Spinoza and architectural thinking

ABSTRACT

Although Spinoza makes few remarks about architecture, his use of architectural examples, understood in the context of his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, reveal the architect to be a distinctive kind of human thinker. In this paper I explore the kind of thinking the architect does, first by demonstrating that Spinoza distinguishes the architect's adequate way of conceiving a building from inadequate ways of imagining one, and second by considering how Spinoza might have understood the architect to translate that adequate thinking into the practice of building and construction. I argue that for Spinoza, the architect integrates imaginative, rational, and intuitive thinking, and the parallel forms of bodily action, to understand and construct a building in its causal connections to its component materials, environment, and users. To understand the true idea of a building is therefore to understand its embeddedness in the world and its functional place in a network of modal relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinoza
• architecture
• building
• art
• adequate idea
• inadequate idea
• imagination
• temple

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented to the London Spinoza Circle at Birkbeck College, London, in 2018. It was subsequently presented at a conference on Spinoza and the arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, and at the Universities of Warwick and Glasgow. I would like to thank the organizers and audiences for comments and questions that helped the paper's development. Special thanks to Peg Rawes, Christopher Thomas, and John Heyderman for discussion of Spinoza and architecture, Gokhan Kodalak for his comments on an earlier draft, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank Moira Gatens and Anthony Uhlmann for their support and invitation to contribute to this special issue.

Notes on contributor

Beth Lord is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (2011), and Spinoza's Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (2010), and editor of Spinoza Beyond Philosophy (2012) and Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio (2018).

ORCID

Beth Lord http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9068-0887

Notes

1 Spinoza's views on art have been discussed by Morrison, “Why Spinoza Had No Aesthetics”; Gatens, “Spinoza on Goodness and Beauty”; Thomas, “From Complex Bodies to a Theory of Art”.

2 Mitrovic, Philosophy for Architects, 39–40.

3 Heyman, “Geometry, Mechanics, and Analysis in Architecture”.

4 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, first meditation.

5 Heyman, “Geometry, Mechanics, and Analysis in Architecture”.

6 Spinoza, Ethics, Part 4, Proposition 4. References follow the standard abbreviations in the field for Spinoza's Ethics: E for the Ethics, Arabic numerals for the five parts, P for Proposition followed by the proposition number, S for Scholium, D for Definition, L for Lemma, C for Corollary.

7 Spinoza, E1P33. A growing scholarly literature explores the relevance of Spinoza's naturalism to architecture. Spinoza allows for a conception of the built environment continuous with the natural environment, leading us to think of buildings as active components of our affective fluctuations, and contributors to, or detractors from, our flourishing and our freedom. See Rawes, “Spinoza's Architectural Passages”; Rawes, “Dissimilarity”; Kodalak, “Spinoza, Heterarchical Ontology, and Affective Architecture”; White, “The Greater Part”.

8 Spinoza, E2P7S.

9 For more detail on Spinoza's theory of knowledge, see Wilson, “Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge”; Steinberg, “Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics”.

10 Spinoza, E3P1C.

11 Spinoza, E2P40S2.

12 Spinoza, E2P47S; E5P20S.

13 “Perfectly adequate” and “imperfectly adequate” are my terms, not Spinoza's. For a longer account of intuitive knowledge, see Primus, “Scientia Intuitiva in the Ethics”.

14 Spinoza, E2P47.

15 Spinoza, E5P10S; E5P31; E5P39. On this puzzling point, see LeBuffe, “Change and the Eternal Part of the Mind in Spinoza”.

16 Spinoza, Letter 9.

17 See also Spinoza, E1App.

18 Spinoza, E4Pref.

19 See Spinoza, E2P40S1.

20 Spinoza, E2D6.

21 Spinoza, E1P33S2.

22 Spinoza, E1P16Dem.

23 Spinoza, TIE 108. The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect is abbreviated TIE, with references to paragraph number.

24 Spinoza, E1App.

25 See Newlands, “Spinoza and the Metaphysics of Perfection”.

26 The tabernacle in the time of Moses is described at Exodus 25–27, Solomon's temple at I Kings 5–7, and Ezekiel's vision of a future temple at Ezekiel 40–48. For a helpful overview of this topic, see Touber, “Applying the Right Measure”.

27 This was Jacob Judah Leon's 1642 Retrato del Templo de Selomoh; James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics, 58.

28 Spinoza, TTP ch. 17. References to the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) are to chapter number.

29 Spinoza, TTP ch. 17.

30 TTP ch. 2.

31 On the prophetic use of fictions, see Gatens, “Spinoza on Goodness and Beauty”.

32 Spinoza, TTP ch. 1.

33 See Touber, “Applying the Right Measure”.

34 Spinoza, TIE 69.

35 Spinoza, E2P34Dem.

36 Spinoza, E2P7C.

37 Spinoza, E2P32Dem.

38 See Wilson, “Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge”, 107–9.

39 Spinoza, CM 1.2. Spinoza's Appendix Containing Metaphysical Thoughts is abbreviated CM, with reference to part and chapter numbers.

40 Spinoza, CM 1.2. The same thought is expressed at E1P8S2. For further discussion, see Viljanen, Spinoza's Geometry of Power, who argues that, for Spinoza, “the being of essences is the prime layer of reality itself” (11).

41 To explain the difference between essence and existence, Spinoza offers the example of the craftsman: “go to some sculptor or woodcarver [who] will show [you] how they conceive in a certain order a statue not yet existing, and after having made it, they will present the existing statue” (CM 1.2).

42 Spinoza, E2P8C. See also E1P24C and E2P45C.

43 Relatedly, in the Ethics, Spinoza refers to “the order of the intellect” (e.g. E5P10).

44 Spinoza, E2P40S1-2.

45 Spinoza, E2P40S2.

46 Spinoza, TIE 19, 22.

47 Spinoza, TIE 24.

48 Spinoza, TIE 95; cf. EIP8S2.

49 Viljanen, Spinoza's Geometry, 17–19.

50 Spinoza, E1D6.

51 Spinoza, E1P16Dem.; E1P17S.

52 Spinoza, E2P47.

53 Spinoza, Letter 9.

54 See Curley, “Spinoza on Truth”.

55 Spinoza, CM 1.1.

56 Spinoza, E2P49S.

57 Rawes, “Spinoza's Architectural Passages”, 73–4, uses the term “sense-reason” to describe the thinking with which the architect moves from geometry to materiality. She argues that Spinoza's philosophy enables us to understand architecture as the translation of a geometrical process into embodied human relations.

58 Spinoza, TIE 72.

59 Whereas the eternal idea of the building is defined by its geometrical essence, we might say that the durational idea of the building “gives a genetic definition of itself” (Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, 84).

60 Vitruvius, a key source for early modern architectural thinking, states that the architect requires knowledge of history, astronomy, music, philosophy, medicine, and law, as well as geometry and the practical skills of drawing and building (Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, Book I, ch. 1).

61 In this, I draw on Deleuze's critique of the philosophical notion that the actual is a replication of the concept (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition). White, “The Greater Part”, discusses how architectural thinking may be non-replicative in this sense.

62 Spinoza, E2P7S.

63 Spinoza, E5P10Dem.

64 Spinoza, TIE 69.

65 On the relationship between adequate-inadequate understanding and adequate-inadequate causation, see the definitions and first three propositions of Ethics Part 3.

66 Morrison, for example, argues that the artist for Spinoza is “a kind of sleepwalker” (Morrison, “Why Spinoza Had No Aesthetics”, 364 n. 12). See Gatens, “Spinoza on Goodness and Beauty”, 1–3, for criticism of this view.

67 Spinoza, E5P20S. See LeBuffe, “Change and the Eternal Part of the Mind in Spinoza”.

68 The argument for this connection is developed through Ethics Part 4. See especially E4D8, E4P20-28, and E5P25.

69 Spinoza, TTP ch. 2.

70 Spinoza, E4P37.

71 An architect may, however, be forced by external circumstances or authorities to build structures that detract from the flourishing of others. And, of course, architects whose rational thinking and virtue are at a low ebb may design poor-quality buildings.

72 See Kodalak, “Spinoza, Heterarchical Ontology, and Affective Architecture”.

73 “Whatever we desire and do of which we are the cause insofar as we have the idea of God, or insofar we know God, I relate to religion”, E4P37S1.

74 Spinoza, Ethics, E4D8, E4P28.