, 170 J Johnson, Phillip, 113, 152 K Kant, Immanuel, 68, 69, 71, 75, 77-91, 96-9, 102, 110, 111, 122, 123, 125, 129, 135, 156, 166, 193, 195 Kepler, Johannes, 65 Korsch, Karl, 107 Kosslyn, Stephen, 24, 25 L Latour, Bruno, 170 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 71 Le Corbusier, 112-3,115 Lenin, Vladmir Ilyich, 105-7 Leucippus, 44, 66, Lobachevsky, Nikolai, 55 Locke, John, 74, 195 logic, 40, 46-7, 102, 144-5, 147, 156, 166, 173, 175-7, 183 Luther, Martin, 61, 109, 111, 125, 132 Lynn, Greg, 197 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 170 M Marx, Karl, 104-7, 112, 196 modernist movement, 63, 113, 115

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N Nazis, 111, 121, 125, 126, 127, 136, 147, 178 Neurath, Otto, 177 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 145-7, 151, 166, 168, 196 Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 120, 137-41 O ontology, 35, 127, 144, 145 P Palladio, Andrea, 23, 25, 38-41, 62-3, 89, 90, 183, 194 Panofsky, Erwin, 52-54, 109, 111-2, 125, 195, 196 Parthenon, 37-38, 182 Perrault, Claude, 70 Picasso, Pablo, 186-7 Plato, 26, 30-5, 38-9, 43, 46, 50, 58, 66, 74, 109, 119, 122, 147, 149, 154, 156, 193 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 60 Popper, Karl Raimund, 34 propositions as truth bearers, 17, 78 Ptolemy, 59 Pylyshyn, Zenon, 24-5, 196 Pythagoras, 57-8 Q Quine, Willard van Orman, 18, 19, 180, 182, 194 R Renaissance, 37, 39-41, 49, 50-55, 57-60, 62-4, 70, 71, 72, 89-90, 109, 111-2, 165-6, 195 Romanticism, 87, 93-5, 97-8, 195 Rothacker, Erich, 136 Russell, Bertand, 177 S Sapir, Edward, 19, 150 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 145, 148-51, 154, 157-9, 189 Scott, Geoffrey, 89-91, 140-1, 191 Schlick, Moritz, 177-8 Searle, John, 161-2, 170, 180, 183-4, 194, 197 Sedlmayr, Hans, 110-1

Index

Shepard, Roger Newland, 23, 24, 181 Sibley, Frank, 186 Smith, John Alexander, 12 Socrates, 27-30, 32-3, 47, 69, 147, 194 Sokal, Alan, 169-72, 197 Sparta, 28 Spengler, Oswald, 53, 109-10, 112, 127, 179, 196 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedictus) de, 100, 166, 195 V Vienna Circle 177-80 Vitruvius, Marcus Pollio, 36-7, 41, 51, 62 W Walton, Kendall, 186-7 Watson, John, 181 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 19,20, 150 Wigley, Mark, 152-3, 157, 162-3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 41, 179-80, 185 Wittkower, Rudolf, 62, 195 Zangwill, Nick, 187, 190-2, 197 Zeitgeist, 99, 115

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