Abstract submitted

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Architecture, Bamberg, Classical architecture, Eliade, Germany, isparchitecture, Lonergan, maurice merleau-ponty, Metaxy, Voegelin

I recently submitted the following abstract for the conference below:

http://isparchitecture.com/events/3rd-international-conference/

Abstract: Architecture in the Metaxy

Man is a (dependent) rational animal.  This classic formula, while not exhaustively defining man in all of his ontic nor ontological density, is useful in that it points towards characteristic features by which the presence of “the human” might be distinguished in the anthropological record—in other words, how we might recognize ourselves and our origins within the “evolutionary” milieu.

In short, the presence of “the human” makes itself known in the vestiges of the characteristic operation of its mind, as the movement-in-being by which we abstract from and recapture our corporeal existence and use it to signify rather than merely to co-exist in the world (Merleau-Ponty).  Thus, the anthropological record is inherently, and perhaps essentially, the material record of this symbolizing activity.

A philosophical anthropology indicates that this symbolization flows from the beginning of man’s “experience of being” in which is disclosed a two-fold experience: that of being not only in relation to the world in which he finds himself, but ultimately to the ground of being itself (Voegelin).  According to Aristotle’s principle of equivalency, there is a recognizable identity between the experienced reality of this “metaxy” and its symbolization at various levels of differentiation, ultimately as forms of analogical participation.

One such characteristic form of analogical mediation is Architecture, not narrowly or reductively understood within either an equivocal tectonic paradigm nor a univocal conceptualism, but rather as Mircea Eliade and Bernard Lonergan explicate it: as the analogically patterned objectification of space whereby psycho-somatic man posits an orientation in space and time that manifests, orients, and transforms his relationships within the world, as well as his participation in—and search for— the  “ground”.

In view of such an architectural anthropology, this paper serves to explore how Architecture comes to reveal, extend, and transform, whether implicitly or explicitly, each person’s and each culture’s horizon— the beliefs regarding who they are and what it means to be human within the metaxy.  In so doing, it seeks to provide some cursory analysis to the question of “how should we build today?”.

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The Primacy of Perception

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maurice merleau-ponty, phenomenology

 From a previously unpublished text at the introduction to the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Primacy of Perception”, a series of passages provides a wonderful insight into perception and the body’s role in perceptual and spatial orientation, which has significant meaning for architectural theory.

“…the body is no longer merely an object in the world, under the purview of of a separated spirit.  It is on the side of the subject; it is our point of view on the world, the place where the spirit takes on a certain physical and historical situation.  As Descartes once said profoundly, the soul is not merely in the body like a pilot in his ship;  it is wholly intermingled with the body.  The body, in turn, is wholly animated, and all its functions contribute to the perception of objects– an activity long considered by philosophy to be pure knowledge…We grasp external space through our bodily situation…A system of possible movements, or “motor projects”, radiates from us to our environment.  Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space.  It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument…For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions…We also find that spatial forms or distances are not so much relations between different points in objective space as they are relations between these points and a central perspective– our body.  In short, these relations are different ways for external stimuli to test, to soicit, and to vary our grasp on the world, our horizontal and vertical anchorage in a place and in a here-and-now.” [p.5]

“Knowledge and communication sublimate rather than suppress our incarnation, and the characteristic operation of the mind is in the movement by which we recapture our corporeal existence and use it to symbolize instead of merely to co-exist.  This metamorphosis lies in the double function of our body.  Through its “sensory fields” and its whole organization the body is, so to speak, predestined to model itself on the natural aspects of the world.  But as an active body capable of gestures, of expression, and finally of language, it turns back on the world to signify it.  As the observation of apraxics shows, there is in man, superimposed upon actual space with its self-identical points, a “virtual space” in which the spatial values that a point would receive are also recognized.” [p.7]