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page068from Building Ideasadhere to the principles of Positivism – such as those with which Wittgenstein began and soon abandoned.
Derrida is likewise concerned with the limits of language, together with the general principles and mechanisms of signification, and in this he takes off from the ideas of Structuralism, which we will return to in Chapter 4. In his preoccupation with language as the very medium of philosophy, he betrays a similar priority to Heidegger, although he is much more concerned with the peculiarities of writing as distinct from the traditional emphasis on speech. The difference is significant for much of Derrida’s work but what is important here is the wider objective – by enquiring into the medium of his discipline with such vigour he set a pattern which has inspired others to follow. In architecture his ideas have found an enthusiastic reception, especially among those looking to challenge historical tradition. His frequent use of metaphors drawn from architectural sources has also been the source of much direct inspiration. Despite the problems with applying the process of design what began as a tool for analysis, Derrida has collaborated with the architect Peter Eisenman with some success, and we will return to this theme later in concluding this chapter. Another source of new ideas that have crossed over into architecture is the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and this collaborator Felix Guattari. They too have focused on language as a theme in much of their work, including the multiplicity of possible “language-games” as ways of conceiving and describing the world. This pragmatic theme of potential usefulness, as opposed to the “truth-value” of various languages, also forms part of Deleuze’s general vision of theory as a “box of tools”. In his early work he uses the theories of individual philosopher of dynamic reinterpretation. The resulting offspring of these relationships provides a model of his later theory, where he sets out the general strategy of adopting “voices” for different purposes. In all of this, as with Derrida, there is a lesson for other disciplines, as their creative engagement with the past provides a means to deal with the problems of tradition. More importantly for the theory of
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page067from Building Ideas“paradigm” and the freedom that resulted from this has expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. Martin Heidegger, in a similar vein, also challenged the assumptions of philosophy and attempted what he called a “critical un-building” of its traditions. It was this notion that was picked up by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida when he coined the term “deconstruction” to described his own approach to the problem.
In Derrida’s work one could say that philosophy is being done, if not “with a hammer” – as Nietzsche recommended – then at least with a crow-bar, for the purpose of opening up and revealing. Much of his writing deals specifically with the work of previous philosophers, as he attempts to expose their initial assumptions and to question their conclusions. He often does this through a process of re-enacting their own thinking and thereby revealing the fragile logic of many common philosophical principles. His goal is not a nihilistic one of simply attacking and destroying, although he has often been lambasted for seeming to disparage the achievements of philosophy. As he says in an interview, on the general outlook of his thinking: Tod ‘ deconstruct’ philosophy, thus, would be to think – in the most faithful, interior way – the structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the same time to determine – from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy – what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhere motivated repression. 15 The help escape from this repression Derrida writes in a complex manner, using an often dense and poetic language, which suggests the “exterior” realm he referred to above. In this approach he again follows Heidegger, in his similar use of poetic language, and it is this crossing over of literary genres that has allowed him to step outside the conventions of his field. It is this style of presenting his thoughts that has attracted criticism from “analytical” philosophers, those who still 15 Jacque Derrid, Positions, translated by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, p 6.
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page066from Building Ideasplines like history, philosophy and science could also be seen as languages in themselves. In the Philosophy of Symbolic Forums published in three volumes in the 1920s, he set out the basic principles of this theory, but it was only with his later publication, his Essay on Man, that he applied them to this much broader field. This general study of linguistics in other fields of cultural expression will be developed further in the following two chapters where the language model is considered in detail. In the more recent theories of architecture this notion has been widely influential whether inspiring strong allegiance or provoking opposition. For our present study the major impact of this kind of relativism between languages has been the challenge to the domination of science as the only true description of reality. By questioning the objectivity of science and its claims to the source of truth, Cassirer helped to reinstate the importance of other ways of describing the world. Another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was writing around the same time, came to a similar realization about languages in the course of his own research. Having begun by searching for a pure language based on logical and mathematical principles, he ended up by abandoning this and devising the notion of “language-games”. His conclusion was that no single language – however precise it might be – could ever give a total and accurate description of the world. As each mode of expression has its own range of uses, a composite picture is built up from the overlapping of these various discourses. Each one makes its own contribution towards our overall knowledge of the world. The reassessments of science by Thomas Kuhn and other writers, which were discussed at the beginning of this chapter, should also be compared with the reassessment of philosophy and its similar purported claims to a kind of objectivity. The techniques of deconstructing the inherited traditions of Western philosophy, to overcome the limitations of this dominant model rationality, have become popular in philosophy in the last several decades, though the process has been attempted in different ways in the past. As we saw earlier with the Romantic movement, there was a similar critique of a dominant
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page065from Building Ideastendency in his thought that appears to limit individual freedom. This acquiescence to a kind of “historical destiny” proved to be troubling for later critics, as did Heidegger’s support for German nationalism during the 1930s and beyond.
Where Heidegger’s search for the “truth” of Being led him, like Hegel, to favour poetry and language, Ernst Cassirer, on the other hand, began from a different set of assumptions and this led him to an alternative conclusion. Cassirer sidestepped the metaphysical questions of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being and instead took up the problem of knowledge. It was this more than anything that caused their difference of opinion which Heidegger expressed in a review of Cassirer’s work. By dealing with epistemology as distinct from ontology, Cassirer was following in the footsteps of Kant, who, as we say earlier, had produced the three great critiques which each dealt with one aspect of knowledge. Kant’s critiques or enquiries into the “conditions of possibility” under which we could know anything about the world had produced the distinction between the real world and the world which we know in our minds. The distinction turns on the fact that what we know about the world is limited by the capacity our brains, which are structured in such a way as to “frame” our perceptions to fit into certain pre-given forms. As these perceptions depend on schema like three-dimensional space and time, Kant made it clear that our knowledge is restricted by these different categories or forms of thought. Cassirer picked up on this principle to develop a theory of knowledge, based on the variety of what he called “symbolic forms”, and in the process he modified the chronological sequence set out in Hegel’s history of aesthetics. Where Hegel presented philosophy as the highest achievement of human knowledge, with art as a primitive phase now past its useful purpose, Cassirer allowed all media an equivalent importance in that each has a unique role to play. He did this by considering the origins of language in the assignment of symbols to objects and then extending this metaphorical basis of all language systems to the analysis of symbolism in art. If art could be said to function as another form of language, or another means of describing the world, then whole disciplines
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page064from Building IdeasHeidegger’s work and it is here that he departs from Cassirer and shows his adherence to the philosophy of Hegel. Being is not an entity as such but an underlying force, like Hegel’s Spirit, and it manifests itself in the work of art much more distinctly than in everyone objects. This idea that art “condenses” reality into a truer representation of Being echoes Aristotle’s view that the artist must idealise the individual, in order to attempt to produce an image of the universal from the particular. When Heidegger discusses this, in the essay called The origin of the Work of Art, written in the 1930s but not published until 1950, he describes it as a process of revealing a world that is implied within the work itself. The famous example that he describes, of a van Gogh painting of a peasant’s shows, provides an illustration of the kind of truth that he felt a work of art was able to express. By suggesting a larger context around or behind the particular object, such as the life of the peasant farmer which can be inferred from the depiction of the shoes, the work of art can reveal a world in an immediate and powerful way. Heidegger describes this in a lyrical language, bordering on poetry itself, as he does in the example of the Greek temple which he considers from a similar point of view. The temple, he says, depicts nothing: it merely stands there in its “rock-cleft valley”, while at the same time it implies a set of ritual activities and thereby conjures up a way of life.
The power of man-made objects to carry stories in this direct way has many lessons for the designer of buildings, which we will return to in the next chapter. The work of art, however, remains subordinate to the work of language, which Heidegger continually comes back to in all his analyses of forms of expression. It is here that he echoes Hegel in the priority he gives to philosophy, with language supposedly being the true medium of thought and, in Heidegger’s system, the “house of Being”. It is language that acts for Heidegger as a repository of the history of Being, and he often uses etymology to uncover a word’s hidden primal meanings. In another sense language is primary, according to Heidegger’s scale of priorities, in the language exists as a system prior to any individual’s attempts to make use of it. This idea that “language speaks man” –rather than man speaking language – reveals a deterministic
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