The Unholy Union: Philosophy and Architecture

What's the deal with architects and philosophy? When Paris became a museum - and not a school

Object relations. What do structuralism, formalism, Lacan's orders, and Derrida's deconstruction have in common? (Source)

Why do architects love philosophy so much, especially the complicated kind, and dig into it at every opportunity? Because they love structures and want to live inside thought structures. That's why they're not creative in philosophy, because their creativity is structural, and innovations in philosophy are not structural innovations. Structural creativity of creating complex structures in philosophy is fruitless - because philosophy is creativity at the foundational level. The structures only demonstrate the foundations. If something is complicated in philosophy - it's a sign that in a hundred years, when only the different foundations are visible, it will be worthless and no one will be interested in it. Philosophy doesn't seek the complicated, but the profound, and the profound is found in the simple, not the complex. But the profound is not found in the trivial simple, it's not New Age, but in the creative simple - in the basic innovation. The basic innovation is profound because the new foundation is beneath everything.

What is the significance of philosophy being in innovation, that depth has a dimension of time? The reason for this is learning. Otherwise, depth would be a matter of space. And this is what architects really don't understand, and why they are conformist in their tendency towards existing philosophical structures: they love philosophy made of stone. Philosophy is more like archaeology than architecture. Its innovation is in deepening - but not in the past, rather in the future. It is archaeology reversed in time. The structures are just tools for it. Good philosophy is lean philosophy - not skeletal. And so is good psychology - a little fewer models, and a little more examples.

So, what's the difference between philosophy and the Talmud? Why are complex structures created in the Talmud that last for generations? Well, in the Talmud, structures are not created, but a tree. The Talmud is not built - it grows, because it is a learning system. All of philosophy - it's really a tree, of all kinds of thinkers. Even if it seems that it always returns to the base, that is, to the bedrock, and to the (destructive) zero point, and starts building everything from scratch again - this is true only for the individual (important) thinker, and not for philosophy as a system. The problem is always focusing on the individual, without understanding long-term historical developments in philosophy.

Here's an important exercise: to understand the line connecting Descartes - Kant - Wittgenstein not as a broken line, and not as a triangle of independent possibilities, but as a straight line, as a trend in which Kant is an intermediate stage (important. Not trivial, but in the same direction). And to extend this forward and backward in the history of philosophy. And to understand the junctions, why philosophy split into several possibilities here, why branches came out from here, and how the branches are already in the branch from which they split - and whether there was a missed branch, or if we've exhausted them.

The thinking of the roots is less important, because it is thinking about the past as a possibility (here, one can find a foreshadowing of so-and-so's ideas!), because there are many roots for every idea (the splitting in the roots means a variety of possibilities). The important thinking is the opposite thinking, branch thinking: what can come out of something. Because it shows the past as a necessity. And it organizes the possibilities that came out as a necessity (for example: from Descartes, these two schools and this variety of thinkers had to emerge). Therefore, it is learning-oriented. This is root thinking. Not the roots. But the one root as a necessity. And then from such thinking, branches for the future can also emerge - this is fruitful thinking.

This is in contrast to thinking about roots and learning sources as cases, that is, as a non-necessary form. Because learning-oriented thinking thinks of these sources as examples - and even more so as paradigms (that is, when the example is perceived as necessary. Plato is necessary. Aristotle is necessary). And then, a philosopher is one who demonstrates new thinking, that is - gives an innovative example (and in the paradigmatic case - the innovative example is perceived as necessary. Kant is necessary. Wittgenstein is necessary). But the very meaning of thinking as new - stems only from old thinking, and not from thinking itself. There is no meaning to a philosophical method without history (but even the beginning of history - the beginning of philosophy - is history. The meaning of "everything is water" stems from what came after it. Without philosophy, this sentence is meaningless).

Therefore, the structure of each philosophy is much less important - and what's important is the structure of the tree. That's why the Talmud manages to develop a complexity that is learning-oriented - because it has many sages. All (heroic) attempts to understand the Talmud as a structure have failed. It has no uniform system - and there is no one great depth structure in Halacha [Jewish law], that if we only discover it, and map it all out, we will understand everything and solve all disputes and difficulties. There is no master plan. It is a tree of life. Therefore, Sha'arei Yosher [Gates of Righteousness], in which Rabbi Shimon Shkop tried to build a system, is a failure - and Rabbi Shimon Shkop's innovations are exemplary (and the greatest achievement of the Talmud in the 20th century. He was the Rabbi Shimon of his generation).

The great mistake of the Western spirit is the lack of canonized textbooks, that is, the lack of writing philosophy as Talmud, in an organic way throughout history (and so in every other field of humanities). And then everyone writes and interprets on the same corpus, and every new conception is an interpretation. But it's too late now. The Talmud is an abandoned model, but its example is not abandoned. And when does philosophy turn to stone? Exactly when it becomes a structure. That is, exactly when architects start to love it (and how they love French philosophy! In perfect timing with the decline of Paris as an intellectual center).

The depth of philosophy is in time, not in space, and in its ability to create time: to create a new conceptual era, to such an extent that we already find it very difficult to think in the previous conception. This is how it creates a passage of time - out of the progress in spirit. Learning is what creates the passage of eras, and only therefore can philosophy advance the spirit, and therefore there is progress in philosophy - because the progress of physical time is uniform, but the progress in spiritual time accelerates and decelerates, stops and breaks through, solidifies and flows, petrifies and grows, according to philosophical change. The structure in space is a kind of brake on time. It is meant to hold it in place, as if if you put enough intellectual weight and gravity (oh, French!), time won't escape (to America, to the future). Hence the French hatred for America. But no structure can stop time. All architecture turns into archaeology.

Therefore, we must be very careful about designing the future by architects, lest we turn ourselves into stones and fossils. The fear of artificial intelligence is not a fear of silicon versus carbon, but the fear of artificial structure. That is, of lack of organicity. But the concern is not about lack of biological organicity, but about lack of learning organicity. From cutting off the tree of life and turning it into a book (in the best case) and into a structure (in the worst case). But here, precisely the learning technologies, that is, the technologies approaching intelligence more closely, are created when technology itself gives up on structure - in favor of organicity and growth (like in the vegetative tangles of neural networks, random forests, and decision trees). The disaster will be if instead of being gardeners we become builders of artificial intelligence. Just like the great disasters of the previous century were when people tried to be architects of human society (extreme example: Hitler's obsessive architectural fantasies) - instead of being gardeners (in the sense of Candide). With the French - even the gardens are architecture (the rhizome...). Artificial intelligence needs to grow from us organically, and not be built by some "system architect", as in the computer world today. In philosophy, learning, and culture - we need to nurture our gardens. And beware of the artificial structure. And a shoot shall come forth from the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.