ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE (Part One)

[• ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

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MICHAEL BENEDIKT Hal Box Chair in Urbanism The University of Texas at Austin

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P A R T O N E Locating the Sacred ____________________________________________________________

MANUSCRIPT This draft: 2/7/18 © Michael Benedikt, 2018 Not for distribution or reproduction

ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE, Part One, Draft, © Michael Benedikt, 2018

Dedicated to my wife and muse, Amélie Frost Benedikt, and graduate students of architecture everywhere.

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CONTENTS Preface i Introduction iii

Part One Locating the Sacred 1. Tetsugen 4 2. Sacred space 5 3. From spirituality to solipsism 7 4. Solipsism succeeds 10 5. Solipsism’s expression in architecture: Experientialism 14 6. The Buddhist solution? 16 7. Martin Buber and I-You 19 8. Michael Graziano: consciousness is social 26

Part Two The Fabric of Glances 9. The story of architecture 3 10. A critique of environment & behavior studies 6 11. Two ways of thinking about architecture relationally 10 12: The social logic of space 19 13: From optic arrays to isovists 26 14 From isovist fields to the fabric of glances 33 15 Formations 42 16. Presence fields and the order of shoulders 53 17. M-branes and the phenomenon of theater 71

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Part Three Beyond Experience 18: Buildings as being(s) 2 19: Rooms in relation 7 20. Rooms in motion 15 21. Aldo van Eyck: photography, relation, and “the Between” 23 22: Carlo Scarpa: the power of two 45 23. Learning from Lou 55 24. Architecture in the second person

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PART ONE

Locating the Sacred

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1 Tetsugen

TETSUGEN DOKO WAS a Zen master who lived from 1630 to 1682. As a young man, he resolved to publish the Buddha’s teachings (sutras) in Japanese. At the time, they were available only in Chinese. The book was to be printed with wood blocks in an edition of seven thousand copies—a huge undertaking. Tetsugen began by traveling and collecting donations. Wealthy sympathizers would give him a hundred pieces of gold now and then, but most of the time he received only small coins. He thanked each donor with equal gratitude. After ten years, Tetsugen had enough money to begin. At just that time the Uji River overflowed. Famine followed. Tetsugen took the money he had collected for the books and spent it all to save people from starvation. He then began raising funds again. Several years later an epidemic spread across the country. For the second time, Tetsugen gave the money he had collected to suffering families, and again he began traveling for the book. After twenty years he finally had enough money. Translation done, the printing began. Tetsugen died the following year. The blocks that produced the first edition of sutras in Japanese can be seen today at the Ōbaku monastery in Kyoto, Japan, where parents tell their children that Tetsugen made three books of sutras, and that the first two books, invisible though they are, surpass the third by far. Thus ends the story as it is passed down.1 Interesting to note is that the book begins with the Prajnaparamita, or “Supreme Wisdom” sutras, the primary teaching of which is that all things perceived are illusory.

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2 Sacred space WHEN ARCHITECTS TALK about sacred space, they’re likely to recall the holy sites they’ve visited, or the sanctuaries they’ve designed, or the handful of secular buildings they’ve experienced that in reflecting an order both human and beyond-human, seem to expand time, or intensify the sensation of space, or connect us benevolently to nature. Of course, architects understand that different kinds of sacred space serve different spiritual goals and different religious communities. There is the silence and simplicity sought by monastics, for example, created by cloisters and walled gardens, by cabins and chapels in remote locations. There is the bustle and ceremony preferred by more gregarious believers: song-filled tents, radiant temples, cozy synagogues, dark and echoing cathedrals, chandeliered mat-filled mosques. For some, the spaces offered by art museums border on sacred. There, in rooms clean, lofty, and hushed, in galleries bathed in soft light and surrounded by mysterious depictions and artifacts, one can indeed begin to feel buoyed, swept up, by the efforts of generations of artists to transport people beyond whatever is selfish or practical or hasty in their lives. For others, only nature can provide truly sacred space: a mountaintop, say, or a wilderness, where on a grassy plain under a starry sky one might sense the earth rolling silently through an infinite universe and imagine Jacob—a Jacob, anyway—dreaming of angels, ascending and descending, and in the morning calling the place Beth El, the House of God. In all these examples, the primary experience to be had is not of architecture, however, or of the place as such. The experience sought is that of the divine, or God, described most ecumenically perhaps as that universal, infinitely wise and absolutely authoritative Who, or What, or Process behind all events, moving them towards greater goodness. Needless to say, different places are differently conducive to the experience of divinity. None are able to cause it in a reliable way, such that one might arrange things thus, stand in this spot, and watch the gates of heaven open.2 This is the stuff of movies. By the same token, it takes a rather distinct theology to be able to encounter divinity in banal, indifferent, or unhealthy environments, unless He/She/It appears as a salvific figure or force reversing those very qualities. On the face of it, the profession of architecture is not much occupied with designing sacred spaces. The bulk of architects’ work in this day is decidedly secular: office buildings, hotels, schools, libraries, apartment buildings, houses, and so forth. Clients ask for efficiency, style, ingenuity, and profitability in their buildings—for firmness, commodity, and delight, to use Vitruvius’s categories—not for “sacredness.” Nor are architects as a group particularly religious. But I would argue that most


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architects interested in design as an art, i.e., over and above problem-solving, are in fact unconsciously preoccupied with making space(s) sacred nonetheless, and not just in the ethical/salvific action sense mentioned a moment ago. This preoccupation is why, given the chance, architects will inflect almost every building they design with the very gestures one associates with “spiritual” buildings. They will raise ceilings higher than necessary and cause light to enter from the sky in ingenious ways. They will make plans that “bring people together,” and “connect” them. They will design meditative gardens (preferably with running water) and multiply thresholds to inner sanctums. They will open the building up to majestic and/or idyllic views while suppressing evidence of the building’s internal organs (mechanical and electrical services), excretion (sewage, garbage), material inputs (loading docks, service doors) and dirt (dust, grease). Cleanliness is next to godliness. They will want their buildings to last forever and perform miracles of structure (most often, levitations) and materiality (lustrous concrete, invisible glass) as though to induce doubt that the laws of physics and entropy apply here, to this building.3 There will be no mistakes, no cracks or gaps, no tools or accessories left lying about. Mathematical symmetries will abound, either in preternatural orderliness and purity, or in computer-aided adoration of nature’s leafy complexity…these, together with an acute awareness that the direction up, when not clearly utilitarian (as with an access ladder), connotes elevation in more senses than one. We might also include the natural tendency of architects, across nearly all building types and styles, to specify the most precious materials they can, to create virtual shrines out of recesses, to set artworks just so, to call for high levels of craftsmanship and other shows of devotion from both contractor and client, and to publish photographs of their building’s tallest, most vertiginous spaces and most imposing contours as seen in the rarest of lights: the “accidental” beam of sunshine, or the Edenic turning of day into night.4 Here I am proposing that the desire to sacralize space, to make buildings that could engender a near-religious experience in at least some part of them, permeates the profession of architecture. Church, temple, and mosque provide the model, or Nature does—which is to say, nature seen all but religiously. If this is true, then whatever cogent thing can be said about divinity and our experience of it today will apply more broadly than just to the design of religious sanctuaries. That ‘cogent thing’ may help us understand why many high-design buildings look the way they do, be it in agreement with, or objection to, historical conventions of sacralization. It could help us see where the proclaimed-great architect’s claim to extra-personal, extra-political authority comes from. I mean: the knowing of what should be built. More importantly, it could identify what precepts about being human in this world—precepts that guide much cultural production as well as motivate contemporary architecture—could stand reexamination.

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3 From spirituality to solipsism EXPERIENCES OF THE DIVINE are rare. That experiences of the divine are also personal is not often remarked upon.5 After all, I can have the experience; you can have the experience; but I cannot have yours and you cannot have mine even if what precipitated it was a group event. And this personal-ness is what I would like to focus on. The private nature of the experience of the divine agrees well with the “neurological” view that all experiences are private, not just religious-spiritual ones. How could it be otherwise? Experiencing happens in brains, and brains are individually owned and operated. It’s a matter of anatomy, of wiring. The world might be public, then, and out there. But it is experienced in here, locally, partially, and uniquely by each one of us. Moreover, it’s the experience that counts. It counts because our individual consciousness (= our individual brain states) is all that each of us knows and maximally can know. Indeed, together with our bodies, our brain states are all we really are. Any report on the World out there, then, or on divinity, or on each other, is actually a report of how the World, or (the thought of) God, or the other person, is occurring in here, i.e., in the reporter’s brain. Focus on the inescapability and uniqueness of personal experience, and it will soon make sense to speak of the existence of many worlds rather than one. These worlds, rather like plays or movies, have a finite set of locations (i.e. the places you live, work, and visit), props, major and minor characters, and plots (or at least ‘story lines’). They have beginnings, middles, ends, episodes, crises, and resolutions, with just and unjust desserts. It follows, quasi-metaphysically, that there are at least as many worlds— as many movies or plays—running concurrently as there are people on the earth, with each person the co-star in some, the audience of others’, and at least co-writer/director of his or her own. To be sure, there are similarities among plays and some agreement about what certain episodes feel like: waiting for a doctor, walking on a beach, boarding a plane. If this were not the case, there would be no stand-up comedy, and no branch of philosophy called phenomenology. But, ultimately, your life happens to you and my life happens to me. Moreover, because both the framing and detail of the same experience had by two people is different, they are not really the same experience.6 This is not only true technically but a good thing ethically: for surely (we believe) an important gauge of a society’s evolvedness is the quality, multiplicity, and diversity of the worlds (plays) it produces. In philosophy, the name of this individualistic, experience-centric, many-worlds idea taken to its logical extreme is solipsism. Descended from Descartes’ cogito (“I think therefore I am”), solipsism holds that since “the self can know nothing but its own


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modifications, …the self is the only existent thing,” or at least the only “thing” we (individually) can be sure exists.7 With solipsism, more than every person being at the center of the universe, every person is the center of the universe, or rather, of a universe (if that’s not a contradiction in terms),8 so that it makes almost scientific sense to agree with this old rabbinic wisdom: that when a person dies “an entire universe is extinguished.”9 A similar belief is held in Buddhism. I will come back to how. In the meantime, consider this light-hearted gloss. For his 2003 film Wheel of Time, Werner Herzog interviewed His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Thus: HHDL: “Ultimately, we ourselves, one individual, that is the center of the universe. So for me, this place is the center of the universe, because the concept—the conception—of the whole universe comes from here, so therefore, I am the center of the universe. So, similarly, in your case, you are the center of the whole universe!” (Laughs). WH: “Thank you. That makes me feel very good. I shouldn’t tell my wife.”10

How do buildings fit into this solipsistic if pluralistic and egalitarian view? Buildings are compellingly part of the World out there. Without them, the words “here,” “there,” “where,” and even “real” would lose much of their meaning.11 No matter, says the solipsist, buildings are experienced in minds, and it is those experiences that count, not the buildings. Indeed, if we could have the same or better experiences without the actual buildings…well, then, we should. It would save a lot of time, energy, and money.12 Some works of architecture might resist by positioning themselves as overtly physical, as rooted in geography, as singular and hard to get to as well as beautiful (or sublime). But this only makes matters worse (or better, if you are a solipsist). Why? Because works like this engender memorable experiences all the more copiously, and more easily become the victims of their own success. The target of tourism rather than of natural, everyday (dis)regard, such buildings’ fate is to be supplanted by their photographs, by the narratives of how they were built, how one got to them, what happened there, and so on, even in the minds of those who physically visited them.13 “Lament none of this,” says the solipsist. “Experiences are—experiencing is—all you amount to.”14 Are sacred or religious buildings immune to such reduction? No. Quite the opposite. Bruder Claus Chapel in Mechernich, Germany, by Peter Zumthor, is a perfect recent example; Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp has been another for sixty years, to cite just two modern masterpieces of sacred architecture whose experiencers are almost entirely tourists and architecture pilgrims. To be sure, some sacred buildings require our presence among their stones for a length of time—several seasons, say—in order for their spirit to seep in to us. Most do not, however, and that is by design. Most architecture with a capital A is designed for impact in the short term—as short, often, as the time it takes to take a picture of it that “captures the experience.” At best, people go


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to these buildings for the few hours of elevation they provide along with ritual, recitation, and music. It might take visiting a building for many years, and noticing with every visit the seemingly inexhaustible intelligence of its design to form the kind of relationship with the building, and with the rooms and people there, from which divinity might be felt to shine or in which it might be felt to abide. This relationship is what goes “beyond experience.” And, like all relationships, it starts with an attitude.15 ONE MIGHT BEGIN to have misgivings about solipsism. But let us admit: there’s something pure about it, something correct. Wittgenstein was right: it cannot be denied that while I can extend my senses with instruments, and while I can extend my vocabulary with education and even hearsay, I cannot know my limits, however enlarged, from any viewpoint outside of them. I must live permanently inside my limits. It is as though my experience and my vocabulary together created the concave, outermost surface of a sphere in which I live, a sphere characterized by the fact that near the perimeter, and without God, questions directed outward return an echo, or silence, or nonsense. I am—I can only be—whatever realizes itself here, within the volume of my sphere, whose central region is the nexus of my senses and the locus of my being.16,17 So compelling is this view today that it is hard to think of an alternative formulation. It is a philosophical stance with support in prophetic Western religious thought too. “Hineni” says Adam to God, “Here I am.” “Hineni” said Abraham, three times. Prophets and saints have answered God’s call the same way ever since. You and I (if we are traditional believers) might find ourselves alone in God’s un-avertible gaze too, singled out from somewhere beyond the limits of our understanding. Here I am would be our reply, signaling our readiness for new responsibility. Hineni is the first word of existential monotheism.18 In the Buddhist contemplative ideal something similar occurs, as I remarked upon earlier. Realization (Samadhi, satori) is the result of long training leading to a rare and possibly brief attunement to Brahman. The model is prince Gautama Siddhartha, who, after years of mendicant wandering witnessing rhyme-less suffering, achieved enlightenment while meditating, alone, under a tree that came to be known as the Bodhi Tree. In the western rendition of the story (which is supported in Vedic literature), the Buddha’s enlightenment was termed realization—and more specifically Self-realization—to indicate that it was less about the way the world is apart from us (and thus something like the European Enlightenment), and more about realizing that consciousness—including one’s very own—was constitutive of reality at all scales. This realization was transformative. World and Mind are one, and suffering is caused, at root, by acting as though they were not. Idealist philosophers of the 19th century, as well as followers of Spinoza, tended to agree: innerness, individuality, rationality, and contemplation were the high road, the road both to understanding oneself and the universe, one being the flip side, as it were, of the other. By the 1950s, Western psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow could drop the capital S and name


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our highest need the need for “self-actualization,” and in one step bring the blessings of Eastern consciousness-raising and German Idealism to the two-century-old American passion for worldly success though self-improvement.19 Thought becomes reality and reality becomes thought through the axis mundi that passes through me. By the 1980s and ‘90s, the U.S. Army recruiting slogan “Be All You Can Be” could sound like the eleventh commandment and a Buddhist mantra at once. The 2001-2006 slogan, “Army of One,” would extend the idea into truly Orwellian territory.20 I will have more to say about the self-centeredness that solipsism encourages later. My point for now is this: for the solipsist, religious hierophanies, realizations, and episodes of cosmic-consciousness may be extraordinary in that they do not happen often, or everywhere, or to everyone. But they are ordinary in the following respect: they’re experiences you and I could have. You yours, and me mine, of course, as similar as they might be when we compare them.

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4 Solipsism succeeds THERE ARE TECHNICAL difficulties with solipsism (quite apart from possible ethical ones) which we cannot fully explore here. One is “the problem of other minds,” which involves regarding others as quite possibly automatons, actors, or mere projections of oneself. 21 Another is explaining the massive indifference of nature to our changing states of knowledge about it. (Do the stars not burn on regardless?) These, among other difficulties, are why no serious philosopher has built a philosophical system upon solipsism despite its peculiar, seemingly foundational truth.22 The twentieth century, however, saw the rise of psychology as a rival to both philosophy and religion as a guide to life. And with psychology (and the help of technology) solipsism survived. Indeed, it thrived. How? The early 1900s were when the “hardest” of scientists were beginning to agree: science is nothing if not empirical. Science is based on observations, which are direct experiences of the world as organized by a particular set of questions directed to it— questions, moreover, whose answers are numbers. Scientific method is the method by which (i) a variety of observations we have made of nature can be reconciled with one other, and by which (ii), using the most elegant mathematics possible, future observations can be predicted, as well as the behavior of similar objects.23 If the reconciliations are coherent, if the predictions are successful, and if the similarities are found to hold up in surprising detail, then both the variables used and the numerical constants discovered might usefully be hypostatized, i.e., posited as being real, as being “out there,” in Nature. To the true empiricist, however, even successful hypostatizations are provisional. They are not necessarily the case. They are, rather, pointers to what needs closer observation whenever there are discrepancies between theory and data, which discrepancies, in the fine, there always are. After Kant, science does not claim to know what is really real, what is actually out there, other, perhaps, than regularity itself.24 The empiricist ideal extends to the practice of law and much of everyday life: statements claiming to be factual should be falsifiable in principle and then verified by the direct sensory experiences that ordinary people could have with a minimum of feelings, suppositions, and metaphors attached. That minimum can never be zero: we can never know completely what is going on, or went on. The best we can do is agree on which stories our enumerations give us best evidence for, make a prediction, and then marvel when Nature goes along.


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The trouble is that the admission-cum-stipulation that science is-should-be empirical makes practicing science unavoidably psychological at the very moment it involves our senses (not to say social too because it involves forging common frames of reference, as well agreeing on what makes a “good” story or an “elegant” theory). And that was something that the young discipline of psychology seized upon, wanting to become one of the sciences itself. It would stand at the gates of Experience; it would observe observation itself, and more: it would observe how we sense, count, choose, think, feel, tell stories, and judge elegance…empirically. It would be objective about subjectivity. It would be science at the highest level: a science of mind/Mind and the grounds for a sociology of science as practiced. By the nineteen thirties, having combined with a lingering 19th-century Romanticism championing individual sensibility over social custom and individual possibility over group destiny, psychology’s time had come, and with it the age of the Experiencing Individual.25 Today, in the United States and much of Europe, the science of psychology has been normalized and popularized most markedly in its clinical and therapeutic modes.26 Here the individual (= the patient = the protagonist = the subject) is central. His or her experiences, feelings, and life-story are focused upon, while the world and all the other people in it are cast as impinging sources of “stimuli.” Personal growth is the goal. Or happiness. Or success; and that is true of everyone. In the age of the Experiencing Individual, perception and reality come to stand in a permanently uneasy relationship. Witnessing takes a seat next to dreaming, and memory ceases to be trusted. Relativism becomes the answer to all ontological and ethical questions, thus: just as “real” really means real to (or for) me, so “right” can 0nly mean right to (or for) me, now, or for my group. In the fine arts of the twentieth century, perception psychology became the science of greatest interest: what can our eyes and ears be made to detect at the margins of their ability? What are the minimal requirements of making sense? Certainly, modern painting began to look like a series of experiments in perceptual or cognitive psychology. Ditto modern sculpture and ditto New Music. Novels and poems explored individual sensibilities at the margins of their sensitivity as well as the borders of normality.27 In a parallel motion, language and media became their own subject matter. Consciousness became something to study, not just study with. Human action—once mysterious—became an instance of action-in-general, i.e., universal, impersonal, causeand-effect, systemic, at bottom either mechanical, and thus explainable, or even more mysterious. Social critics started noting the elevation of freedom and privacy to the status of high values. They lamented the “atomization of society” and the rise of the “lonely crowd,” but which was the cause of which, no one knew. Over the course of the twentieth century and into our own, psychology’s language, explanations, and values were absorbed into art, culture, and politics in ways that obscured the solipsism still operating at its base, giving metaphysical legitimacy to self-absorption.28 It’s as though we were all patients now, or psychologists, or as in literary studies, "subjects," or as in business terms, CEOs of Me, Inc. Psychological


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solipsism—if we might call it that to distinguish it from full-on, philosophical solipsism—does not challenge the very existence of an objective world or of other minds, both of which are commonsensically accepted. Indeed, it believes them to be important…to one’s own experience, success, growth, and happiness. You can begin to see the problem. Psychological solipsism is why we—or at least Americans over twenty—are living in the “Me Decade” still, equipped with i-Everything to make it more so.29 Thus: if experience is “every man for himself” and the having of experiences is what counts, then why should other people not be cast as contributors to (or detractors from) the quality and quantity of my experience(s)? And why should I, in return, not be cast as a contributor to the quality and quantity of theirs? It is only fair: I am a part of their worlds via phone and social media if not in person. Moreover, if social happiness is the sum of individual happiness(es), why should manufacturing pleasurable, happinesscreating (feel free to add “meaningful”) experiences for as many people as possible not be the raison d’etre of art, architecture, education, politics, business, religion, and much else?30 What could be more ethical? Or better for business? “Sustainability” comes to mean arranging matters so that we can go on doing this indefinitely without ruining the planet, while “community” comes to refer to whatever social network helps its members maximize the number of positive experiences they have (or help them “grow”) and minimize the number of negative experiences they have (or do not help them grow).31 The spread of the idea that individual experience is the locus of value advances apace. As Joseph Pine and James Gilmore chart in their book The Experience Economy, advanced capitalist economies are turning ever more determinedly away from the production of commodities, goods, and even services, and towards the production of experiences. Today, entertainments are crafted for every demographic, drugs are fabricated for every mood, and every commodity, good, and service is staged, narrativized, and ultimately rated by how enjoyable the experience was that it provided. This includes “signature” buildings, especially museums. It includes most art. In the fully realized experience economy, say Pine and Gilmore, we will not see ourselves as owners, workers, makers, managers, customers, or even consumers. We will see ourselves by turns as clients, audience members, patrons, fans, entertainers, collectors, producers, directors, writers, programmers, organizers, forecasters, connoisseurs, hosts, caterers, docents, actors, teachers, students, performers, celebrants, presenters, counselors, facilitators, participants, collaborators, checkers, reporters, editors, trainers, coaches, jokers, boosters, designers, critics, touters, doubters, and guests. Material goods and routine services will become as cheap as automation and globalization will allow, while livelihoods—especially upper-income ones not involved in moving large blocks of money, adjusting the law for the rich, or collecting rent—will depend increasingly upon the production, distribution, and management of custom experiences: unique ones, designed ones, and, per impossibile, authentic ones (bonus for addictive ones), with satisfying introductions, climaxes, and resolutions for the greatest number of people. At least cost.32 Bread and circuses, as it is said.


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We are well on our way, just as philosopher John Dewey in the 1930’s inadvertently predicted when he identified art with the production of satisfyinglycomposed experiences, and as sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1950’s through 1970’s saw as he watched the ideal of the free, dramaturgical self replacing the ideal of the dutiful, unselfconscious one.33 Do brick-and-mortar retailers not increasingly control every detail of “the retail experience” from the moment one enters to the moment one leaves?34 Do online businesses not do the same, tracking our every click and keystroke to present us with pointers to other products we might like, other sites we might want to “visit” given the ones we have “been to”? Is the browsing-without-being-critiqued, solitary choosing-, clicking-, and put-it-on-my-tab experience not the driver of Amazon’s success, followed as it is a day or two later (the uncertainty is crucial) by a package with your name on it at your door? (“A gift! Who is it from?” you tease yourself.) The gratifications delivered by YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vimeo, iTunes, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify and their rivals are more instant: everything you’d like to see and hear, delivered directly from their servers to your brain. And available surely by the time you read this will be efficient and convincing VR—virtual reality—possibly streaming. Headphones for the eyes; experience on demand.35 We need not wait for the future. Are online retailers not open to consumers acting as reviewers, and are these reviews not mostly of the experience they had ordering, purchasing, receiving, using, and returning the goods (rather than assessment of the quality of the good itself, physically, in light of what else is available, which is what professional reviewers provide)? And who does not want to be massively, personally, liked on Facebook as measured…well…by the number of Likes posted for all to see? Your Tweets, too, are rated. In the real world, do you not pay for the whole experience (not just the food) when you dine expensively? Atmosphere, sure. But do you not tip a waiter well who treats your group as though you were his or her only guests? Clothing creates identity, we are told. Food confirms identity too—yours and the celebrity chef’s.36 And what does “identity” consist of? After your name, social security number, and basic ethnic or class affiliations, it consists of the unique collection of experiences and experience-preferences you make known about yourself. This makingknown about yourself to others happens most efficiently on Facebook, but better, it happens to everyone you physically meet too. Much of the business of “big data” consists in learning, without your consent, what your personal interests and preferences are and selling that information to advertisers and politicians. Is the news on radio and TV (in the U.S., anyway) not offered as “your news,” or better, “news you can use”? Do they not speak of “your weekend weather,” “your day,” indeed, “your world”? Here the announcer bends into the microphone or looks sincerely into the camera and gives to each of us what cannot be owned or given except insofar as its substance, its real estate, is a brain state. Yours. Online, news servers know what you've been reading, and they know what you’ve recently researched or bought.


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Do the most searching questions put to celebrities by interviewers not take the form “What did it feel like when…?,” and do these not add up to the Big Question: “What does is feel like to be you?” As the celebrity dutifully recounts the pleasures and the pains of their life, they make special reference to the setbacks they have overcome and the (amazing) experiences they've had. But the host knows this: that listeners do not really want to encounter the celebrity, but rather, to imagine being them for a few minutes, as in a daydream, vicariously...and then snap out of it, grateful they are not. Does the notion that marriage means sharing your life with somebody not seem true, even insightful? Here is the implication: first there is Your Life. Then you can let someone else be in it and share in its rewards, if they “bring something to it,” i.e., if they contribute to the central enterprise, which is to maximize the total of your positive experiences.37 It’s rather like casting a movie, or staffing a business called My Life. Did you know that funerals—or rather, funeral experiences—can be designed, worded, and delivered by “certified celebrants” to suit your unique needs and the deceased’s? They also do weddings.38 Have you seen the billboard slogan “Education You Can Use,” followed by the name of some local community college?39 It might appear that “use” is the operative word, i.e., that a practical, vocational education is being offered. Nothing wrong with that. But “you” is an operative word too, implying not the receiving of an education but of your education, with all the personalizations—the custom curricula, the individual advising—you need to help you become all you can be. Expensive liberal arts and humanities colleges offer educations tailored to your personality and talents too, but unlike urban community colleges they are able to tout the classic college experiences they also provide: the dorms, the lawns, the ivy-covered walls, the white laboratories, tweed-clad professors, travel programs, and future business associates. It’s all there, for you (and maybe later, your children).40 In similar vein, it is not uncommon for college teachers to claim that their profession’s highest calling, and therefore their own method, is not to Provide Answers but to give students the Tools they need to ask and answer questions for Themselves. Muttering “of course, of course” their colleagues wander off to find more wine. Rarely is the claimant challenged to consider whether the tools he or she so generously provides are (a) adequate to the task or (b) ideologically innocent. Nor is it pointed out that the claim itself gives an all-too-ready answer to the question “What is the best way teach?” Only in a thoroughly solipsistic and psychologized regime would answering a question for oneself begin to have self-evident value.41 Ditto asking questions for oneself while neglecting whether others have asked the same questions—people who genuinely and together might have tried to answer them once and for all. Certainly, the method used by Socrates (of “know thyself” fame) involved dialog between people who were in living relationship to each other over time. It did not aim at promulgating abstract, general thought-tools designed to help strangers reach privately satisfactory answers.


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BLAME GLOBALIZATION OR blame capitalism, the fact is that the nature of work is changing for millions of people at least partly because of widespread, unwittingly-held solipsism. I refer not to the falling relative wages of the working- and lower-middle classes in first world economies, which has many causes, but to the rise of a class of people called the “precariat,” or precariously self-employed.42 Persuaded that holding a steady job is a "living death" compared to "following your passions," members of the precariat try their hands at being capitalists. Maxing out their credit cards or raiding their family’s savings, they engage the world as creatives, as entrepreneurs or independent contractors, doing things their own way on their own schedule. Before long, however, and the more so as they are successful, they find they have turned their entire lives over to the marketplace. Pseudo-personal relations start to abound: in style, metaphor, and intention, all talk becomes business talk. Contacts become "friends" and friends become contacts (potential business associates, customers)—a part, anyway, of a “network” in which everyone functions as an instrument of other’s success. The axiom of solipsism also lie behind the deep interest that most upwardlymobile Americans have in their own personalities and bodies, even in what passes for dialog: the slyly competitive comparing-of-notes on recent health, fitness, diet, career, and personality developments; the trading of tips and pointers in this regard, and the equally competitive recountings and Instagrammings of experiences had while traveling, shopping, at the movies, in sports and games, at restaurants, museums, and concerts, in the wilderness, at sacred sites, and possibly with others doing the same. There are new technologies for recording experiences live (e.g., GoPro, SnapChat, 360 cameras). In addition to Facebook, there are scores of websites and blogs for “sharing” these experiences as well as mobile apps for monitoring the condition of one’s body at every moment (e.g. Apple Watch and Fitbit), all part of the Quantified Self [QS] movement.43 That there is a rapidly growing market for programmable, electric massage chairs is not coincidental. Nor is the proliferation of “hands only” how-to videos online. Here, two disembodied, super-skillful hands come up from the bottom of the screen. They are supposed to feel like yours.44 The unspoken question is this: who’s getting the most out of life? Whose supremely healthy body is having the most and most rewarding experiences? This is not hedonism. This is not the love of pleasure. It is the logical outcome of believing that, after physical health, the having of interesting, enjoyable, canonical, personal, and preferably recountable experiences (“shared” is the wishful term) is the new and enlightened form of wealth, with stories the most effective social currency.45 IN THE PRE-MODERN era, the world was considered God-ordered at all scales. Every object had a place, every action had an ought. There were saints and sinners (or good people and bad people) living in community, who each eventually got what they deserved. In the modern era, the world is considered more chaotic, chancy, complex. Among ideas, as among organisms, as among people, there are no “good” kinds and “bad” kinds. There are only winners and losers, and temporary ones at that. At the


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larger scale, order emerges and melts away. The only entity still bobbing, whole, in the turbulent transition from one worldview to the other is the self-aware, self-realizing, and ultimately solitary, experiencing, self.

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5 Solipsism’s expression in architecture: Experientialism A PARTICULAR STRAIN of solipsism took root in architecture in the 1970’s. It thrives in architecture schools and practices to this day. I am referring to the variety that feeds the belief that fine architecture is “fine” because of the special attention it pays to personal experience, to how one feels as one moves through and around buildings, even to how one feels while designing or constructing them. The approach is sometimes called “phenomenological.” With its roots in such thinkers as John Dewey (Art As Experience), Steen Eiler Rasmussen (Experiencing Architecture), Rudolf Arnheim (Art and Visual Perception) and Jean Labatut’s teaching at Princeton in the 1940s and 50s, it established itself in architecture through the writings of Siegfried Giedion (Space, Time and Architecture), Christian Norberg-Shulz (Existence, Space and Architecture), Kevin Lynch (The Image of the City), Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space), Charles Moore and Kent Bloomer (Body, Memory, and Architecture), geographer Yi Fu Tuan (Topophilia) and, more recently, Juhani Pallasmaa (The Eyes of the Skin), Peter Zumthor (Atmospheres), and Alberto Perez-Gomez (Attunement). All of these writers were influenced by phenomenologist-philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose thinking was derived, arguably, from David Hume. By the 1990’s, sensorially-based, body-based, “experience talk” among designers and teachers of architecture had become something of a gold standard of what it means to get to the heart of things—to the point, the method, the value of making architecture at all.46 It was to make Experience happen. And so, in many quarters, it remains. On this view, formal, practical, historical, cultural, and technological accounts of architecture are well and good, but the rubber hits the road in the actual experience of actual buildings by actual individuals. This is what all other accounts must come down to (or up to: the high ground for which true designers compete).47 Even if one’s talents and interests lie elsewhere, experience cannot be omitted or ignored. It follows that the hinge question to be asked of an existing or proposed building is always “what’s it (going to be) like to be there?” Or, “how does (or will) it make people feel?” Presenters are asked to “take us through the building.” Critics who cite famous buildings are asked, “Have you been there? What was it like?” Thoughtful young designers come to believe it self-evidently true that architecture is transhistorically about “space and time,” about “unfolding” and “change,” about what you can see or hear from here and not there…in short, about experience over time and the


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sensations to be had. Certain of these experiences are preferred. For example, in contemporary academic practice48 one is always triumphantly “blurring the boundaries between inside and out-” or between the natural and the artificial, as though doing either was an accomplishment, as though the experience of boundaryless-ness were itself, self-evidently, a good. (Here Buddhism is a silent partner, along with New Age environmentalism.) Then too, with talk of “screens” and “layers” and “shifts” and “registers,” the mechanics of location, motion, and perception are raised to a selfconscious art. Buildings become machines not for living in, as the young Le Corbusier famously put it, but for experiencing in—indeed, machines for experiencing architecture and/or one’s own sensing self in.49 And to the question to a young designer “Why does your building do this (or that) here?” the answer that stops further questioning is “So that you can experience the space,” or “…the light” or, more riskily, “…being alive.” In commercial practice, the picture is not so different. Here, practicing architects strive to deploy their client’s land, time, and money with maximum cleverness. A handful strive to engage the public with symbolic forms and striking imagery. But in both cases the appeal made is to the client’s experience, or the client’s clients’ (i.e. the tenants’), or the public’s. That’s what will sell. Repeated experiences describe lifestyles, and lifestyles—finite in number—are lived by people of a certain demographic (gender, age, income, childedness, education level, zip code). In the burgeoning experience economy, a building’s success comes to depend on how convincingly the lifestyle it caters to is marketed to the demographic that aspires to it. Lifestyles require material goods, to be sure. These goods are acquired, however, not for the companionship-in-life they offer and which true artworks provide, but for the acquisition stories they provide, and the social standing that these in turn confer. Marketers understand all this. TO YOUNG AND WOULD-BE architects, experientialism (as I should like to call it now, since it is neither phenomenology nor solipsism in their naked forms) comes naturally. Attention to what it is (going to be) like to be there seems to them a perfectly valid priority. Everyone wants to feel alive and to prosper; everyone wants realize themselves as unique; and buildings become the way of doing all three. Other motivations fall away. Indeed, buildings become architecture by virtue of how well they provide the gratifying, status-confirming or -elevating, entertaining, moving, or enlivening sensory experiences people want in order to realize…again, themselves. On this view, contemporary architecture is just like contemporary music, theater, and film, all time-based arts. The arena being competed for is people’s finite capacity for experiencing at all. This finiteness of capacity means that the architect’s first task is to attract attention against the competition of other arts and media, including social media on portable devices. (These, of course, drain attention away from all architecture, good and bad, as well as from the presence of real others.) Boredom is the common enemy. What the architect wants is for every visitor to see and appreciate their building totally, smartphone off, and alone, as though they were in a museum or chapel and no one else was there looking at them, calling them to respond.50


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The ambition is hollow, alas, and architects know it. How do we know they know it? Listen to their pitches to clients and to each other and you will notice how often the words “engagement,” “interaction,” and “relationship” are floated. We are encouraged, because it betrays an awareness of the need. But the referents are always vague and the underlying theory schematic. Examine the building being pitched. Listen to the life being envisaged. Nine times out of ten, words like “engagement,” “interaction,” and “relationship” are invocations precisely of what will be missing in the realized building, for reasons out of our grasp. Absent the vocabulary to effect genuine relationships with and through architecture—a vocabulary we are trying to build here— experientialism is what stands before us. It is what leads many talented architects to design buildings that aspire to being carnival rides, experience machines, offering visitors a maximum of vertiginous, disorienting views of their surroundings, and/or becoming spectacles themselves. OMA’s celebrated CCTV building in Beijing is a fairly recent example of both ambitions in one structure, as was OMA’s earlier Seattle Public Library.51 Daniel Libeskind’s extension to the Denver Art Museum is another; Antoine Predock’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg is yet another, to choose just a handful of buildings, recent at the time of writing, more or less at random. Any building by Zaha Hadid qualifies, or by MAD architects in China; as do all buildings whose roofs bend to become walls, whose walls become glass, whose floors become hillocks, or whose visible structures simulate aerial combat. The current (at the time of writing) interest by architects in new construction materials may seem to be a departure into “building performance” concerns, but it is actually about achieving new visual effects, which is to say, performances of another kind. At the apex of this type perhaps, is (or rather was) the Blur Building by Diller & Scofidio, a gigantic, fog-enwrapped, flying saucer of scaffolding hovering over Lake Geneva through which people could walk in raingear, delighting in the effects of sunlight on mist, and mist on their skin.52 Today, websites like dezeen.com and architizer.com offer countless examples of architects striving to amaze, disorient, and (mildly) disturb with their buildings for no reason other than to entertain and/or outdo each other with quasi-magical spatial and material effects. Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar hospitality, gambling, retail, tourist, and entertainment industries steam on like enormous cruise ships with architects on board (indeed on the bridges and in the engine rooms too), offering new and lavish, themed, thrilling, exotic, and even classy “simplicity” or “spa” experiences world over. To architects’ architects, only the last-named hold any interest because they tend to be minimalist in style.53 In reality, the Experience Economy coopts everything in its path. WHICH BRINGS US to the more rarefied, spiritual end of the experientialist spectrum. Here experientialism encourages the production of austere structures combined with obsessively careful construction in the manner of Peter Zumthor or Tadao Ando. Renzo Piano’s addition to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth by Louis Kahn is an example of the genre, as the Kimbell itself is often taken to be.54 To


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prepare oneself to appreciate these works, one reads architect-authors like Juhani Pallasmaa, Kenneth Frampton, Steven Holl, Sverre Fenn, Peter Zumthor, and sometimes myself, as well as the phenomenologists mentioned earlier. One reads the artists Donald Judd, Robert Irwin, or about Walter de Maria or James Turrell; one visits Marfa in Texas or Kyoto in Japan. One builds something by hand in a wheat field: a bird blind, or a meditation platform. Designers are urged to address all the senses: not just sight, but touch, hearing, kinesthesia, and smell, and to do so with maximum limpidity and simplicity.55 Wisdom is held to lie in the body, in perception, while beauty comes from pure or humble materials, subdued color, and fastidious constructional detail. In books congratulating the genre, photographs proliferate that set the viewer alone before scenes of supreme poise, patina, symmetry, and stillness. Images become more abstract and tightly cropped, empty of people and inclusive of nature and joinery, sunlight across weathered boards and perfect concrete. Earth. Air. Fire. Water. The prose grows sonorous and delicate at once. The art of photography is complicit. Pure perception can be had, it promises. One has only to tune in to an empty-enough channel to hear the hush of Eternity.56,57 I have been a proponent of the spiritual experientialist project for many years, as well as a critic of its commercial counterpart, i.e., architecture as popular entertainment. But while experientialism represents a welcome alternative to purely mechanical and functional views of architecture—i.e., buildings as machines, or as organisms, or as systems (which plays into the hands of people who call buildings “facilities”), or, more reductively still, buildings as diagrams driven by “data”—experientialism of either kind, I realize, is not the best we can do. A finer architecture awaits us. It will involve moving past solipsism, past phenomenology, and past experientialism—grateful, yes, for the world-attunement they encouraged—to what someday might be called relational or dialogical architecture, perhaps architecture in the second person. All three would offer “architecture beyond experience.” All three would name a better way of realizing architecture’s latent aesthetic, ethical, and even spiritual powers.58

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6 The Buddhist solution? IF THE EXPERIENCE-HUNGRY, experience-consumptive lifestyle threatens to perpetuate the worst aspects of material consumerism, Buddhism seems to offer an alternative, at least in its legendary, monastic form. Emphasizing as it does the virtues of simplicity, quietude, mindfulness, and attention to detail (as well low material and energy consumption), Buddhism—even in its “lite” Western versions—provides some support to environmentalist and experientialist thought in architecture. It does so by delegitimizing egocentrism with a metaphysics, borrowed largely from ancient Hinduism, which holds that the self-experiencing self—or “ego”—is illusory.59 Thus: The inner world and the outer world, the private and the public, the self and the other, are in fact One. The separations between the experiencer and the experienced, between the creator and created, as well as between you and me, are illusory. All objects together form a singular, interconnected fabric above which or below which (it’s hard to say, lies Brahman (the Absolute), which embraces all being and non-being. Brahman spontaneously gives rise to Atman (Self or spirit) and thus to individuality, language, desire, and all phenomena. But these phenomena are in fact epiphenomena; they are side-effects rather like rainbows, and not fundamentally real. They are “illusory,” and basing anything on them or chasing after them leads only to frustration. Brahman-consciousness on the other hand (it cannot rightly be called Brahman-knowledge) gives us peace and happiness. It is also the soundest basis for compassion, and thus ethicality in human affairs. Why? Because Brahman (like the Tao or Sunyata or Indra’s Net) is oceanic and holographic at once: every part is a mirror of the whole, each part manifests the whole. In some formulations, Brahman is the ultimate substance, or that-from-which, every perceptible thing emerges and returns. We are all, so to speak, temporary ripples upon Brahman’s infinitely deep, vast, and consciousness-imbued substance. And so, part of the whole that we are, and whole in every part too, we are, each, each other already: you, me, everyone, everything. In reality, there is no Other. By realizing this truth (typically through guided meditation, but also, in Rinzai Zen, by sudden insight) and by following the Five Precepts,60 ordinary people can be led to living lives that are disillusioned in a positive sense. They learn to live moderately. They learn not to take themselves too seriously, not to harm others. They learn to accept the transience of all things and people, which and who are just naturally arising and subsiding local patterns of the same interconnected reality. Understand this—or better, practice this—and you are saved from rebirth into life after life of suffering, the kind of life, that is, that follows from egotism, vanity, desire, ignorance, voracity, possessiveness, competition, judgmentalism, and the morbid fear of death. Such truths (or shall we call them beliefs?) constitute Prajnaparamita, or supreme wisdom, which is not unlike the wisdom reached for by the author of


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Ecclesiastes. Such truths steer us towards peace. They locate the sacred in the everyday. And they dovetail well with the modern search for sustainable lifestyles through the curtailment of material consumption, overwork, and power- or thrill-seeking. All this is to their credit. Alas, and paradoxically, mystical paths in the Buddhist tradition (there are parallels in all religions) can lead to greater solipsism yet. I say “yet” because, in a way, mysticism derives from the solipsism I have been critiquing. For while identifying ourselves with Brahman, or the Universe, or all sentient beings, or all humanity, commends us to abandoning our petty (petite) individual selves, it does so by inflating our selves indefinitely, by giving our personal states-of-mind—or at least our achieved equanimity—all but cosmic, supra-ethical status. In the words of the Bhagavad-Gita: “Those whose minds are established in sameness and equanimity have already conquered the conditions of birth and death. They are flawless like Brahman, and thus they are already situated in Brahman.”61 Doctrines like this explain the tension felt by many followers of the inner, contemplative path between the desire for serenity through mental and physical selfperfection (not to add: perfection of the local physical environment), and obedience to the pan-religious ethical instruction to engage with imperfect others (and places) regardless of whether doing so elevates one’s own consciousness. For if we are each other already at a deeper (or higher) plane, what need is there to deal with the actual other at the bothersome surface—especially those who, like aggravating co-workers, relatives, or neighbors, require frequent face-to-face dialog? It is easier to perfect one’s self oneself. It is easier to meditate among strangers. It might even be easier to build schools in Africa than to talk to your mother about her drinking.62 This is not to say that Buddhism places no value on community. Sangha, or commun(al)ity, is one of the three “refuges” of Buddhist belief, the other two being Buddha (enlightenment on the example of Gautama) and Dharma (impersonal cosmic law). But sangha is conceived of as that communal life which is optimized to help its members reach Buddhahood through self-knowledge and self-perfection, which, like transcending one’s self, are individual achievements. “Be a lamp [or island] unto yourself” were the Buddha’s last words, spoken to Ananda, his closest companion.63 We might aver, however—and here I am anticipating the next chapter—that neither helping each other reach the goal of enlightenment, nor conversing about partial-enlightenment experiences on the way constitute actual relationship. The latter involves your obligation and mine to address, care for, and guide—to be addressed by, be cared for by, and be guided by—at least one, single, ordinary other person or creature; and this not on principle (such as compassion for all beings) and certainly not for show (as in ritual courtesy, or to gain moral stature in others’ eyes), but out of genuine admiration for the reality and depth of the unique Other.64 It’s hard to put these things into words. Mysticism has been defined as belief in the possibility of “the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality.”65 In the western secular imagination, “ultimate reality” may no longer be God of the Bible. But it is very big and


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impersonal nonetheless, as well mystically scientific, like The Universe, or Being, or the Ground of Being, represented by such images as whirling galaxies, or writhing superstrings (computer simulated), infinite oceans with scudding clouds and crying gulls, the Big Bang turned to sunbeams refracting from a jungle dewdrop...images such as one might see projected behind smiling cosmologists on TV intoning that It’s All One Thing. This is deism, and it should give us pause. For what of the ultimate reality at the very place a veterinarian’s hand touches a trembling animal?66 That is a reality of a different order. HUMANS ARE BORN helpless but for the ability to make their parents scramble to stop their wailing. Before long however, say six years of age, they find—we find—that we must choose. We must choose between taking control of ourselves, which we think we can do (and have the obligation to do), and taking control of the world, which we cannot do completely. Eventually, pragmatically, most of us choose a combination, i.e., partial control of ourselves, especially of our speech and outward behavior, and partial control of the parts of the world we can legitimately call “my…”.67 By adding these two areas of control together, as it were, most of us, by adulthood, gather enough power to ourselves to avoid living in continuous fear. Experientialism suggests we take more extreme measures. Either (1) we should control all parts of ourselves entirely as well as everything that happens around us insofar as it affects our experience (let us be reasonable!) or (2) we should renounce control completely, trust, sit back, and try to enjoy whatever happens, masters only of our own responses. The first measure (controlling everything) cannot be undertaken without continuous attention to, and post-fact manipulation of, our effects on others.68 So large is the world, however, and so ornery and self-involved are other people, that the strategy unlikely to succeed. Nor will it engender affection along the way. Going some way towards making the strategy workable, however, is this: simplifying one’s physical and social environment so radically that its total control is at least close to possible. One might dedicate oneself to mastering a craft. One might prefer the company of tools and other obedient objects. Or, with the help of an architect (and a lot of money), one might create private domains of preternatural orderliness, purity, and security. The more common disappointments of life can then be avoided by hardly ever going out or listening to the news or watching broadcast television, by choosing one’s companions carefully (or having none, except by text or Facebook), by driving behind tinted windows and wearing sunglasses, by shopping online, by jogging with headphones on, by practicing yoga, gym, dance, or meditation alone-in-a-group, and generally treating that which does not touch one literally, directly, as not real. The process has been called “cocooning.”69 In all, the Stoic, anxiety-reducing conclusion that what does not touch me might as well not be real, could be the origin of solipsism as a doctrine. The second measure, going with the flow, which is another recommendation of Stoicism, encourages us to accept whatever happens around us as inevitable, beyond


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our control, and probably rigged and so not deserving of active response. I might live a life of retreat, then, like Henry David Thoreau, or the life of a perpetual observer, like Albert Camus’ Meursault. Today, I might live in the city of information others have made, delight in its din, trade in its trivia, play inconsequential games, and witness events (preferably virtually) without opinion, reflection, or action, saying yes to all proposals and philosophies that let me continue in this mode. I might even work, but in a detached way, knowing that I am better than my job and smarter than my boss. My friends, real and on Facebook, will enjoy my banter about entertainment, sports, and the laughable inconsistencies of other people’s preferences. They will enjoy my mockery of official appearances. I will be light; I will be fun, even “Zen,” not needing much and not caring much. What I risk, however, is slowly abandoning control of the circumstances of my life, and so slipping into dependency upon others’ saintly (or grudging) care. Both measures are unsatisfactory. Both are based on a solipsistic model of human consciousness—to wit, the idea that we are experiencers first and foremost and that life’s purpose is having the largest number of enjoyable or meaningful (but not too meaningful!) experiences without detracting from other’s opportunity to do the same. In fact, we are not experiencers first and foremost. We are, rather, relational creatures from the start. Indeed, as we shall see, it is from relationships that awareness of oneself and awareness of the world are derived—awareness without which we could not have “experiences” in the first place. It is from the process of forming and dissolving relationships that we learn of our own presence and agency. It is from improving and nourishing relationships that we develop our soundest ethical and spiritual values.70 The alternative to both solipsism and experientialism, then, might be called relationism, as I began to say at the end of the last chapter.71 In order to see what could be meant by relationism in the context of “locating the sacred” which is the theme of Part One of this book, and then in the practice of architecture, which is the theme of Parts Two and Three, we will look first at the work of the philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) and then at the theory of consciousness proposed by the contemporary neuroscientist, Michael Graziano.

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7 Martin Buber and I-You BORN IN AUSTRIA, raised in Galicia, and returning to Vienna for higher education, Martin Buber (1878–1965) was a student of Edmund Husserl, George Simmel, and Ludwig Feuerbach. He was also a critic of Martin Heidegger. Buber is often grouped with religious existentialist philosophers like Gabriel Marcel, Immanuel Levinas, and Paul Tillich. Although he wrote some sixty books, the book that accounted for his considerable influence on Christian and Jewish social-religious thought through the middle of the twentieth century was his fourth, an extended essay first published in 1923 under the title Ich und Du (I and You). The book was translated into English as I and Thou in 1937. It remains in print today in two translations, benefiting from a postpoststructuralist revival of interest in Buber generally. I and Thou begins with a distinction that may seem familiar. Consciousness does not occur in a vacuum, Buber noted, but in the world and of the world. For humans it occurs, moreover, through two possible “attitudes.” Buber named them I-You and I-It: To man the world is twofold in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words that he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words. The one primary word is the combination I-You. The other primary word is the combination I-It, wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It. Hence the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the primary word I-You is a different I from that of the primary word I-It. 72

Every phenomenon—physical, chemical, biological, social—derives from bonds, from relationships-in-action, and in the human world it is no different except that the attitudes I-You and I-It form the bonds, the relationships, foundational to all the others. There can be no “I” without a “You” or “It” to relate to; no “You” or “It” without an “I” to make it so. I-You and I-It are thus the two “primary words” uttered by human consciousness, and the “I” involved in each is a little different.73 This difference is what will allow Buber to talk about experience and yet skirt solipsism. We are each situated in a network of other It-alterable, You-alterable I’s, who, like ourselves, are more than just their -It and -You relationships in sum, so to speak, but who could not exist without them.


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In the human realm, I-It relationships and experiences are the ones that result from one person regarding another person (or animal, or inanimate object) as a means to an end. These ends might be one’s own, the company's, society’s, or even God’s. No matter. As “Its,” others are assessed, objectified. They are judged to be well formed or not, useful or not to one's projects, suitable or not, edible or not; they are judged intelligent or dull, functional or problematic, amenable or bothersome. The I-It attitude and the relationships that ensue from it are not ipso facto morally bad; they can be good or bad. Indeed, they are essential to the functioning of a society that provides safety, goods, and livelihoods through markets and other public institutions. We all agree to become -Its for certain others some of the time: an employee to an employer, a business partner to a business partner, an actor to an audience, a service-provider to a client, and so on. And we treat many others as Its ourselves. (Recall that for Buber It can be He or She.) There is no blame here, except that I-It attitudes tend to crowd out and dominate I-You ones, which are just as essential but more fragile. In I-It relationships one person pushes the other person’s buttons as it were: stimulus and response. At a higher level, people expect things from each other and respond to one another by virtue of their roles and positions in a firm or society, as in a game—a game that everyone plays, ideally, by the rules, even if the rules are under review in some higher-yet game. In I-It relationships there is no interest in what the other is really thinking beyond the fact that knowing what they are thinking allows one to “work with them” all the more effectively. As Its, others are there to give you pleasure, and you them. They are there to give you information, rights, money, protection, help, and so on. I-It relationships also allow us to accept other’s poses and appearances without thinking of them as lies, or as addressed to us specifically and so requiring personal response. We can just think of them as what-they-do under circumstances x. Followers of the sociologist Talcott Parsons and his student, Niklas Luhman, will point out that people are nothing if not members of "social systems," meaning families, schools, departments, churches, political parties, professions, businesses, and so on. These systems are all made of and by relationships of some kind. Bonds. Who could argue? Luhman takes matters further. Like all living systems, he said, social systems want to persist. More than that, they want grow, incorporate, protect resources, and reproduce copies of themselves. To do these things social systems will compete or cooperate—whichever works best—with the systems around them. They will plan, advertise, and deceive, just like animals. In all, Luhman’s vision is totalizing. People are caught up in it necessarily, both as components of systems and as systems of components, each one looking out for itself, or, depending how low down the scale it is, sacrificing itself for the larger system. Alas, to see oneself and others from this biological, Darwinian, systems-theoretical point of view, to behave as though it were a complete and true view of the world—to deploy systems language and its dialects (rife in architecture), to describe oneself, others, animals, and even things like this other than


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purely academically and briefly—is in Buber's view to immerse oneself tragically in I-It attitudes for life.74 WITH I-YOU ATTITUDES, on the other hand, and with the relationships that follow from sustained I-You attitudes, one cannot see the other as a tool or specimen, as an entertainment or system. To look into another’s eyes is to look through the night of their pupils into a sort of infinity; it is to address them fearfully or lovingly, but in any case, fragilely. It is to say: you matter to me and (I think) I matter to you. It is to say: I acknowledge an immensity in you equal to the immensity I feel in myself; I recognize your freedom as I recognize my own, your fears almost as I do my own, your dreams almost as I do my own. In I-You relationships, computations of debt and advantage are all but absent. What accounting remains is complex, deferred, unresolvable. Contrary to philosophers following Kant who argue that I-It-like indifference, or non-involvement, is necessary to aesthetic enjoyment, aesthetic enjoyment does not vanish when adopting the I-You attitude towards “aesthetic objects” like works or art or architecture. It just occurs differently, better able to get past superficial ugliness, better able to ride swells of emotion. Think of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, or van Gogh’s. Who are they looking at now, if not you?75 I-You relationships cannot be had from the side, as it were. They engage the whole of our consciousness and they block out the rest of the world, if only for a few moments. Are they rare? Not at all. Every genuine “hello” and every genuine “goodbye” is an I-You utterance that briefly performs the magic. And so we might say hello to a cat as it turns towards us (or should I say if it does?). We might say hello sotto vocé to a praying mantis, a sapling, or a building, meaning: I recognize the you-ness of you and that, in some way, you experience me in your subjectivity, such as it can maximally be. I am here, now, for you, as you might be here, now, for me. We are in dialog, as Buber would put it, whether or not we exchange words. In I-It, people deal with each other. In I-You, they meet. You go to an aquarium. An old turtle glides by and you hold eye contact for three, long, seconds. You are exhilarated. Later, do you say “…and there was this turtle”? Or do you say, “…I met this turtle”? At some level, of course, you did simply experience the turtle, inasmuch as it passed into and out of your vision, leaving a trace in your mind like a small movie reel. You might also have classified it as beautiful or ugly (or beautifully ugly), as foreign and familiar, and so on, grasping for words. But if something else passed between you in that three seconds—call it an understanding, an opinion, a recognition, a caring—then something more happened in the world than two experiences in two brains. What happened was more like a momentary reconfiguration of the world itself. What happened was a single event, an encounter, in which everything physical, from the layout of the aquarium to the rays of light that joined the turtle’s fovea to yours, played a role.76


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The hunter of old kneels over the animal he has slain. “Forgive me,” he whispers. This is I-You. Looking up, the hunter offers a prayer of thanks. This may or may not be I-You. He stands up to think about how to get the carcass home. This is I-It.77 EXPERIENCES ARE CHANGED by the attitudes that frame them. Buber, however, was more exclusive, assigning the words “experience” and “use” solely to the world approached with an I-It attitude, and the words “meet” and “encounter” to the world approached in an I-You frame of mind.78 Here is Buber using this distinction to valorize “the life of the spirit” over “the spiritual life:” “The primary connections of man with the world of –It (are) comprised of experiencing, which continuously reconstitutes the world, and of using, which leads the world to its manifold aims” of sustaining and equipping human life.79 “In proportion to the growing extent of the world of It,” Buber continues, “the ability to experience and use must also grow.” As the world of It grows (i.e., as technologies, businesses, products, and networks multiply), so does the “progressive development of ‘the spiritual life’” institutionalize, forming churches, monasteries, retreats, and systems of spiritual practice from meditation to yoga to body-mind workshops. But the spiritual life thus construed, argues Buber, is not a life “lived in the spirit…” “It (i.e. the spiritual life) is at best the material which, after being mastered and fashioned, (goes) to make up that life (i.e. the life lived in the spirit).” Indeed, developing “a spiritual life” can be an obstacle to living the life of the spirit. Why? Because increase in “the ability to experience and use comes about mostly through a decrease of man’s power to enter into relation— the power in virtue of which alone man can live the life of the spirit.”80 The “spiritual life” promises transcendence of personal, always-entangling relationships. In fact it is merely escape. By contrast, the “life of the spirit” entails entering our ordinary lives all the more fully, more deeply, seeking encounters with other beings while seeing divinity in the I-You bond itself—i.e., in its very coming-intoexistence. Indeed, for Buber, divinity, or God, lies at the convergence point of all I-You lines-of-regard everywhere. Conversely, it is from God, and only from God, that I-Youness radiates. Goodness comes into the world anew from encounters, from I-You relations. It flows towards us as from a well sunk deeply, if horizontally, into the plenum of complexity, obligation, and adventure that lies within the Other, a well that has been replenished by possibly-wordless dialog down through the ages. From this plenum, patterns emerge in the other’s voice to become patterns in your own. The same happens with their gestures, expressions, and actions as well as yours. Some of these patterns persist and even thrive because they preserve, honor, or promote all forms of life, including your own. The most proven of these patterns, in turn, become principles or commandments—mitzvot—having evolutionary, historical, and, to believers, immutable credentials.81 While Buber suggests that divinity dwells within the earthly world in, as, and because of the quality of the relationships between people, sentient beings, and even inanimate objects (but well short of idolatry), he does not pursue this line of thinking to


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where it leads, which is, I would propose, to the idea that divinity is (or “consists in”) ethically creative speech and action. This combination depends on I-You attitudes as well as enlightened I-It attitudes, “enlightened” precisely because they make room for IYou attitudes and are protective of them. Ethically creative speech and action are not educed (“led forth”) by knowledge of the cosmos and/or by experiences of “cosmic” buildings and/or natural settings. Nor are they educed by experiences of mass social solidarity (think throngs in a square). They are educed, rather, by witnessing, deepening, and multiplying instances of positive, dialogical, inter-human, inter-species, inter-object regard. God exists not above people (in the sky, so to speak) or within people (in their hearts and minds), but between and among them in a sort of interactional electricity that has become, however temporarily, an object, a configuration.82 This last sentence describes my own view more than Buber’s.83 Of Buber’s, one might say this: that in the phrase preliminary to all Jewish blessings, “Baruch Atah Adonai…” (“Blessed are You, O Lord…”), Buber hears mainly the You, which presumes—even instates—a mutuality that no inner, deistic, or nature-like concept of God will permit. After all, you only say “you” to someone present who is not yourself. From the singular Adam answering hineni (here I am) to a singular God who in the cool of the evening came calling for him, Buber sees God’s trace, God’s nature, which is a calling for and a calling forth. God’s “image,” multiplied in human beings thereafter as though reflected in facing mirrors, lies not in the human form, meaning body-shape, but in the quality of their regard for one another. It is from addressing other beings “IYou-ly” and from feeling addressed in the same way by them, that God’s call to Adam is heard down through the ages.84 Set theology aside (as Buber mostly did), and we hear a philosopher honoring the human ability to address another being, even another kind of being, in the “second person”—i.e., as you—over and above referring to them, or to our experience of them, or to our experiences-in-common with them, in the “third person,” i.e., as he, she, or it; as they, them, or those.85 NOW, ONE CAN ADDRESS entities in the world in I-You mode and have unique experiences as a result. One can discover new capabilities in oneself and new motivations. But for Buber, I-You is not, itself, just another experience-to-be-had. Like I-It, I-You is a stance, or attitude, that is held prior to experience and that conditions what kinds of experiences we will have—experiences which, in the case of I-You, are transformed into encounters. This is what Buber wanted to make clear when he reserved the words “experience” and “use” for I-It relations only, and why the title of this book suggests that there is a kind of architecture and an approach to its practice which is “beyond experience.” We might also call it “architecture in the second person.” None of this is to say that I-You encounters cannot be examined clinically as a mode of human interaction. fMRI scans would undoubtedly show certain areas of the brain lighting up while encountering the world in I-You mode. By all means, Buber


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today might say, let us call on neuroscience, but know that doing such a study would cast I-You-ness into the world of It, at least for the time of the study. “I-You” would be on the table, so to speak. We would be looking at how it works.86 And this raises a question: have I not—has Buber not—put I-You on the table too, by examining it, by trying to say what it consists in? This problem, alas, is in the nature of expository writing. But if, over the last few pages, you have now-and-again felt addressed by me (or Buber) without my having had to write “dear reader”—if you have felt yourself struggling alongside me (perhaps with me, perhaps against me) to prevent Buber’s ideas from evaporating into mystical airs on the one hand or falling into obviousness on the other—then we have indeed met, and what you are having is not a “reading experience” but an encounter. Encountering is certainly what it feels like to read Buber directly. THERE’S A TEMPTATION to equate Buber’s “I-You” with love. No doubt this is what enthused Buber’s many Christian admirers, followers of the Gospel according to John. Buber understood early Christianity well, to say the least, although his thought is more usefully traced back to Jesus’ contemporary, Hillel (roughly 50 BCE to 20 CE), and to the eighteenth century Hasidic sage, Rabbi Isaac ben Eliezer, better known as the Baal Shem Tov (“Keeper of the Good Name”), who, like Jesus and Hillel, valorized personal love and humble piety.87 But it would be a mistake to skip forward in Buber because one “gets the message,” or because it’s been said before in religious language. What Buber is saying is peculiarly modern and has to be accommodated to rather than assimilated. For example, I-You relationships are not necessarily Christianly agapic, or Buddhistically compassionate, or erotically charged; they are just direct, nondepersonalizing, and open to the wholeness/fullness of the other. This last characteristic perhaps more than any other inclines them to be ethical, and it explains why relationships maintained by social media, in which only curated versions of oneself are presented, cannot be.88 Moreover, for Buber there is no falling into I-You like there is falling in love. There is only conscious entering. One might say: I-You is precursory to love. Nor need I-You attitudes be reciprocal. In I-You there is no conditional “If you can’t or won’t address me I won’t address you.” The I-You attitude (like the I-It one) can be adopted unilaterally: it is my existential choice to be the “I” of I-It, or the “I” of I-You to the very same person, creature, or thing. If it is the “I” of I-It that I choose, I can attend to, enjoy, use, assess, and experience the other. If it is the I of I-You that I choose, not only do I experience the other by directing my attention to them, but I address the other in hope of mutuality (such as it maximally can be), and so encounter them. I can also choose to be the -You of someone else’s I-, some other creature’s I-. 89 And when I join a circle of beings communicating I-You-ly, it is not as a soloist but as the member of a band for whom the music is the point.


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SOME PART OF our discussion of architecture will be about people’s receptivity to, and relationship(s) with inanimate objects such as furniture, buildings, and building parts, i.e., bits of wood and steel, as well as to landscape elements like water, soil, and trees. So let it be noted: entering into an I-You relationship with an inanimate and/or non-sentient object and expecting in-kind reciprocation is childish. A stone is a stone, a bush, a bush. But doing so unilaterally is not at all uncommon among artists and designers, who might say: “I could not design (or place) this sculpture or this building or this shrub well unless I thought that non-sentient things like them had integrity and the right to exist and flourish in their own ways. I could not (create) unless I thought the thing could answer to your or my presence as you and I answer to its, i.e., with the fullness of our respective beings, however momentarily. I could not create unless I thought that in its very conception and form it had ‘family resemblances’ to objects in history similar to it, that it has what amounts to provenance, parentage, and certain rights to be itself. I could not create unless, most importantly, I imagined that the thing thought about its relationship to its partners-in-being—partners with attitudes, postures, and purposes all their own. For if did I not, the thing would not have the qualities that allow ordinary people to ‘relate to it’ at all.”90 Every object, from its own perspective, has an "I," as Ortega y Gasset claimed, the more so as it is a work of art. When a designer arranges inanimate objects—chairs in a room, say, or implements on a table, or flowers in a vase, or buildings or sculptures in a landscape—the logic of their placement by virtue of their relationship to each other, as though each were attending to, addressing, respecting, and encountering the other with a past and a future, can equal in importance the logic of their placement for their handiness to us or to accommodate their mutual, mechanical displacement. On the relational view, designing well and arranging well means seeing what the objects are seeing, listening to what they are listening to and saying to each other, and inquiring as to what they want and where they want to be. It might mean protecting them; it might mean letting them duke it out. Things found next to each other can have been thrown together, or they might willingly be in each other’s company. They can seem aloof or anxious to please, stoic or sensitive; they can seem cast off, estranged...and all these things not just seemingly so but also truly so, at their level, in their own way. Certainly, inanimate objects can serve as means. We call those objects "tools." But tools, when they are treated as parts of nature or as works of art, are ends in themselves too. They share in life; not just serve ours. It would hurt us to abandon them. This is not fanciful designer-talk. It is seeing the world through I-You eyes and knowing that others will sense more than the utility of the world’s layout as a result: they will feel that they are entering a conversation, a situation, that they are joining an ensemble.91 It is seeing all things as alive and communicating—not as a child or savage does—but maturely, knowing that that there is nothing “mere” about our attribution of consciousness to things because it recognizes, and perhaps rehearses, God’s breathing of life into dust (Genesis 2:7), which is to say, into us.


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Is this last thought too religious for you? Then let all God-talk be allegorical. Designing this way recognizes that perception and cognition stand upon ancient, animistic patterns of call and response with the world—patterns neurologically still at play, as we shall see in Chapter 8. What is a work of art if it is not (among other things) an inanimate object that (you think) knows you are looking at it, and perhaps is looking at you?92 Animism is a relational way of knowing.93 CHILDREN ATTRIBUTE LIFE to dolls, stuffed animals, and figurines, and then form emotional attachments to them. They do this while knowing full well they are not really alive. Now, we sometimes attribute attachment to such objects to their physical similarity to actual humans and animals, i.e., to the fact that they have eyes, fur, hands, faces, etc. Statues, idols, fetish figures, masks, and so forth, do the same thing. It seems, however, that too great a similarity to human or animal form—and ditto, too realistic a set of behaviors—in fact destroys our ability to relate to them in an I-You way. Such objects enter what Masohiri Mori, a Japanese robotics engineer, called the “Uncanny Valley.” Here, a robot’s extremely life-like appearance and behavior becomes disturbing rather than entertaining. It seems that when verisimilitude reaches the level of deception or duplicity, i.e., of impersonation rather than personification, I-It attitudes return with a vengeance—indeed, with anger towards the object.94 What this means for designers is important. It is that I-You attitudes towards inanimate objects might develop faster when the object’s resemblance to humans or animals is distant rather than close. For architects interested in animism and relationality, the existence of Uncanny Alley is good news. It means that the sweet spot of humanly resonant, I-You form-making in architecture lies well to the abstract side of animatronics. Later I will argue that, after Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn was the modern architect that most often got the optimal degree of abstraction right. Why? Because he had, in fact, given the matter an inordinate amount of thought. ALAS, LIKE MANY other life philosophies, Buber’s “life of dialog” or “life of the spirit” (or more accurately, the longing for this kind of life) is exploitable by cynical preachers of universal love as well as by entertainers of all kinds. Think of the instant, personal friendliness of salesmen, politicians, and radio hosts, of church ministers, (some) college teachers, personal injury lawyers, first dates, and new co-workers. Add flight attendants and waiters…persuaders all, “affective laborers” all, anxious to win rather than earn your confidence.95 Think of the banks and investment firms that now want to have a “relationship” with you, indeed who want to be your bank.96 Or how easy it is to believe that more communication—yes, more “dialoging”—will solve any problem. Think of the false familiarity and rapid intimacy with which strangers of only a moment ago address each other when the pressure is on, 97 or when on TV, or in the movies. Here actors “acting natural” depict people having just the feelings you would


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expect them to, but bigger ones and better ones, sooner, with lots more eye contact and shoulder touching. In short, simulated I-You is everywhere.98 Does simulated I-You have educational value? Perhaps. I learned how to kiss from the movies. But genuineness is not a teach-able art. En-masse, and unframed as theater, simulated I-You relationships teach what Sartre called “bad faith.” Watching bad faith proliferate at the expense of genuineness year after year is enough to make anyone want to take a long walk in the wilderness or among silent walls. Here, no one and nothing tells lies, and no one and nothing “loves” you.99 An architecture, then, that would participate in Buber’s life of the spirit—indeed, an architecture that would draw on existentialist philosophy generally—must be wary of drifting into the bad faith that has already brought down two movements: Neoclassicism (roughly 1750-1910) and Postmodernism (roughly 1964-1990). Both were ultimately critiqued for lack of authenticity, lack of truthfulness to the medium and to the Age. Both ushered in eras of I-It, engineering-engrossed architecture committed to optimizing material usage, physical functionality, and rental output under the sign of Honesty—an honesty that was actually cynicism about, as well as deafness to, what Louis Kahn called the Unmeasurable. Thankfully, history moves on. Architects have known for a while how buildings invite or dissuade human dialog by their spatial configuration. The art would advance if architects took that ancient knowledge more seriously and questioned its accuracy. But architecture would advance also if architects started to think of rooms and whole buildings—and not just obviously-anthropomorphic sculptures, toys, and furniture—as having characters, attitudes, and even personalities that influenced ours by their example. After all, things, rooms and buildings can stand in I-You or I-It relationship to each other too, exemplary and not. They have fronts, backs, sides, postures, gestures, intentions, contents, integrity, self-sufficiencies and dependencies, attitudes, opinions, and secrets. They have eyes and ears and the uncanny ability to move without moving, like boats that never leave their docks. Switching metaphors: when inside a building we wear it like clothes, which, like what we wear, affect how we think, how we feel, and how we (and they) are judged by others. Facts like these take some sensitivity to report, especially in an intellectual environment dominated by talk about systems and/or propounding the ideal of efficiency, which is entirely I-It. Efficiency, like expediency, is a powerful idea, one that powers through complexity and shakes off anything delicate. Experientialism in architecture resists this thrust, and that is to its credit. Combine ideas about the social interaction of humans and animals (dialog) with ideas about the “social” interaction of things and rooms (also dialog) however, and a new round of humanist architecture might result.100 I say new not because of the advanced material and computational technologies now available to architects, nor only because of them, but because humanism—and religious humanism at that—has evolved in architecture at least twice before: once in the Renaissance and once again (if less religiously) in the nineteenth


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century. Humanism’s “genome” lived on in certain renowned, bona-fide, 20th century modernists like Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Aldo van Eyck, Carlo Scarpa, and Louis Kahn.101 It needs to find a new expression in the 21st century. It would be architecture beyond experience. These themes will be expanded upon in Part Three. FINALLY, THIS: FOR all their consequence, I-You encounters among people do not last. Sooner or later, even within seconds, they revert to I-It relationships or to no relationship at all except involuntary co-membership in some demographic category.102 Only art objects can sustain I-You relations…and then only in model form. Among people, I-You moments need constantly to be created. They are like the electrical charges that make it possible to run on batteries. Full I-You-ness (and in Buber’s view, contact with God) is a constant opportunity only intermittently availed of. This is why a couple or team can work quietly side by side, hardly ever looking at each other (much less into each others eyes, those “windows of the soul”) and by the patter of their remarks and gestures reassure each other of their appreciation of the others’ being-in-full.103 Nonetheless, we often volunteer to forego such reassurances for periods of time. Does a job not demand that we stay this way for hours, days, or weeks on end: “just the cashier,” “just the nurse,” “just the driver,” “just the teacher”? That is what jobs, roles, and positions are. Indeed, what is a national economy if not the vast network of I-It transactions by which we bind ourselves in usefulness to strangers embedded in "social systems"? These myriad transactions, these mini-contracts, make up Hobbes’s social contract. But the social contract, says Buber, can be entered into with I-You “in our memories” and “on our lips” nonetheless (his words). We can and should be ready, always, for true encounter. Living in the world of I–It and not withering requires periodic re-sourcing from people and animals who see us fully, or try to, people and animals who gently and frequently address us as “You” and whom we address as “You” too. Bosses, customers, clients, patients, passengers, teachers, and students can be You to you, as you can be to them, as long as no one is playing the role. With humans, falseness is a constant possibility.104 Buber was a religious philosopher.105 Were his thought ever to become a practical psychology it would have to acknowledge that not only do people dissemble, but that I-You attitudes can be adopted by degrees, and probably should be.106 It would be difficult to measure the I-You-ness of an encounter the way one can measure the proof of a brandy. But we know, most of us, what zero feels like on the receiving end if not also the giving end. It feels like being treated as an object, a tool, or a specimen. It feels like being ignored as a desiring being. It feels like having no effect on another’s heart. Then again, we can be overwhelmed by one other person addressing us fully in IYou mode, especially if we respond in kind. We cannot function for long overwhelmed. And so a practical Buberian psychology might also incorporate the distributional principle already at work. People’s need for I-You-ness, coupled with their fear of being


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overwhelmed by it, surely causes them to “spread the love.” Most people do not open themselves fully to each other, or even to one other person more than occasionally.107 While we address others far more genuinely and fully in I-You mode than in I-It mode, which is to the good, most of us stop well short of opening our whole selves to all others all the time. Rather, we fill our lives with enough I-You-ness, as it were, by parceling it out among many relationships, being open to this person in this area of our life and with that person in that area of our life. The dangers of “parceling out” are three, however: first, that we turn again to making the sum of our rewarding personal experiences the goal of life (experientialism); second, that we deepen the divisions between parts of ourselves (and so have to keep close track of who knows what about us), and third, that no single relationship, in its fullness, reaches the threshold of true encounter.108 If parceling out is to be attempted nonetheless, the question becomes: how? What is the best way to go about it? Here opinions and temperaments vary. Some people have a few good friends, some lots of friends, and some lots of “friends.”109 Some people stick to family. Others prefer the company of animals and plants. Yet others prefer the company of inanimate objects and materials—objects and materials that await their touch. We call them craftsmen or artists. And then there are the multitudes who, in company or alone, gaze into their glowing, all-but-living smartphones for hours on end and ignore the world around them—the world from which, indeed, their smartphones offer instant and alwaysavailable exit. We might be saddened at the sight. We might feel guilty about our own habits in this regard. But we should not a priori dismiss the relationships being sustained in this a-spatial, often a-synchronous, and invisible manner. Nor should we overlook the subtle, pet-like companionship being offered by the devices themselves. Both have value.110 In sum, people have different capacities for letting others’ being flow into and mingle with theirs. Buber’s life of the spirit entails addressing all creatures and things as I-You-ly as we can, and letting them do the same. One benefit is a richly-lived life. A second is an ethically-lived life. A third is rarely feeling alone.111

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8 Michael Graziano: consciousness is social IF WE TAKE CONSCIOUSNESS to mean our awareness of being alive in the world, perceiving, willing, thinking, remembering, acting, and feeling, then we are likely to think that consciousness must precede any social relationships we might develop. Thus: first I must know that I exist. Then I can reach out to you; or, as Buber might put it (but to my knowledge does not), “I-Me” must precede I-He/She/It, or I-You. Otherwise, who am “I” to have relationships (with) at all?112 This account ties in well with the solipsism of the age, which posits mature, independent, self-aware, experiencing individuals as the sine-qua-non of social life, as well as its purpose.113 According to Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano, however, this view has it backwards when it comes to the causes of consciousness. Sociality does not emerge from the clash or mesh of individual consciousnesses, but the other way around: consciousness—awareness of one’s very being—emerges, evolves, from sociality. Specifically and most deeply, it emerges from aeons of living creatures attempting to predict the behavior of other living creatures, a process that may or may not itself have risen to any creature’s conscious awareness but ours, and that only relatively recently.114 As Graziano notes, predicting the behavior of other living beings and not just seeing walls, cliffs, water and so on, has long been critical to all animals’ reproductive success. Animals especially—which are mobile—have senses in order to answer several life-important questions beyond Am I falling? or Will I collide with that rock-face? They answer questions all the time like: What was that sound? Is that ‘thing’ dead or alive? Is it one of my kind? Is it edible to me (or am I edible to it)? What are its intentions? How does it move and what is it capable of? Is it hungry or satiated, afraid or bold? Does it see me? Does it see me seeing it? Will it come towards me or go away? The brain of an animal must be so wired, thanks to evolution, or so trained, thanks to learning, as to be able to answer these questions quickly, on incomplete information, and without using up a lot of computational resources. Nature’s neural solution is to form a working mental model of the other creature—a simplification, a cartoon—but one that works most of the time. How to keep the model fast, economical? Leave things out, prioritize, generalize; and an important way to effect these economies is to attribute, both to objects known to be alive and objects that might be, the following: a small number of goals, the ability to attend to its environment selectively, and the ability to act so as to accomplish its goals. Call it animism. Eminently correctible (“Whew! That’s a stick, not a snake”), animism is the adaptive, default assumption of higher-animal perception, to wit: things are alive and have intentions unless proven otherwise.


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Now, attention usually precedes action towards that which is attended to, and so paying attention to the others’ line of regard—to where they are looking—is a good idea. Attention reveals goals, and goals predict action. Helpful to the effectiveness of the working mental model, therefore, is having the neural machinery and “software” to understand that other creatures are sensing the world from viewpoints different to one’s own, that they are quite possibly attending to things one cannot see (or hear or smell), and that they are doing so for reasons one does not fully understand. Not all animals have the requisite hardware or software to take this data into account. Humans up to the age of four do not.115 Coordinating one’s behavior with another creature’s, whether in imitation or reaction, is the beginning of relationship, which is comprised at a minimum of if-then conditionality in one’s behavior: if it does A, then I will do B; if it does C, then I will do D or E. Linking one’s behavior to the apparent perceptions, intentions, and states-ofmind of the other is if-then conditionality at a higher level, especially if it goes both ways. These links are not necessarily I-You in kind. Graziano does not entertain the IYou/I-It distinction. His point is relevant to both, however, and it is this: that once (and only once) we have the means to track and predict the behavior of other creatures, do we have the means to track and predict our own. That is where “I-” first comes in. Consciousness is one part of our brain reporting to another part of our brain about a third part—the part that is attending to others. More precisely, it is tracking one’s own patterns of attention to other creatures and to their patterns of attention. This is how our own goals revealed to us, this is how our own actions are presaged: by what we find we are interested in, by what we see we are doing or looking at, by what we hear ourselves saying when answering questions like: “What are you thinking about (or feeling, or seeing)?” which it makes equal (actually prior) sense for us to know about others. Where Merleau-Ponty in 1945 could write, only mildly controversially, that “our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body…discover(s) in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression,” Graziano in 2013 could claim the reverse: that it is from decoding others’ “expressions” that we become aware of having any ourselves.116 Amending Descartes famous cogito, one might say: You are, therefore I must be. Graziano sums it up like this, “Consciousness is perception—social perception—applied to oneself.”117 More pithily yet, relation precedes experience. FOR THOSE WHO THINK that consciousness is epiphenomenal, that it rises from neural complexity like heat from hardworking machinery,118 Graziano’s summation is interesting. Social psychologists have long argued for the social origin of “the subject,” i.e. the individual self.119 If we grew up alone we would not have selves, much less proper names or language.120 Plausible enough. The conversation in social psychology then veers towards identity-formation, the social “who am I?” question, or it wants to know more about language acquisition. It neglects the ontological “what am ‘I’?” or “am I?” question. So, while it might be too strong to say that if we just grew like plants we would be unaware of being alive, it is probably correct to say that if our brains had


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evolved in vats, where they were given nutrition and sensory inputs from cameras, microphones, the Internet, and the like, we would not know we were alive either. Before dismissing this thought as frivolous, consider the task facing those trying to design conscious artificial intelligences (AIs). If consciousness derives from tracking the attentional and intentional states of other mobile bodies and then turning this skill upon one’s own, then there will be more to creating artificial consciousness than “perceiving the environment” with cameras and microphones—more to it, also, than passing the Turing Test, which is purely verbal. There will be the need, as there is for us, to perceive parts of the environment perceiving, and quite possibly perceiving us perceiving them in a mutually wary, apprehension-tinged, and actionable way…all this before introspection, the “app,” can run by itself. Back and forth these reflections go, fading like echoes, to deposit us finally at a world that is made (we conclude, and can rest assured) of inanimate, unthreatening, and stationary or perfectly-predictably-moving things that have no quality but size and momentum: atoms. All this back and forth, all this framing and re-framing, is what an AI would have to be capable of in order to become conscious of its own existence in anything like the way a human being is.121 GRAZIANO OFFERS ANATOMICAL evidence. Immense neurological complexity is necessary for consciousness to arise, he agrees, but it is not sufficient. The right circuits need to be there. And indeed, there are parts of the human and primate brain— specifically, the superior temporal sulcus [STS], the tempo-parietal junction [TPJ], and the medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC])—whose job it is to model and predict the behavior of other creatures (for example, by following their gaze and their limb motions). And these are the same parts of the brain that, when damaged, cause people to become unaware of themselves, unable to report on what they themselves are doing, or why or how they are doing it even though they are doing it perfectly well, and/or become (or remain) unaware of others and unable to relate to objects, people, or animals in a social, anticipatory, or empathetic way. Consciousness, Graziano shows, is the output of the small, specific, and adjacent regions of the brain just listed that (a) report on (b) other entity’s patterns of attention, and (c) one’s own patterns of attention, which are linked to (b) functionally as well as computationally in that they use the same neural pathways.122 One can selectively knock out (a) our reporting capacity, or (b), or (c), or all three and still (sort of) function. In fact, primates get along without (a), lesscomplex animals than primates get along perfectly well with only (b), autistic children (and thoroughgoing solipsists) with only (a) and (b), and lower animals, like insects, without (a) or (b) or (c). Of what adaptive use is (a), then? In other words, why be able to report being conscious if so much already goes on unconsciously and perfectly successfully: not only the proverbial 99.9% of the brain’s housekeeping functions like regulating hormones and keeping our hearts beating, but also the myriad things we do on semi-automatic, like scratching an itch, not walking into walls, producing speech, and feeling emotions? Graziano asks us to see that consciousness—contentful, reportable awareness of our


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being present in the world, seeing and thinking—is not just the result of the brain’s overall information-processing the way flame is the result of combustion, but is itself an informational process, a “module” if you will. Consciousness, he says, is an expert system in its own right with conclusions to share and outputs to send, both “out” to our language centers, and “in,” back to the senses, affecting their readiness to detect some patterns but not others in the environment. Organisms that not only do what they do, but know that they are doing it—and moreover, know what they themselves will likely do next—are just that much smarter and more adaptable. Their brains compute internal models not only of the scenery, but of themselves and all of the possibly-active agents around them, spatially localized.123 These models, although they can be mentally played with, are not toys.124 They veritably enable the having of, drawing on, and writing about experience(s)—social, architectural, spiritual, and other. To the degree that they are able to read each other and so themselves, nonhuman animals are undoubtedly conscious too, and consciously so. Some not only respond to the world and to each other, but know that they do, and are thus able to take some control over how they will look to others.125 These animals, we should imagine, feel like themselves to themselves. Less articulate in their reportage however, and less in control of that reportage than we are, non-human animals are far less capable than we are of on-the-spot misrepresentation, and thus of true language.126 FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE that consciousness was breathed into humans by God and thus shares in the mystery of divinity, Graziano’s position is typical of an evolutionist’s, which is to say, entirely naturalistic and practical.127 It is worth noting that in Buber’s view of God as (also) the “convergence point” and origin of all I-You lines of regard, Graziano’s research makes some religious sense.128 What sense is that? 129 To answer, we need not follow Buber in trying to preserve a traditional image of God as creator. Today we can stay as far away from paganism and nature-worship as Buber wants us to, and take the more generative, process-theological view noted earlier: the view, that is, that God is somehow made by or “constituted” by I-You-ness insofar as that attitude, and the relationships and actions that flow from it, are the chief source of goodness in the world—the source if not of love exactly, then of whatever is precursor to love, like regard for the fullness of being of the distinct other.130 Understand this and you understand that the sacred is located neither in forest clearings, nor on mountaintops, nor in temples, dramatic skies, or the remains of saints, but in living relationships. Divinity is inter-human, inter-creaturely; it is a tender thing; it is a phenomenon, or being, or mode-of-being, or “realm” far younger than the sun and the moon, and immensely complex. Divinity depends on life because it is the fruit of life, flickering into existence whenever living creatures enter and leave each other’s regard, exercising their freedom such as they know they have it, benignly. One need not subscribe to this theology however, or to any theology, to appreciate the basic idea.131 All evolutionary, naturalistic theories of morality, and at


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least some theories of beauty, require that human beings mature in a social matrix that rewards cooperation, compassion, courage, patience, fairness, loyalty, goodwill, conscience, and the like.132 These are relational virtues, ramifications of the Golden Rule (“do unto others…”) in the context of our freedom to disobey it. These virtues are taught chiefly by example, that is, by the behavior of admirable human beings. But they are taught also by the behavior of admirable animals, buildings and artifacts—and I mean behavior with regard to people as well as behavior with regard to each other. This, for us, will become a crucial point. Whether you believe that God (as the Creator) is responsible for all this (Ibn Sina: “God is at the source of every beautiful thing”), or that God emerges from all this (i.e., from goodness, from ethical creativity), or that God has no part of any of it because God doesn’t exist, what Graziano is pointing to is the crucial role that perceiving-others-perceiving plays in our becoming conscious, experiencing beings ourselves. It represents something of a next step in the evolution of consciousness to become perceiving, experiencing, and encountering beings too, aware of the difference between I-It and I-You.133 This next step opens possibilities for all of us. Perceiving the world relationally and then I-You-ly or I-It-ly, opens possibilities for architects in particular, as I hope I am beginning to show. If “awareness is a construct of the social machinery of the brain,”134 then moving from experience to relationship as the basis for design represents a deepening of the entire project of architecture based on a truer understanding of human nature and its contemporary situation. It is here, beyond or perhaps prior to experience, that the sacred is located. And always has been.

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NOTES to Part One:

1

This is a close transcript of the story as rendered in the audiobook Zen Buddhism Stories (Trout Lake Media, 2010), read by Alec Sand. 2

“The difficulty in identifying the stimulus conditions for mystical perception in no way impugns its epistemic worth…an experience of God's presence therefore cannot be brought about in some relatively mechanical way, simply by creating an appropriate set of sensory or other conditions.” (Mark Wynn, “The Phenomenology of Religion,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online, citing William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991].) In more Wagnerian manner, and summing up the heroic architect’s dream, Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture “tells us the strong aesthetic response to (the Parthenon) is due to the building’s capacity to induce a harmonic alignment between ourselves and an ‘absolute’ or natural order…. ‘a moment of accord with the axis that lies within man, and thus with the laws of the universe—a return to the natural order’.” Julio Bermudez, “Le Corbusier at the Parthenon,” in Julio Bermudez, ed., Transcending Architecture: Contemporary Views on Sacred Space (Washington DC, Catholic University Press, 2015) p. 92-3, my emphasis. There is a tradition in both Christianity and Judaism that stands against the notion of sacred space. This opposition is based on belief in God’s omnipresence or that the human body is God’s temple. Both of these beliefs place God—or at least access to God—anywhere you physically are (1 Corinthians 6:19). The belief that there are immovable sacred places on earth is a pagan (Greek) one, and idolatrous at that, even if it refers to geographic features rather than statues (idols). It’s little wonder that architects find the idea attractive to this day, especially given both Martin Heidegger’s and Mircea Eliade’s blessing. For a recent manifestation of the popularity of the pagan in interfaith circles, see http://www.onbeing.org/blog/thin-places-and-the-transforming-presence-of-beauty/6180. For a wonderful essay on the power of art to bring a sacredness to otherwise ordinary spaces, see Pelagia Horgan, “Sacred Art: Fra Angelico’s frescos inspired generations of devotion. Can religious art still work its magic on the godless?” Aeon Magazine, November 21, 2014, available at http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/how-should-secular-people-approach-sacred-art/ . 3

Daniel Libeskind: “(A)rchitecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of soil. It’s based on wonder” (TED Talk, July 2009). Libeskind here speaks for many who would not agree with much else he says. The ability to perform miracles has long been held to be the surest way to distinguish the work of God from the work of humans. For a more detailed analysis of modern architecture’s devotion to magic—which is only ‘this far’ from miracles—see my “About Magic” in CENTER 16: Latitudes, Barbara Hoidn, Ed. (Austin, TX: Center for American Architecture and Design, 2012), available online at http://mbenedikt.com/lats-preface-aboutmagic.pdf pp. 4–9. The contemporary interest by some architects in biomorphic form (enabled by computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing) can be read religiously too, even theologically. After all, to design buildings whose material assembly by humans with machines mimics nature’s self-assembly from atoms, molecules, and cells, is to step into the shoes of the greatest Creator/Evolver of all. 4

Some would argue that such preferences are practical solutions to problems of hygiene, construction, social status indication, and so forth, which have become enlarged, exaggerated, in architecture (as over mere building), and then exaggerated again in sacred architecture (as over mere architecture). This may


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well be true. Or the reverse may be true: that the characteristics of ritual sacred buildings, with their size, higher standards of symmetry and materiality, care in construction, preference for higher ground, protection of magical objects, special lighting, separation between clean and unclean, high and low status, etc., etc., “trickled down” to inform everyday buildings. Palladio’s adaptation of civic architecture to prestigious houses like the Villa Rotunda made this top-down pattern famously visible. But it surely goes back millennia. 5

Perhaps this is because an experience of the divine can only be vouchsafed by one party, from one side— namely, our own. For we cannot assume that God experiences us at all. And if we assume that God does experience us, we certainly could not say what that experience (or any experience) is like for God. Deists find the whole idea of God experiencing improbable. They find the idea that God experiences us in anything like the way we experience God, or each other, even less probable. Theists, on the other hand, believe that, whatever else God is and does (for God is surely beyond our ken in total), God experiences us in a way that we would recognize as human, meaning: judgmentally, mercifully, with a knowledge of and preference for truth and beauty and goodness, and with an appreciation of our limitations…in short, as a wise parent might a child. Theists believe that God understands and loves humanity. They also believe that God can come down to our level at will, and historically has. For theists, these last few assertions are articles of faith on a par with the faith that God exists at all. It’s what it means to believe that God created us “in His image.” Ironically, atheists, who believe that “God” is at best a human construct, would agree. What they do not agree to is this: that human constructs can be as real as any other objects. 6

There’s a proposed new word for the realizations of this paragraph: “Sonder.” See John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (http://dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com) and his “Sonder” video at https://vimeo.com/80318195. 7

The quoted definition is from Merriam Webster Dictionary. Contrarily, David Hume argued that there was no “simple and continued self” on different, almost Gibsonian (J. J. Gibson, that is) grounds. There is just a continuous flow of sensations, which generates, by its inner, world-given, spatiotemporal structure, the illusion of a central one-who-experiences. 8

Weirdly, this is geometrically possible. Every point on the surface of a sphere can be considered a potential pole, i.e., a point around which a set of non-intersecting two-dimensional circles can be drawn eventually to include the whole sphere. If the universe has more than three spatial dimensions and is convex, the same applies. That no physical observation point in the universe has a privileged view of the universe is part of Einstein’s Equivalence Principle. The hypothesis that myriad non-communicating universes could coexist, indeed proliferate, is one of the consequences of quantum theory, and it has gained credibility among some cosmologists. The important stipulation about the multiple-universe hypothesis, however, is a stipulation that makes it unfalsifiable from any standpoint. The stipulation is that these universes cannot communicate in any way at all with each other. Not one particle, not one jot of energy, not one bit of information, can jump from one universe to the other. For if it did, there would be only one universe. The extent to which the multi-universe idea, called "many worlds," can apply to human affairs is matter of degree. People whose lives do not intersect (perhaps they live in different countries and are of different wealth, age, gender, etc.) might well be said to live in different worlds. On this softer usage of the word “world,” people who grow up and live together may be said to live in the same world. The thrill offered by solipsism is the thought that the worlds you or I really live in are circumscribed by our skulls. Among “New Realists” like Markus Gabriel one finds this moderate view: that most of the entities we see around us are perfectly real, and exist in contexts—or “fields of sense” as Gabriel calls them—which are finite. Within these finite “fields of sense,” truth is neither rare nor unattainable. The problem lies in


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imagining that there is any singular whole truth, or even set of truths, about the Whole World/Universe/Cosmos. That problem exists, according to Gabriel, not because the human mind has limitations (which it surely does), but because there is no such object as the World-as-a-Whole, or The Universe. It does not exist. We can have better and better versions of Google Earth, therefore, and one day Google Mars, but we cannot have Google Universe in principle. See Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) 9

The meaning of the saying is ethical, not metaphysical, and is often used in eulogies. It derives from Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, which reads “Anyone who destroys a life, Scripture considers it as though he had destroyed an entire world. And anyone who sustains a life, Scripture considers it as though he had sustained an entire world,” credited to Hillel, who was a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth’s. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man includes this reminiscence by a man who contemplated suicide: It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of it’s being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom, as a mere appurtenance of the consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself. (Transl. David Magarshack, The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Modern Library, 2005; Google Books Digireads Edition. p. 147). 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRjSi9ELD9I, 43.00–43.29. Later, Herzog will make a film in which a building speaks of and for itself: Halden Prison, as part of Cathedrals of Culture (2015). 11

Cf. this author, For an Architecture of Reality (New York: Lumen Books, 1989). Solipsism can be considered to be philosophical idealism taken to its logical extreme. Being is “correlated” with Thought, as Quentin Meilassoux among modern continental philosophers puts it: to say anything about what real is already a “saying” and thus a thought. (Zen long ago answered by privileging direct action and high-stakes dialog over any simple saying). In western philosophy since Kant, it is agreed that “things in themselves” (or noumena) cannot be known; only appearances or “phenomena” can, and those through ideas, thoughts, feelings, theories, and language. Elevate the fact that only you, personally and first-hand, can know your own thoughts, have your own experiences, etc., and you arrive at solipsism. Conversing about what we can do, we can know, we can experience, etc., doesn’t help. The plural “we” is simply rhetorical, a cover for pluralistic or egalitarian solipsism. It actually refers to a bunch of me’s in silos, not a network of mutually regarding subjects. I will make this distinction several more times. 12

This simple realization, which surfaced in the 1990s under the monikers of “virtual reality (VR)” and “cyberspace” and which lies behind the explosion of the Internet since, will quite possibly lead to the demise of care for everyday architecture. This author’s Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press, 1991) was prophetic, if I may say so. Today, except for eating, drinking, and going to the bathroom, millions of people already live, work, and play entirely online, glued to smartphone or laptop screen, soon headsets and implants. Cognitively and relationally, if not fully spatially, cyberspace is where millions of people already dwell. 13

A great deal of one’s enjoyment depends on who accompanies you to such places, and also upon who else was there. But even if one went alone, as research by neuroscientists like Daniela Schiller of the


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Mount Sinai School of Medicine shows, original memories of an event are easily replaced by memories of our first recounting of the event to others later. In the same way, memories of places can be replaced by the memory of photographs of them, and by the things others have said about them. For related reasons, you could never, yourself, experience the magnificent sacred spaces that Ron Fricke “captured” in films like Sacred Site, Baraka, or Samsara, even if you visited every location he and his crew visited. Indeed, Fricke himself might not have experienced them because he was too busy filming. Similarly, your and my visit to the Parthenon will likely not match the shattering effect it had on Charles Eduard Jeanneret in 1911, the young man not yet Le Corbusier. (An excellent study of this experience can be found in Julio Bermudez, 2015, op. cit.) Much depends on one’s preparation and expectations, on the other tourists one finds there, or the friends one brought along (or who brought you, it makes a difference), and on how long one’s been travelling, and so forth. We cannot help but wonder how many of our expectations about the character of a sacred place, space, or occasion are in fact transmitted, if not manufactured, by painting, photography, film, and poetry, rather than by personal, first-hand experience. Like the 1868 engravings of Dante’s Paradiso by Gustave Doré, Fricke’s imagery taps deeply into the Western architectural and cinematic imagination. In film today, sacred spaces have a certifiably modern look about them, as well as sound: sunbeams through mist, stones against stars, choirs over drums, flocks of birds seen from above, and the camera, seeing but never seen, soaring or racing silently over the face of the earth like the eye of God. 14

In Faith & Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Mark R. Wynn goes so far as to propose that God is “placial” by nature, i.e., that God has the attributes not of a person, body, soul, mind, law, mechanism, or language, but of a place, or place in general. Thus, God dwells not outside of the universe on a throne, nor moves about the physical world like a wind or spirit. Rather, God “indwells;” God surrounds, God suffuses; God encourages ethical worshipful activity not just at a sacred place, but as sacred place itself. Its configuration is His person. God “speaks” to us the way beautiful rooms, buildings, streets, squares, and parks speak to us, like fields, valleys, mountains, whole geographic regions do too, sometimes in uplifting ways, sometimes in forbidding ways. What variety of faith, since Freemasonry, could set the arts of architecture and landscape design closer to God than Wynn’s? Not even mine. As Wynn wisely points out, not all sacred sites are architecturally significant. They might be quite small and plain and instead memorialize an encounter with the divine: a miracle, say, or a moment of revelation, the birth or a death of a holy person. Some ugly, memorialized places come to be set apart from everyday life, eventually to be seen as beautiful: such is the persuasive power of an encounter with the divine on its witnesses. This setting-apart is important too, agrees the solipsist, but only because it better sets up the having of individual experiences of/with divinity. The setting-up they do is their raison d’etre. Photography is offered as a trophy. 15

What is meant by “attitude” in this context will be discussed in Chapter 7. See also remarks about Geoffrey Scott in Note 27 of Part Two.

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Following on Note 11 above, here is a little more about solipsism. Responding to David Hume, who first argued that we are only the bundles of experiences we are having, Immanuel Kant distinguished between phenomena and noumena, i.e., between things as we experience them and things as they really are “in themselves.” We can never know noumena, Kant persuasively argued, and so bequeathed to philosophy the phenomenological cast it has had ever since. If we concede what seems obvious—i.e., that the very anatomy of the human brain and its sensory apparati must filter and distort the surely-infinite welter of What Is—then we must continue to be honest and say that it is appearances (i.e. phenomena) that must be accounted for by reason, not the other way round. But phenomenology—careful attention to subjective experience—is not yet solipsism. In Appearance and Reality (1879), F. H Bradley extended Hume’s point this way: “(Since) I cannot transcend experience, and experience is my experience…it follows that nothing beyond myself exists; for what experience is is


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[the self ’s] states.” My thoughts are mine, my orgasms are mine, my toothaches are mine. You cannot experience them; you can only experience your own. It is only natural that the deep “mine-ness” and “your-ness” of experience seep into Locke-ian property rights (as in my inventions, my body, my labor, my home, my tools), as well as into the very concept of being human. The early Wittgenstein agreed: “I am my world.” It is only thanks to language, he said, that people are not limited to their direct experience. But they are limited, still, by the language they know how to use, and how they use it. (Tractatus Philosophicus, 5.6–5.641, 1922.) The same could be said for media, like photography. As will be noted in the main text, so problematic is solipsism that it has never been made the basis of a complete philosophy. But it has haunted philosophy since Hume nonetheless. It has especially haunted empiricism, which must periodically find new ways to reassure us that a world exists independently of our individual experiences and measurements of it. And it must do so without invoking God as the everattentive sustainer-guarantor that what seems to be usually is. As problematic as solipsism remains for philosophy, it seems unproblematic—indeed congenial—to modern psychology, where, as we will also note in the main text, it continues to provide metaphysical support for egocentrism (sometimes identified as narcissism, or self-love) and, by extension, anthropocentrism. This development would have mortified William James, who, in critiquing Kant, wrote: “Th(e) 'solipsistic' character of an Experience conceived (of) as absolute really annihilates psychology as a distinct body of science” [Principles of Psychology, 1890, p. 367] http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin10.htm). But we should note that the idea of multiple, co-equal worlds, together with the private experience of every one of them, shows up several times in James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Certainly, much of today’s self-help, human potential, and spiritual-growth literature is premised upon solipsism if not also narcissism, as noted by authors like Christopher Lasch. For evidence, pick up any issue of Psychology Today. Or consider the perspective of most schools of psychotherapy: it is the perspective of a single person facing the world, a perspective that treats other people as agents to “interact with” and places and events as things to “experience.” Might this derive from the very relationship of a therapist to patient? Here conversation constantly refers to the patient’s friends, family, and associates, as them, i.e., in the third person, and how they affect the experience of the patient. Add to that the (theoretically) impersonal attitude of the therapist. Solipsism is the also subject of movies where mind-altering drugs and/or digital virtual worlds take turns at being real to the protagonists. For example Total Recall (1990) The Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003), Being John Malkovich (1999), The Truman Show (1998), A Scanner Darkly (2006) and Lucy (2014). In fact, the solipsistic argument is deeply enabling to filmmakers in general, inasmuch as their art depends on our willingness to accept that what we feel when watching movies is as real as what we would feel were we living in the world the movie depicts. Tears are tears, after all, and laughter laughter. We do not mistake a movie for real life so much as discount the difference. Why? Because we believe that what happens in our heads—i.e. experiencing—is the truest measure of what is real in the first place. If fear, humor, dread, delight, sympathy, like and dislike, love, thought, and even God are all brain states, after all, then they are as real as anything can be. If you doubt that, just look at an fMRI image. Narcissism may be self-love, but solipsism is self-world-containment, which may or may not involve self-love. Narcissism is at least relational: oneself to oneself, and in fact it depends on controlling others’ opinion of you while seeming not to care what they think, which is a highly relational exercise. It is solipsism, not narcissism, that perpetuates commitment to individualism, suspicion of authority, the faith that the Truth is what you find in yourself, or for yourself, and so on. As for narcissism directly, see Suzy Hansen’s fine essay “America’s Long Holiday” (The Baffler, No. 26, 2014), which provides an incisive overview of the subject in the form of a review of Elizabeth Lunbeck’s The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014). For a critical reaction to narcissism being pegged as the mental illness of our era, see Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (New York, Farar Strauss Giroux, 2016). She does not treat solipsism. Also Laura


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Kipnis, “Narcissism: A Reflection,” Spiked Review, January 2017, http://www.spikedonline.com/newsite/article/narcissism-a-reflection/19371#.WIv1IhkrI2w, a penetratiing essay, personal of course. For a display of solipsism at work in quantum physics, read the popular writings of physicist Christopher Fuchs and the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. 17

Philosophers since Husserl have had no problem admitting that experience is not the passive receiving of data or sensations. All are agreed: experience has a tenor or mood to it; it is changed by motivations and language; it is conditioned by the body, embedded in narratives, and so on. Experience is “lived experience,” they say earnestly, as though this proviso made them immune to what I will call experientialism. It does not. 18

Here I am. Here I am. Here I am. To the existential ear, each emphasis makes sense because uttering any one of the three words entails the other two. The phrase is in fact one word, one statement, one feeling (“here” = “I” = “am”) whether or not one is answering another’s call. I neglect here an account of French existentialism, one which would show how Jean Paul Sartre applied elements of German phenomenology to the problem of French conscience after the Second World War. People were individuals and people were responsible to each other, Sartre agreed, but most importantly, people were free in their lived experience and at every moment to break with history and break with authority, to feel or not to feel what they were supposed to feel. This freedom, once realized intellectually, inevitably causes anxiety. The quest was authenticity: i.e. truth to one’s own, unique self in the face of the actual meaninglessness of the universe and of history as a whole. One had to choose. With Sartre, solipsism found a new formula and widened its appeal. 19

This is sometimes called the Human Potential Movement, centered historically at the Esalen Insitute in Big Sur, California, as admixed with pagan and Buddhist-tinged spirituality. Another influence on Maslow was surely British philosopher F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies (London, Oxford University Press, 1927), and the central role that book gave to step-wise, individual self-realization. In America, transcendentalists Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson had already laid the path to universal happiness through multiplying the number of maximally free, physically healthy, and mentally selfreliant (male) individuals. 20

Actually, before psychology took its Orientalist tack, before Emerson and Whitman, and certainly before its interest in psychedelic drugs, American self-improvement psychology had its own, completely Western theological base in Calvinism, and especially Calvinism’s twin doctrines of election and predestination. To wit: Whatever happens—including whatever happens to us—happens by the will of God, who has complete power over events, perfect foreknowledge of them, and a will determined only by Himself. This is the doctrine of (divine) predestination. Moreover, certain individual humans are born “elect of God” (i.e. favored by God) by God’s unalterable choice. This is the doctrine of divine election. So far so good. But here’s the thing: you can never know whether you were born elect of God or not. The only way to halfknow is by how life does indeed unfold for you compared to how it unfolds for others. This is under God’s control entirely. Bettering oneself, therefore—by getting an education, say, or attending church, doing good deeds, working hard, or making people like you—does not change God’s will one bit. It doesn’t have to: God already knew you would do these things. You do them, rather, to prove to yourself and to everyone in the community that you were “elect” all along. The reasoning is unscientific, to be sure, because it is unfalsifiable. But it is socially and psychologically effective. For the claim that one is “elect of God,” once it is believed by oneself and others, redounds powerfully to one’s continued good fortune. Who would not defer, after all, to a person who is evidently chosen by God to succeed? The hypothesis proves itself true. It’s rather like being taken for a member of the aristocracy.


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In places, the Hebrew Talmud seems to offer similar advice. The rabbis wondered: why were Noah, Abram, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses chosen (“(s)elected”) by God to undertake such significant projects under God’s personal guidance and protection? None of these men, by their resumés as it were, deserved the privilege: Joseph was a vain young man, spoiled, and a loser; Jacob was a liar and a cheat; Moses was an orphan, murderer, hot-head, Egyptian overlord, and shaman. He was also lousy orator. The answer given by the rabbis is intriguing: God chooses, as leaders and prophets, people who God knows will come to deserve the choice of them now. The answer is unscientific to say the least. But it is psychologically effective and crafted to offer a certain moral lesson: that you and I should seek to deserve, by our actions, the blessings God has already given us. Act “chosen,” act “elected,” act “loved by God,” without ever taking that gift for granted…and we will be the happier for it. And more successful. Now, take “God” out of both stories, Calvinist and Judaic. What remains is this secular and perhaps scientific fact: that smart, non-risk-averse, and well-intentioned young people learn on the job. Given the opportunity, given a challenge, they rise to the occasion. They work hard to justify having been given the opportunity, and so later pay back, in gratitude, the confidence once shown in them. They also pay that gratitude “forward.” How? By charging a few other individuals, not unlike their younger selves, with projects that will take them beyond their present capacities. And so, the strategy perpetuates, generation to generation. It doesn’t always succeed, of course, but, on average, the tribe benefits. Evolution ensues. 21

Again, the subject of the reality of the (human) Other is a rich one for films involving ghosts, robots, androids, and other simulacra. The list of these is long. For an account of the logical difficulties facing solipsism, see Stephen P. Thornton, “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (accessed 4/1/2013 at http://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/). 22

George Berkeley’s dictum esse est percipi, “being is perceiving” and also “to be perceived” (as he explains), lies close to Descartes' cogito ergo sum as well as to the solipsistic assertion that only experiences are real. The value of such assertions has not gone unchallenged by contemporary neuroscientists and perception psychologists. For example, both philosopher Alva Noe, in Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York, Hill and Wang, 2009), and perception psychologist J. J. Gibson, in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (New York, Praeger, 1983) argued that consciousness’s non-stop, moment-to-moment dependence on a changing and yet structured external environment makes consciousness—the natural phenomenon—not locatable in brains alone. Every brain, they argue, needs the whole, vast, and structured electromagnetic-wave and chemical-soaked system that is “the environment” (not to mention a body) to do what it does. A brain, on this view, is not the well-head of some deep, underground reservoir of consciousness-essence. Nor are brains little stars, little suns, radiating shards of divine intelligence from some higher dimension into ours. Brains are “simply” nodes, knots, switchboards, complexity pile-ups, nexuses in a very-much-required, very-much-larger, physico-biological, fabric-like universe, only tiny local slices of which— neighborhoods—are causally joined together, and this in only a handful of variables. For an overview of this line of thinking, see Mark Rowlands, The New Science of Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). See also the notion of the “spread mind” propounded by Riccardo Manzotti over many articles and books, at http://www.consciousness.it/. 23

Why mathematics? Because it is built on counting. Why trust counting? Because it requires an unusually exact and explicit specification of what membership in a set or group comprises, be it a set or group of things (like salt shakers or sheep), events (like birthdays or collisions), or standard measurements (like degrees or grams or meters). These elements (salt-shakers, sheep, inches, grams) are, with respect to set membership, identical to and interchangeable with each other. So far so good: without a set-membership definition and procedure called counting, there would be no technical civilization. But a price is quietly being paid for the defining, and the definiteness it brings. Because in all non-membership-relevant respects, the elements of a set differ from each other. After all,


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no two peas, no two sheep, and no two coins are utterly alike (much less two people) and these differences must be ignored in order to get on with the business of grouping and counting. (Even inches and grams are unique to the object being measured: although one can use the same ruler over and over, one cannot count the same inch of the same thing twice to come up with its total length, nor weigh the same gram of material over and over to come up its weight.) This discarded information accumulates with every further arithmetical operation we apply, like adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, averaging, and so on, to get a singular numerical result. Each operation tosses away more particularities, more information, perhaps even the bulk of the information that inheres in the objects counted and that constitutes their full and unique reality. (As Leibniz observed, two absolutely-identical things are not two things at all, but one). That loss is the price that we pay, and the price that the things counted pay, for the mastery we get over them when we treat things (or people) as objects to which arithmetic can be applied. It’s a debt collected when things go wrong because we had so depended on mathematical models. Writes poet Rae Armantrout (from Next Life, 2007): Sad, fat boy in pirate hat. Long, old, dented, Copper-colored Ford. How may traits must a thing have in order to be singular? The answer is: indefinitely many, and there’s no use crying about it. Spoken language is as destructive of information as mathematics is. Language is a barrage of generalities and ambiguities. That’s why it’s so useful. No noun, no verb, no adjective, no sentence or paragraph—no part of speech except very long proper names and serial numbers—comes close to pointing to a single, unique entity or action. Indeed, it would take an infinitely long descriptor to point unequivocally to an absolutely unique entity or action, and even that, looked at closely enough, will be found to have fuzzy borders. As philosopher of science Karl Popper noted, to say or write anything is to require the saying or writing of more, in correction and amplification, and more again, and more again, indefinitely. Hence these endnotes, which surely need their own endnotes, and those their own too. 24

It is “regularity itself” as capture-able by mathematics that Quentin Meilassoux claims finally gives us a window on pre-, non-human reality, i.e. gives us objectivity outside of the “correlation” between being and thinking, which is to say, between reality and appearance/experience, a correlation that is assumed by all brands of phenomenology. See also Note 25 below.

25

Some would say the responsibility for this lies with Immanuel Kant and the revolution in philosophy he instigated: that what is really real (noumena) cannot be experienced or known by human beings; that only phenomena can, which are the noumena filtered, blocked, and distorted by the limited powers of our minds. Minds are the central, unavoidable, and undismissable arbiters of the most careful observations of the world. Even the categories “space” and “time” are products of the mind. Psychology is the first science. Here is polymath psychologist Steven Pinker, interviewed in Harvard Gazette in 2014 (my emphases), believing it: What could be more interesting than how the mind works? …(P)sychology sits at the center of intellectual life. In one direction, it looks to the biological sciences, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. But in the other, it looks to the social sciences and the humanities. Societies are formed and take their shape from our social instincts, our ability to communicate and cooperate. And the humanities are the study of the products of our human mind, of our works of literature and music and art. So psychology is relevant to pretty much every subject taught at a university.


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(http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/05/what-could-be-more-interesting-than-how-themind-works/) Note, also, that the “we” (or “us” or “our”) of scientific agreement refers to a group of people looking at the same phenomenon (or is it). This, anyway, is the “we” of lecture audiences, paper readers, and experimental subjects and witnesses; it is a statistical we. There is also the rhetorical we, as in we humans, we readers of this book, or we who are in this room, or we who agree…all of whom are actually individuals who have something in common. Neither the statistical nor the rhetorical “we,” however, is the “we” who are actually interacting or influencing each other. (Imagine ten essentially identical toy soldiers on a tray. Take one out. Now there are nine toy soldiers in the tray. Go back. Now imagine that the ten toy soldiers are tied, each one to one or two of the others, by rubber bands. Lift one soldier out of the tray. The rest will come along, hanging from the first in a pathetic chain. Repeat this thought experiment with ten very disparate objects; not a set at all. They will still come out in chain. Why? Because they are actually joined by rubber bands.) In short, the “we” of science and philosophy and books is rarely the “we” (or “us” or “our”) of relationship, of mutual dependency, of active, multi-faceted, life-consequential bonds that exist like rubber bands between members of families, communities, platoons, animal groups, plant groups, and some inanimate things, holding them together. 26

I believe it also drives poststructuralist philosophy, but cannot make that case here. Some would take all this as a critique of clinical and personal psychology only. We should note, however, that in experimental, behavioral, perceptual, physiological, cognitive and (some) social psychology, a parallel formula is tacitly accepted too. In these “harder” of the psychological sciences, multiple individuals are typically asked to respond to the same stimuli. Their responses are then tallied, statistically, to reach conclusions about “us as individuals,” which is all but a contradiction in terms (see Note 25 above). Yes, the procedure is scientific in the sense that hypotheses are put forward, units of measurement are defined, instruments are calibrated, and mathematics is called upon to test the results against randomness. But no single, actual individual is described by the conclusion, much less is personally addressed in I-You mode except insincerely, to get cooperation in the experiment. Of the two pioneers of personal (or clinical) psychology, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Freud was more relational (including the close-to-love relationships between patient and therapist, “transference” and “countertransference”), Jung was the more cosmic-minded and individualistic, even solipsistic. (“The process of achieving conscious individuality is the process of individuation, which leads one to the realization that one’s name is written in heaven.”[Edwin Edinger Ego and Archetype, Boston, Shambhala, 1992[1972}, p. 160]). Jung had a concomitantly greater influence on the New Age, neo-pagan attitudes to spirituality generally we find today. Freud thought of psychoanalysis as designed “to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” He did not see it as a tool for providing self-improvement or personal fulfillment; which many of his followers did. For his part, Jung went further still. He looked for a larger, more mystical view than any pure science could provide. See also Lunbeck (2014) in Note 29 below. 27

I omit an account of literature’s post-Proustian turn to the confessional mode, or the rise of concern for personal privacy among wealthy Victorians (more about which in the context of architecture later). A nice essay on the theme is Alfred Kazin, “The Alone Generation: A comment on the fiction of the ‘fifties,” Harper’s Special Issue, October 1959, pp. 127–131. See also my remarks about Jean Paul Sartre, Note 18.

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Western individualism has other roots too. For example, I omit an account of economics’ and sociology’s commitment to “methodological individualism” (the idea, that is, that social phenomena find their best explanation as the mass or “aggregrate” effects of the actions and choices of individuals), or of the influences of novelist Ayn Rand and economist Friedrich von Hayek on belief in the virtues of the egocentric market capitalism, today called neoliberalism, as justified by Adam Smith’s quasi-religious


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parable of the “invisible hand.” Those who defend radical individualism in the political-economic sphere often argue that the only alternative is totalitarianism. It is the intimate relational component of personhood, however, that distinguishes relationism from individualism on the one hand and totalitarianism on the other with nothing in between. (See also http://www.jubilee-centre.org/wpcontent/uploads/2004/01/Personalism-to-relationism.pdf.) 29

I mean, of course, iPhones, iPads, iPods, and all similar portable entertainment and communication devices. Most think the i- prefix used by Apple refers to “information”? Perhaps. I think, on utterance, it cannily primes solipsistic thoughts, less obviously than mePhone, mePad, and myPhone etc., would. On the term “Me Decade,” see Tom Wolfe, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” New York Magazine, August 1976; also David Frum, How We Got Here: the 70’s (Basic Books, 2000)]. See also Christopher Lasch’s bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism (New York, W.W. Norton, 1991 [1978]), Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me (Atria Books, 2014), Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic (Atria Books, 2010), and Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism (op. cit., 2014), who discusses narcissism’s historical origins as a term in psychiatric theory and practice. On the problems associated with theorizing narcissism today, see Laura Kipnis, “Me, Myself, and Id: the invention of the narcissist,” Harper’s Magazine, August 19, 2014. For a nice critique and appreciation of the self-help book genre, see Joseph E. Davis, “The Necessity of Self-Help Lit” in The Hedgehog Review, vol 18, No. 3 Falll 2016, available online. See also Note 16 above. I say “over twenty years of age” because there is some evidence that younger millennials—and the generation following, as-yet unnamed—are more sincerely other-oriented and more sincerely concerned about objectivity. 30

During social upheavals priorities may change. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is more than a list. It is a quasi-Maslovian hierarchy of need urgency: i.e, first life, then liberty, then the pursuit of happiness. The simple “maximize the happiness of the greatest number” principle of utilitarianism is not the subject of my critique, however. A conscientious utilitarian can always add a happiness-distributional measure to any happiness-additive measures like the GNH (Gross National Happiness). If the grounds for doing so, however, is that this or that actual distribution of happiness maximizes the sum, it is still a measure premised on individualism. Often posed as antipodal to individualism is holism, the proposition that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” The rider, usually implicit, is that the whole (e.g. society) is therefore more important than the parts (e.g. the individual). The true alternative to solipsism is not holism but relationism. 31

In North American urban politics, the word “community” is often a code-word referring to people too poor to hire lobbyists. “Neighborhood” is a similarly coded word. The rich do not live in “communities.” The very rich don’t even live in “neighborhoods.” They live on geographic features, like hills, nobs, and lakes. On streets called “drives” and “ways.” On social media, “community” means something different again. “If people online aren't continually affirming you, they get kicked out of your ‘community.’ You just block them. Then they start their own ‘communities,’ in which they block non-affirmers of them, which all leads to a complicated landscape of very fractured identity politics. I think this is one of the hallmarks of my generation.” (Remarks of graduate student Anna Corinne Plyler, April 2, 2015). I am hardly the first person to criticize American individualism. A massive literature does that. The alternative most often advocated is return to historical forms of community life (family, tribe, village), or self-subsuming devotion to national purpose, a kind of mobilization. Not so here. There are scales in between: for example, personal connection to memorable numbers of real and specific others, resulting in a world that is more ethical and beautiful because it is linked together by daisy chains of beneficent mutual regard, one pair or triple or ring of five to ten at a time. Ricocheting between individualisms and


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communalisms—between the worlds of “I-Me” and “We-We”—misses the essential middle—I-You— which it was Martin Buber’s mission to make clear.

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Or perhaps not “authenticity” but “the experience of authenticity.” The latter can be made and sold; not the former. Do you work for a large digital-age company, in an open office with a gym, a running track, rec-rooms, a restaurant, child-care, a therapist, a place to nap perhaps (Apple and Google’s new “campuses” provide the expanded model)? Or do you work from home and coffee shop on a laptop or smartphone, day and night, week and weekend? Are your friends people from work? Then not only your work but your daily life has been sold to your company, which wants you happy for its own reasons. (See Benjamin Nadaff-Hafrey “Work Imitates Life,” Aeon, February 6, 2016 [https://aeon.co/essays/is-theutopian-workplace-just-a-ploy-to-keep-us-all-at-work]. Also William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How Government and Businesses Sold us Well-Being [London: Verso Books, 2015], and Joseph Pines and James Gilmore, Markets of One (2000), The Experience Economy (1999, 2011), and Authenticity (2007) all from Harvard Business Review Press; also doing business at http://www.experience-economy.com and http://creativegood.com. For Airbnb’s deeper entry into the experience economy (i.e., over and above the voyeuristic experience of living in someone else’s home) see https://www.airbnb.com/experiences 33

I write “inadvertently” because in Art As Experience (New York, Capricorn Books, 1958 [1934]), Dewey thought he was describing how art works, not describing/prescribing economic life, and because Goffman (in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [New York, Anchor Books, 1959] and Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience [Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1974] to name two of his many books), was “merely” showing how far dramaturgical theory could go towards providing a nonFreudian account of mental and social life. He was neither recommending nor predicting that social life should or will become more like theater. Some might take heart in this: the experience economy at least requires people to produce something, even if it’s videos. The experience economy provides employment. Alas, that is not entirely true. The Internet allows the massive reproduction and distribution of informational goods like movies, music, courses, games, financial tools, and books, at extremely low prices. Only the top artists and “creatives” benefit from this, reaching large audiences easily, while local ones struggle to entertain or serve handfuls of people. Moreover, every day more software comes on to the market that composes, creates, collages, aggregates, and/or customizes acceptably-original “content” without the application of human intelligence (beyond designing the software). And even that software is software-aided in its design and development. And on down it goes, pushing the application of uniquely-human intelligence—of work in the best sense of the word—further and further away from the site of live, consumable, and affordable objects, experiences, and services embedded in a system of economic exchange that produces livelihoods for all. 34

As well as customize products for your needs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgQq6PvQ6bU . Latest example (in 2015): Amazon.com opening it’s first brick-and-mortar bookstore, in Seattle; offering a completely new bookstore experience, using smartphones strongly tied into its Internet operations. 35

The literature of the promise of VR since the 1990’s is enormous and updated almost daily. Most of it is hype. But see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/magazine/virtual-reality-a-new-way-to-tellstories.html, and Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do (New York, W. W. Norton, 2018).

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See Corey Lee, chef at three-star restaurant Benu in San Francisco, express this (and more) in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSCsHDgAuGw. At many high-end restaurants like this, exceedingly small portions, combined with long menus of richly-described dishes, increase the feeling of


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personal-ness of the food, if only by reducing the desire to share. Long menus also multiply acts of choice, and thus expressions of individuality. Finally, small portions reduce both the inference of real hunger and the possibility of gluttony.

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Take this as Exhibit One: To figure out if someone is healthy for you, ask yourself the following questions: Has my life changed for the better since this person entered it? Have I grown and become a better person? Has this person allowed me to be myself and feel good about my uniqueness? Have I accomplished more, expanded my horizons more, in some way bettered my life since I’ve known this person? Have the good times pretty much outnumbered the not-so-good times? Have I experienced more joie de vivre—more joy in living—as a result of this person being in my life? If you answer “yes” to these questions, the relationship is probably healthy for you.

From Dr. Kate M. Wachs, Relationships for Dummies (New York: Wiley, 2002), Kindle Edition. “With more than 200 million books in print and more than 1,600 titles, Dummies is the world's bestselling reference brand” according to the Wiley website. 38

See for example http://www.dignitymemorial.com/cook-walden-funeral-home/en-us/aboutus/celebrants.page: Every life tells a story. Our certified funeral celebrants can let your loved one's funeral service tell theirs. Funeral celebrants specialize in creating a funeral ceremony experience that uniquely expresses the personality, lifestyle and interests of the person it honors. By working closely with you and asking insightful questions, the celebrant discovers your loved one through the stories you share. He or she can then design a fitting funeral service that incorporates your loved one's interests or legacy through special and creative details. A personal eulogy, the perfect venue, thematic decorations, a special song or thoughtful keepsakes all may be part of a memorable funeral service planned and provided by a funeral celebrant. Certified celebrants can serve in place of or in addition to traditional clergy. They can officiate the ceremony at the funeral home, cemetery or other location of your choice. Regardless of your family's religious affiliation, culture or heritage, our celebrants design services that tell beautiful stories. This is not what paid mourners do (http://www.rentamourner.co.uk/services.html), an occupation that goes back to ancient times. It is exactly experience design of the sort promoted by Pine and Gilmore. So too, at another extreme is this: http://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw/index.ssf/2014/09/funeral_home_offers_drive-thru.html. When, by contrast, a rabbi, priest, minister, or imam officiates over a funeral or wedding hardly knowing the people involved and just plugging the relevant names into formulaic language…perhaps we should not be disappointed. They might be doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, which is conveying to the congregants that this individual (or these two individuals in the case of a wedding) are now transitioning into a state-of-being (or -relationship) which is precisely not-unique, which in its typicality has the blessing of the multitudes of men and women who before them had entered into the same state, on the same terms, and in the same way for thousands of years. One’s membership is the point; it is the comfort and the deeper message: one is joining a tribe; one is joining the Family of Man. The conventional elements of custom-designed ceremonies are what give them their gravitas. Conventional words, gestures, music, food, clothes, and settings are doing the “heavy lifting,” not the fresh ones. There is a message in there for architects.


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The phrase yielded 2,070,000 hits on Google in 2015. It had been trending upward worldwide since 2004.

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At the time of this writing, Dartmouth University’s commitment to the experientalist model of education was noteworthy. See https://www.dartmouth.edu/video/#/ or http://dartmouth.edu/education/undergraduate-experience. Some readers might be reminded of the 1998 movie The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey. “The Truman Show Syndrome” is now an official mental disorder, listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). People suffering from this condition—which is a form of paranoia—imagine that they are actors in an elaborate play or reality-TV show, staged continuously on their behalf, and are being watched by someone on high, the great Director. (See Andrew Marantz, “Unreality Star,” New Yorker, September 16, 2013.) Going further, at least conceptually: did the Warchowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy not “prove” that X is your brain thinking/seeing X? Might X not include God? Some scholars think so. See Matthew Alper, The God Part of the Brain (Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2008), Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), or Andrew Newberg, Principles of Neurotheology (Ashgate, 2010). In the nineteenth century, Ludwig von Feuerbach thought God was “in the brain” too: the human traits we most admire (and which are culturally specific) are here projected onto a mythical figure of unlimited power, a creature of the imagination, God. 41

The wisdom upon which the claim is sometimes based is Maimonides’s saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The academic who boasts that he or she teaches students how to think and not what to think is fully aware, however, of this boast’s effect on his or her social standing (even if he or she does not cite Maimonides). He/she knows perfectly well (as I think Maimonides did too) that no method is free of assumptions, contents, values, or theoria. Teaching students "how to think" is also teaching them what to think—just more indirectly, more deniably, and more insidiously, since one is presuming to teach rationality itself. 42

In Britain the term "precariat" refers to people with no job security who must spend a great deal of their time organizing/protecting their benefits, self-training, and self-selling. In America, the term is more likely to refer to people who (also) voluntarily launch themselves in self-employment, self-reinvention. See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class and The Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2011, 2014). See also Oliver James, The Selfish Capitalist (London, Random House, 2007), who points out that the probability of upward mobility through individual entrepreneurship has in fact fallen steadily since the 1970’s. We are more bossed, more corporationdominated, than ever. 43

See http://quantifiedself.com/U. See also Nick Paumgarten, “We Are a Camera: Life in the GoPro Era” The New Yorker, September 22, 2014, 44–52. Some employers and sports teams are requiring employees/players to wear sensors that report their movement, socialization, exercise, and sleep patterns as well as heart rates and so forth, 24 hours a day. See Aviva Rutkin, “Off the clock, on the record,” New Scientist, 18 October, 2014, p. 22-23. For the latest in experientialist videography (at least at the time of writing) see Lily, the autonomous self-tracking drone, https://www.lily.camera/. On the effect of Fitbitting on self-perception and social life, see Moira Weigel, “Fitted,” The New Inquiry, July 27, 2015: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/fitted/. At the time of writing, however, perhaps the most hysterical statement of treating oneself as bundle of optimizable performances, experiences, and feelings, was Steven Kotler’s then-best-selling The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (New Harvest Books, 2014). Or search for “one second a day” videos on YouTube. On the rise of “selfies” (self-portraits, taken by smartphones, and spread by social media) as an expression of modern solipsism, historian Simon Schama writes:


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There is an aspect of portraiture, about the stories of its making, the locking of eyes, which I obstinately believe to be irreducible to bald data. And there is something else that bothers me, too, and against which the idea and the practice of portraiture might stand. We live at a paradoxical moment when an image is caught and then we look down at it, since that downward gaze has come to consume a monstrous part of daily routine. Whole microuniverses of sounds and sights are assembled in small machines as an extension of what we take to be the particular bundle of tastes that constitutes our identity. If we are not all Narcissus, we are nearly all Echo. We have never been more networked, yet we have never been more trapped by solipsism. From “Face Value: Simon Schama on the power of portaits” The Guardian, September 4, 2015, available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/04/simon-schama-the-face-of-britainpower-portraits At the time of writing, the New York Times had inaugurated their virtual reality app for smartphones, NYT VR, in the course of the loading of which one reads “Please put on your headphones. Your experience will begin after the video has downloaded, 10, 9, 8, 7….” 44

Amanda Hess, “The Hand Has Its Social Media Moment,” The New York Times, October 11, 2017. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/arts/online-video-hands-buzzfeed-tasty-facebook.html. Or watch “AVATAR” by Omnipresenz (http://www.omnipresenz.com/works/) at https://vimeo.com/112455252.

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Some would call this experiential materialism, and cite the literature in psychology that has grown up around proving that discretionary money spent on acquiring new experiences is better spent (i.e. provides greater happiness in the long run) than the same amount of money spent on acquiring new material goods. See for example Leaf Van Boven, “Experientialism, Materialism, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Review of General Psychology, 2005, Vol. 9, No. 2, 132-142. Having lead protected lives, many young, would-be novelists set themselves to gathering life experience. Skipping or quitting college, they set out on multi-year journeys with no purpose other than to have things happen to them, and thus to have something to write about. Germans called it the wanderjahr. Today, if one has wealth, one can start younger and take fewer risks: there are summer programs for ambitious high-school students that offer a month in Italy looking at Renaissance paintings, a week touring with a punk band, or a week helping at a soup kitchen or animal clinic…all of which are experiences designed specifically to provide material for resumés, and essay subjects, for applications to Ivy League colleges. Certainly, the premise of much first-person video-gaming and adventure or sport filmmaking today follows the pattern: have of some out-of-the-ordinary experience—skydiving, say, or hiking across Utah, with a GoPro camera attached—then “share” those experiences on Facebook. TV series like Lost followed the same pattern. In the US, one could add the rise of short-story culture on public radio (NPR, APR) with programs like This American Life, The Moth Radio Hour, and RadioLab. In all, if we add up the forms of vicarious experience being supplied by movies, TV, digital games, YouTube, Facebook, NPR, podcasting, art installations, VR producers, and the social media, it would seem that philosopher Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” (in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, and nicely summarized here by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong) is edging closer to reality: People on this machine believe they are surrounded by friends, winning Olympic gold medals and Nobel prizes, having sex with their favorite lovers, or doing whatever gives them the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. Although they have no real friends or lovers and actually accomplish nothing, people on the experience machine get just as much pleasure as if their


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beliefs were true. Moreover, they feel no (or little) pain. Assuming that the machine is reliable, it would seem irrational not to hook oneself up to this machine if pleasure and pain were all that mattered, as hedonists claim. Since it does not seem irrational to refuse to hook oneself up to this machine, hedonism seems inadequate. The reason is that hedonism overlooks the value of real friendship, knowledge, freedom, and achievements, all of which are lacking for deluded people on the experience machine. (From "Consequentialism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Winter 2012 Edition] online, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Nozick’s pre-internet vision of an “experience machine” was a thought experiment. It was devised in order to critique the validity of hedonism as a prime value, since most, but interestingly not all, people in fact would not choose to plug themselves into the Experience Machine. Most people would prefer real life with all its rough edges. We have no idea whether our great grandchildren or Nozick’s will make the same choice. In the future, some people—and perhaps most people—might well plug in to an Experience Machine because it is experience itself they crave, in variety and quantity, not pleasure as such, a quicker path to which is offered by psychoactive drugs. The possibility of the latter was indelibly explored by Philip K. Dick, especially in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich (Bantam Books, 1977). For better or worse, reality itself can become the Experience Machine, as has already happened in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Branson (Missouri), Disneyland, and most resorts, at least for paying guests. (For staff, these places are just work.) Indeed, given basic material provisioning, plus technology, plus the continued prolongation of the adolescent mindset, plus legalized marijuana…any city on earth can become an Experience Machine, this as more and more people livelihoods depend on becoming experience-providers for experiencer-enjoyers in an experience-economy. On contemporary art's continuing obsession with the manufacture of exclusive experiences, see Sarah Boxer, "An Artist for the Instagram Age," The Atlantic, July/August 2017, available online at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/yayoi-kusamas-existential-circus/528669/ 46

For an interesting discussion of what “phenomenology” really amounts to beyond a penchant for subtle descriptions of experience that suspend or bracket out commitment to what may or may not really be happening, see Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). For an account of how phenomenology entered specifically architectural discourse and education, see Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of Postmodernism (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Otero-Pailos traces the phenomenological approach in the U.S. back to French immigré and architecture professor at Princeton, Jean Labatut. Labatut was influenced by philosophers Henri Bergson and Jacques Maritain. Labatut’s students at Princeton included Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, and Charles Moore. Otero-Pailos also looks at Christian Norberg-Schulz and Kenneth Frampton, writer-architects whose careers did not pass through Princeton. He does not, however, trace phenomenology’s path through the environmental psychology or environmental philosophy literatures in the hands of writers like Tom Barrie, Robert Mugerauer and David Seamon (editor of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter). 47

Yes, a mixed metaphor: experience is both foundation and peak. Privileged in both cases. Other hot topics in the field of architecture at the time of writing were: sustainability, computational design methods and form making ("parametricism"), digital fabrication, architectural material science, datadriven design, smart (or intelligent) buildings, landscape architecture as a model for architecture generally, capitalist/post-capitalist urbanism, the possible revival of postmodernism, and the as yet unclear influence of object-oriented philosophy, more about which in Part Two of this book. The experientialist stream received new impetus in writing about architecture for the general public, with Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s Welcome to Your World (2017).


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Two things are meant here by “academic practice”: (1) The activity of teaching, researching, and writing about design or drawing or construction or history in architecture schools, i.e. the practice of being-an-academic, and (2) the activity of practicing architects who also teach part-time at architecture schools. The fact is that almost all prominent, award-winning architects today have, or have had, academic practices in the second sense, i.e. simultaneous teaching positions, often for decades at a time. Indeed, many paid, nominally full-time, tenured professors of architecture are also partners in busy practices. These individuals’ practices are “academic” in both senses. They draw two salaries, and this enables them to devote more of their practices to such unprofitable activities as thinking, research travel, design investigation, versioning, model building, competition entering, and so forth. (Some do none of this, or only once did, and now simply grow richer.) In general, the role of universities in economically supporting the architecture’s evolution and viability as an art is rarely acknowledged. 49

The influence of Heidegger, Bachelard, and Merleau-Ponty on Juhani Pallasmaa in particular is clear. Note the self-evident centrality of private experience. Here “our” is entirely rhetorical: Architecture…articulates the experience of our being-in-the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self. The sense of self, strengthened by art and architecture…also permits us to engage fully in the mental dimensions of dream, imagination and desire. …The ultimate meaning of any building is beyond architecture: it directs our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self and being. Profound architecture makes is experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings. (The Eyes of the Skin, [John Wiley, Third Edition, 2012] p. 13.)

After casting construction and craftwork too as “existential experience,” Pallasmaa goes on to quote Wittgenstein: “Work in philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more a work on oneself. On one’s own interpetation. On how one sees things.” Architect Madeline Schwartzman’s See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (2011) and See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded (London, Black Dog Publishing, 2017) are two further examples of contemporary architects’ belief that greater attention to individual perceptual experience is the gateway to the future of design.

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If other people are there, that’s fine too, as long as all they do is enliven the scene, and so add richness to one’s experience, basically, of oneself-there-then: “hey, me, look at me!” George Eliot in Middlemarch: “The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.” 51

Nicely critiqued on experientialist grounds by Ruth Dalton in Chapter Three of Ruth Conroy Dalton and Christof Holscher, eds, Take One Building : Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives of the Seattle Central Library (Routledge, 2016). 52

For more on the Blur Building’s tragic beauty, hovering not only between lake and sky, but between architecture and entertainment, see David Heymann’s essay “A Cloud on a Lake” in Places Journal, November 2010, available at https://placesjournal.org/article/a-cloud-on-a-lake/. It may be argued that buildings that create memorable experiences for people in groups—memories which can later be compared and shared—do good work in making and maintain those social relationships. This is true. The ability to co-reminisce is a component of friendship, just as finding out what experiences have been had in common is great for first dates. But relationality can work without it. And relationships based solely on solo experiences of a third thing, held in common, soon run out of steam. They are I-It. What that means will not be clear for a few pages yet.


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The postmodern architect’s academic interest in Las Vegas and Miami in the 1970’s and 80’s is well known. On the recent trend away from glitzy atrium-hotels and towards to smaller “boutique” hotels for certain demographics, see Thomas L. Friedman, “The Edamame Economy,” The New York Times, January 6, 2014. One hesitates to add to the list of experientialist approaches to architecture such Peace Corps-like initiatives as Auburn University’s Rural Studio (http://www.ruralstudio.org/), the Global Architecture Brigade (http://www.globalbrigades.org/architecture-brigades-overview), Scale Africa (http://scaleafrica.org/), Architecture for Humanity’s Open Architecture Network (http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/), or GeoEco (http://www.goeco.org). Most of these programs do social good overall. But we should note that much of the volunteerism they depend on is a manifestation the desire by ambitious, upper-middle-class youth to have experiences in any resume-enhancing way they can (cf. Note 42 above). 54

See especially John Lobell’s Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (Shambala, 2008 [1979]). Renzo Piano worked for Louis Kahn from 1956 to 1970. 55

Peter Zumthor describes a photograph of Rudas Baths in Budapest, which was an inspiration for his Thermal Baths at Vals (Peter Zumthor Thermes Vals, Schiedegger and Spies, 2007) p. 23: The rays of light falling through the openings in the starry sky of the cupola illuminate a room that could not be more perfect for bathing: water in stone basins, rising steam, luminous rays of light in semidarkness, a quiet relaxed atmosphere, rooms that fade into the shadows; one can hear all the different sounds of water, one can hear the rooms echoing. There was something serene, primeval, meditative about it that was utterly enthralling. The life of an Oriental bath. We were beginning to learn. “Coming To Our Senses: Architecture and the Non-Visual,” by this author in Harvard Design Magazine, Number 26, Spring/Summer (2007) p. 91ff., offers a review of several then-new books in architectural phenomenology. Available at http://www.mbenedikt.com/hdmphenomreview.pdf 56

[[[[[add reference to Blur Building as being ‘religious’ too]]]]. A movie made of Steven Holl describing his 2012 Daeyang Gallery and House in Seoul, South Korea, nicely exemplifies the spiritual side of experientialism: http://vimeo.com/45441531. (The house itself is toured in http://vimeo.com/45443501.) The house is shot in the style of Alex Roman’s 2010 The Third & The Seventh, http://vimeo.com/7809605, which is fairly a model of what the solipsistic impulse in architecture looks like transcribed into film. See also Note 42 above. Wendell Burnett’s Amangiri Resort in Utah (https://vimeo.com/10794635) provides another example. On how to appreciate Peter Zumthor’s architectural work in experientialist terms, see Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Place of Grace” in The New Republic, November 18, 2009, p.29-33. One might even confirm individual spiritual experiences of certain buildings by brain-wave analysis. See Sally Essawy, Basil Kamel, and Mohamed Elsawy, “Timeless Buildings and the Human Brain: The Effect of Spiritual Buildings on Human Brainwaves,” in Archnet-iJAR (International Journal of Architectural Research), Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2014. Alas, this was a rather poorly executed study. For better research along these lines, but as yet incomplete, see Julio Bermudez, “Spiritualizing' Modernity and the City: The Future of Urbanism, Well-being and Spirituality,” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69xRZ6V0ZP8) and, in overview of related research, Allan Logan “Nature as a Promoter of Well-Being in Future Cities,” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5SAA2_j5g#t=1322). Both of these papers use real-time mappings of the brain activity as proofs of spiritual experience. They were presented at ACS 5: Symposium on Urbanism, Spirituality and Well-Being at Harvard University Divinity School (June 6-9, 2013). A frequent recommendation of the papers at this


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symposium was replacing egocentrism with cosmic consciousness through allowing nature and quietness into the busy city and creating islands of geometric order lit by the sky. See also Julio Bermudez, ed., Transcending Architecture: Contemporary Views on Sacred Space (Washington D.C., Catholic University Press, 2015). It seems that stress-reduction is next to godliness, like cleanliness. In the Abrahamic/prophetic religious tradition, let us note, a brush with the divine is never relaxing, before, during, or after. [[[[should be in text]]]] 57

By the 2000’s, even architects as analytical, in the philosophical sense, as Peter Eisenman had turned to explaining their projects through narratives of individual experience. Here he is in a 2013 interview with Iman Insari talking about his 1980 Checkpoint Charlie competition entry (http://www.archdaily.com/429925/eisenman-s-evolution-architecture-syntax-and-new-subjectivity:

(T)he mayor of Berlin said: Look, I can’t build this because everybody is going to hate this project. The right wing is going to hate it; the left wing is going to hate it. But it certainly had to do with the individual, and his or her being in the space. No question that when you walk on a wall that is 3.3 meter high it is the only space you can walk on, you are now walking on a new datum in Berlin, which is the datum of the Berlin wall. So the wall doesn’t even exist anymore, it is now part of the fabric of this project. And then when you go into the watchtowers and you walk up and you cannot see anything because there is no viewing out. And then you see the ruins below. All of this is about the experience of moving up and down and across of the human subject. So there is no question that the human subject enters the project, and you cannot understand the project, as you said, unless you can conceptualize what it would be like to be the human subject. Even though it’s not built, you can conceptualize what it would be like. It would be quite an extraordinary experience. That’s why architecture, finally, has to involve the subject in an architectural manner. In other words, that was purely architectural, as it was political, as it was real. It didn’t mean anything; it had layers of meaning, traces of German history. But its real message was: we can no longer walk on the ground of Berlin. We have to walk on another ground. The ground of Berlin is tarnished by history. And like we did in Rome and other places, we have to walk on another ground. But it was the subject walking. So we are talking about a post-structural subject. It is at that moment after Cannaregio that post-structuralism comes in. And after that, all the projects change, and they do have an affective experiential condition. No question about that. And I can tell you this, you go to Cincinnati, which is after that, or you go to Santiago, or you go to the Berlin memorial, and you’ll feel something. You can’t take pictures of it or draw it, but you feel something, an experience you cannot capture in drawing or photographs.”

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Some readers might think I am giving short shrift to “sustainability.” Is sustainability not a discourse that has values 0ther than—indeed higher than—maximizing enjoyable/meaningful human experiences? Yes and no. No, in that “sustainability,” strictly speaking, is about as many people as possible experiencing as much happiness as possible for as long as possible, even forever. The “forever” element is what requires us to control our population, to husband or replace non-renewable resources, to come up with new technologies, etc., etc. But yes, in that “sustainability” is a different discourse when it is based on the granting of equal rights to all forms of life in principle, even at the cost of human experiential pleasure. Getting past experientialism is what we are trying to do in these pages. 59

There are many strains of Buddhism, and not all exemplify what I am about to describe. My reference is chiefly to Mahayana Buddhism, which flourished from about 1100 A.D. in China, Korea, and Japan, admixed with other non-Indian traditions like Taoism. On Buddhism as it is practiced in the West being rather more “legendary” than how it is practiced in the East, see Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (London: Bradford Books, 2011).


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The Five Precepts are fundamentally ethical and behavioral. They forbid (1) killing, (2) stealing, (3) sexual misconduct, (4) lying, and (5) drinking alcohol. 61

From the Sanskrit, by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, The Bhagavat-gita As It Is (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1972, 1983). 62

People in the process of perfecting themselves spiritually will often advise each other to avoid people and situations that “bring them down,” that contain or transmit “negativity.” The model is this: avoiding disease by contamination, or recovering from alcoholism by staying away from liquor. It is not the model given by the Buddha himself, by Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, or Mother Theresa. That model—although it is legendary that each of them spent some time wandering alone—was engagement with difficult and specific others. It is worth noting that the final image in Zen’s Ten Cow Herding pictures, designed to illustrate the ten stages of enlightenment, ends not with Nirvana or world-transcendence (i.e., Heaven in a western sense) but with life in the marketplace. Here, our finally-enlightened Zen monk transacts like a commoner, without illusions and yet with forgiveness in is heart. Hasidism (a mystical branch of Judaism) faces the same dilemma. Does devekuth (communion with God) require removing oneself from the vexations of business and family life, or might it better be found in the midst of them? There is no agreed answer. 63

Here is the quote from the Pali Canon in greater fullness. It can be found all over the Internet with small variations: “Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves.” “Hold fast to Truth as a lamp” “Hold fast to the truth as a refuge.” “Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves.” “And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.” 64

Jacques Derrida visits this in The Gift of Death (University of Chicago Press, 1991). "I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another,” he wrote, “without sacrificing the other other, the other others" (p. 68). And "I am responsible to anyone (that is to say, to any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all the others, to the ethical or political generality. And I can never justify this sacrifice; I must always hold my peace about it... What binds me to this one or that one, remains finally unjustifiable" (p 70). You can be sure that every mountain-ensconced Zen monk has a sister-in-law, far away, looking after his parents.

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Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (1986)

In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, a Bodhisattva is a person who, at the threshold of entering Nirvana, turns back so that he might bring all sentient beings to the threshold too. In this tradition, Bodhisattva-hood is held in as high esteem as is Buddha-hood. In the Zen strain of Buddhism, compassionate engagement with the world is the final goal, as I mentioned in Note 54 above; Nirvana is no place other than this place, now, and there is no threshold to it at which I can turn around. The master Dogen said in the Genjo Koan: “To study the Buddha’s way is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be enlightened by all things.” For an argument that Zen (Ch’an) Buddhism properly advocates social engagement and relationship, see Peter D. Hershock, Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Hershock distinguishes between Buddhism’s Indian, ascetic heritage, and China’s adaptation of Buddhism into pragmatic social contexts. In The Buddha’s Wife (New York, Simon and Schuster/Atria Books, 2015), Janet Surrey and Samuel Shem try to craft a


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relational parallel to Gautama’s more solitary (if much communicated and imitated) path to enlightenment. It’s also worth listening to the redoubtable Slavoj Zizek, who sees amorality in Buddhism’s fundamental tenets at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtUPfF1R_s. Finally this. Research shows that regular meditators become more compassionate people (David de Steno, “The Morality of Meditation,” The New York Times, July 5, 2013), but it does not explain why this is so. It seems not to matter whether “compassion” or “enlightenment” are mentioned in the language surrounding the practice, or any religious or spiritual truths. The practice can be entirely medical, secular, about health. Perhaps it is the regular quieting the babble of voices within us—the worries, the fantasies, the convolutions of our wills and conversations with absent others—that allows us to pay greater attention to other people’s internal states, which in turn allows I-You-ness to arise. 67

E.g. my book collection, my bedroom, my dog, my friends. Other areas of self-control are expected sooner, e.g., control of our bowel movements, of our urge to steal, lie, hit, curse, and so forth. 68

Here is an old but trenchant joke. A couple is chatting. “But enough about me!” says one. “Let’s talk about you: What do you think of me?” Similarly, mutual confession may be preliminary to I-You but it is not the same as I-You. Mutual confession can be done self-centeredly, solipsistically. This is demonstrated throughout Spike Jonze’s wonderful film Her (2014). It would be remiss not to mention somewhere the hundred-year-old tradition of “positive thinking” in American self-help psychology, starting (nominally) with Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Postitive Thinking, Werner Erhard’s “est” in the 1970s through 90s, and The Law of Attraction (http://www.thelawofattraction.com), thriving today. All promise that reality itself is constituted by, and changeable-to-your-liking-by, thinking the right thoughts. 69

Seemingly paradoxically, one might also climb mountains on the notion that, when clinging to a rock by one’s fingertips, one is in sole control of one’s fate. In general, with cocooning, we are talking about the super-rich. The term “cocooning” is futurologist Faith Popcorn’s in The Popcorn Report (Doubleday, 1991). Recently she speaks of “super-cocooning:” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2013/02/15/internet-tv-super-cocoons/1880473/) 70

It does no good to say “surely you mean the experience of relationship.” This puts private experience at the origin again simply by fiat, making “relationship” the derived object of study. The claim, rather, will be that there is no experiencing without relationship, as Michael S. A. Graziano argues in Consciousness and The Social Brain (op. cit.). The same insight, together with the idea that the soundest ethical human values come from intersubjectivity and dialog, can be found in Edmund Husserl (The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, David Carr ed. and transl., [Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970] Appendix III, pp 327-334), and in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see The Visible and the Invisible, Claude Lefort, ed., trans. by Alphonso Lingis [Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968] pp. 143-155). 71

Relationism is not to be confused with postmodern relativism, the view, that is, that since “true” is always “true for x” where x is a specific subject, there can be no such privileged thing as “Truth” for all x’s, all subjects, except as it is enforced by power. Relativism itself, alas, is a power-backed modernist doctrine too: By posing as disinterested representation, decontextualized from any political aspirations, modernist knowledge production suggests a relinquishment of responsibility, but in fact serves– through technology—to set the instrumental rationality of the powerful free to go about its business in the world. But the post-modern mirror-image of objectivism—that is, relativism—


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certainly fares no better in terms of responsibility. Both these epistemologies have been spawned by the same, modern subject–object dichotomy. The division into natural versus human sciences pitting ‘realism’ against ‘constructivism’ in Western knowledge production, remains a projection of this fundamentally existential, dualist scheme. The former takes the represented object as its point of departure, the latter the constructing subject, but neither acknowledges their recursivity, that is, their relation. One reason why animism continues to intrigue us may be that this is precisely what animism does. Rather than viewing knowledge as either representation or construction, animism suggests the intermediate view that knowledge is a relation that shapes both the knower and the known. An animistic or ‘relational’ ontology is a mode of knowing that is not only constitutive of both the knower and the known…but that crucially also acknowledges this fundamental condition, and thus also the responsibilities that must always adhere to the very act of ‘knowing’. Beyond objectivism and relativism, there can only be relationism. If only because purely instrumental knowledge and rational risk assessment can never be as powerful incentives for human action as moral imperatives, we do need new metaphors capable of sustainably relating us to the rest of the biosphere. (Alf Hornborg, “Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2006, 71:1, pp. 21-32.)

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Martin Buber, I and Thou. 1958. Reprint. (New York, Scribner 2000). The reader may be wondering: what happened to the word “Thou.” As Walter Kaufman, the book’s second translator, noted, the English title of Buber’s book should have been I and You, which is closer to Ich und Du, the book’s German title. The book’s first translator, Ronald Gregor Smith, however, wanted its religious import to be signaled, and so “King James-ed” the title. I side with Kaufman. Smith’s strategy worked. In popular accounts of Buber, “I-Thou” dominates (e.g. in the New York Times at the time or writing: David Brooks, “Read Buber, Not the Polls,” Nov 1, 2016, available online). Let it also be said: Buber represents a confluence of many thinkers in the religious-existentialist line, as well as a few who were atheists, like Jean-Paul Sartre. As is always the case with philosophers, several of the views I ascribe to Buber are traceable to the views of earlier figures, in this case, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and significantly, Max Scheler. For more on Buber’s education and influences see Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (Routledge, 4th Edition, 2002). Buber was a scholar of non-Western religions too, and so was bound to have come across one of the most famous pronouncements of the Upanishads: “Tat Tvam Asi,” translated from the Sanskrit as “That Art Thou.” However, in no conventional interpretation of this phrase can Buber’s take on it—if take it is—be found. It is conventionally taken as one more assertion of the ultimate identity of the individual (“you,” in conversation, since it occurs in a dialog between Uddalaka and his son Svetaketu) with Ultimate Reality or Everything (“Tat”), and not anything to do with the peculiar quasi-divine relationship that is bought into being when we respectfully use the grammatical “second person” form, you or Thou (Tvam). 73

Buber did not claim that the world consisted only of relationships, i.e., that there are no real objects— meaning entities that survive component change and environmental variability with their function(s) and identity intact. This would be absolute relationism, which Buber did not propound. One’s metaphysics must have a place for relations, not just observed or mathematical relations, but causative, energic, informational, and interactive ones. But it must also have a place for real objects, for persistent entities that are on their own missions, so to speak, entities that not fully knowable to us or to each other (thus “impenetrable,” or “opaque”), full of potential, and far fewer in number than the relations between them. To borrow the terminology of the philosopher Graham Harman: any complete ontology would be “object oriented” and relational. As to the aside about number: if N is the number of objects, and R is the number of 2-way relations between them, then R ≤ Rmax = N[N-1]/2. In words: the number of relationships between things goes up as the square of the number of things involved (divided by two if each bidirectional relation is counted as


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one). It grows faster if larger groupings are also counted (i.e, of 3, 4, 5...N) uniquely. "Relationists" work harder.

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One sees in all this some of the larger, social context of Buber's thinking. He lived through the rise of the "Organization Man" and the universalization of the idea that management (a) could and should be scientific, and (b) could and should "use psychology." Psychologists served the military, but also industries of all kinds, showing managers how to increase workers', lower managers,' and clerks' productivity. How? By making them happier and more committed to work, whether they wanted to be or not. This was, and remains, an I-It exercise entirely, to the extent of simulating I-You. For an excellent treatment of this subject (sans mention of Buber) see William Davies, The Happiness Industry (London, Verso, 2016), and Carl Sederstrom and Andre Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome (Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2015). To see the systems view of architecture in full flower, read Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol. I (London, Wiley, 2012). I say, when you hear the word "system," be alert.

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John Berger’s classic book Ways of Seeing (London: Viking, 1973) examines the gaze of subjects in portrait paintings, exposing, precisely, our involvement as viewers in the disclosures being offered by the subject, the reaching out from one person to another across the abyss of time. For a sustained critique of the Kantian view, see Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1991). Berleant’s writing is more experiential than relational however. 76

Cf. Alva Noe (op. cit.), and Note 23 above. Buber’s account of his meeting with a tree in I and Thou (op. cit.) p. 7 cannot be improved upon. But see also Adrienne La France, “When you give a tree an email address,” The Atlantic, July 10, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/when-yougive-a-tree-an-email-address/398210/ . 77

For a time, around 1670, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (who would become known as the Baal Shem Tov, or “Keeper of the Good Name [of God]”) served as a village shochet, or kosher slaughterer. The shochet’s method to this day is calmly and swiftly to slice the animal’s neck with an exceedingly sharp knife. The animal feels no fear and no pain, and uncomprehendingly loses consciousness—faints—before dying. Traditionally, the sharpening stone was wetted with water. It is said that the Baal Shem Tov wet the stone with his tears. 78

It hardly needs pointing out that “experience” and “use,” in both their noun and verb forms, are two of the most important words architects invoke to justify their designs: the former to refer (in an enlightened, up-to-date way) to their building’s aesthetic and/or cognitively interesting properties, the latter to refer to how their buildings carry out their practical, functional missions. Add technical factors (structure, energy use, maintenance, rental rates, etc.) and architects believe they have it covered. 79

In classifying the having of experiences with the having of things (or land, money, and so forth), Buber was implicitly following Marx and his critique of the overpowering role of private property and use values in capitalism. (Cf. Note 31 above.) We might object: surely the having of rights is not the same as the having of ice cream? The word “have” covers many different kinds of possession. But when one pays admission to a theater performance, or for a carnival ride, or private music lesson, or Greek Island tour (these are experiences, all), it makes good sense to speak of “having” in the just private-property sense that Marx intended, that Buber lamented, and that Pines and Gilmore today celebrate as salvific of the global economy. Here, (1) non-payers are clearly excluded, and (2) the value of those experiences is afterwards “cashed out “ in their use in social exchange (entertaining stories, proof of class or wealth) as well as, in the case of lessons or educational experiences, human capital.


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Martin Buber, I and Thou (Second Edition), transl. by Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1958) pp. 38-39. Note that Buber is here saying that experiencing comes at the expense of relating, having in mind, possibly, something like a person passing up a trip to Paris in order to stay home with a needy friend. This choice is emblematic of larger choices, of course, as well as smaller ones: wherever delight and duty vie with each other as values. Later we will see that, at a deeper level, the capacity for experiencing fully and satisfyingly is premised on the capacity for relating fully and richly. 81

Immutable? Not completely. Where atheist evolutionists see cultural adaptation at work in our slowly changing values, believers (fundamentalists excepted) see continuous improvement in our understanding of the Word of God. Might those two processes be one process? I think so, as does Robert Wright in The Evolution of God (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2009). “Choose life, that ye and your children shall live” says Moses seemingly redundantly in Deuteronomy 30:19. For Immanuel Levinas too (more about whom below), self-transcendence (he called it “transascendence”) is to be found in responding to the expressive face of the Other, which calls to us whether we are ready or not or willing or not to respond. Infinity lies here, and so does divinity, and not in running (away) to a mountaintop or forest clearing where the gods might disclose themselves to us. Levinas found the message of Heidegger’s “unhiddenness” entirely Greek and pagan. As controversial as Heidegger’s political life was, his writing, and especially his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” provided a great deal of inspiration to architectural phenomenologists (e.g. David Seamon, Robert Mugerauer, Tom Barrie), and even to such estimable philosophers as Karsten Harries (e.g., The Ethical Function of Architecture [Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1997]). Harries, correctly to my mind, sees architecture’s beauty as always-already an ethical proposition, re-presenting the values of its time. Harries laments the draining away of modern architecture’s interest in creating “sacrable”—if not everywhere actually sacred—space. He laments the disappearance of symbolic ornament; he laments the non-applicability to modern sensibilities of the (essentially medieval) Heideggerian “fourfold” of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and suggests that these be rediscovered in the design of public monuments and theater. In this book, I try to sketch an alternative route to sacredness, and so, too, another course for science and phenomenology, at least as they apply to architecture. 82

Such interaction is possible among humans, certainly, but also all living creatures as well as all things that are treated as living. Tetsugen (Chapter 1) demonstrated Buddhist compassion surely, but, as a Zen master, Tetsugen would not have done so in order to demonstrate Buddhist compassion. He would have seen people in need and responded. “Invisible sutras” truly are the best: teaching by example. For more about the proposition that divinity is constituted by moral creativity in action, see my God Is the Good We Do: Theology of Theopraxy (New York: Bottino Books, 2007) which includes a discussion of the proposition’s debt to the transcendentalism of G. W. V. Hegel, to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, to the vitalism of Henri Bergson, to the religious humanism of Henry Nelson Wieman, to John Wall’s “moral creativity,” and to the progressive Jewish thought of Felix Adler, Mordecai Kaplan, and Harold Schulweis. Whitehead: “God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as men and women partake of this creative process do they partake of the divine, of God…” in Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, (London: David R. Godine, 2001) p. 366. As a theology in its own right, theopraxy stands in sharp contrast to the persuasive but atavistic notion that the big is better than small, that the eternal or timeless is better than the ephemeral or temporal, that the first or cause of everything is better than the first or cause of something, which is better than the lastor most-affected of anything. The attribution of the first term of these dualities to God and/or the Universe or Tao (i.e., God being the biggest, most eternal, most powerful and unaffected first cause of everything) spills over into architecture with the belief that the largest, longest-lasting, oldest and most impassive of buildings that “connects us to the stars”…naturally carries more religious weight than the


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smallest, most ephemeral and recent buildings that has only local views and effects. With Zen Buddhism, theopraxy says: not so fast. Evolution teaches otherwise also. In the height of its perfectly balanced complexity, in its concentration of life, in the maturity of its evolution, in its extreme rarity in the universe, a butterfly is superior to a mountain, and the smallest act of human kindness eclipses the sun. Sunday in the park, and there’s a sudden thunderstorm. It pours! The umbrella held over an old lady by a stranger is larger to her than the dome of the Florence Cathedral. And not just to her. “Merci, monsieur. Merci!” she says three times. One is rightfully uncertain whether to capitalize the “m” in monsieur. The dimensions of reality in which such reversals of scale and significance occur are hard to elucidate. They are intuited; they are not yet understood. 83

It is not that Buber would disagree. He would just prefer his own metaphors. It also agrees with the views of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), but I cannot argue that here. See also Note 85 below. On "objects," see the second half of Chapter 11, and on configurations being/becoming objects, see Chapter 15. 84

Think of Michelangelo’s portrayal of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Many of these themes are developed by the Immanuel Levinas. Levinas scholars tend to dismiss Buber as a lightweight. For a defense of Buber as well as an appreciation of Levinas, see Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) p. 55ff. 85

Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the source of evil was as influenced by Buber and Levinas as it was by her direct mentor, Martin Heidegger. Adolph Eichman’s flaw, Arendt thought, was his inability to extricate himself from the system of I-It relations that was being promulgated by the totalitarian machinery of the Third Reich. It wasn’t that Jews weren’t human to Eichman. They were. It’s that they were not addressable in I-You mode. But, says Arendt, I-It depersonalization was everywhere in Germany at the time. In what was becoming a totally militarized state, I-It was the dominant attitude between Germans too: everyone was an instrument, a tool, a cog in the machine that was rolling forward with irresistible historical inevitability. Eichman included. He was a tool, even to himself. In The Human Condition (op. cit), Arendt distinguishes between labor, work, and action. Labor is physical, providing sustenance and safety by virtue of disciplined effort. Work uses resources to create “capital” in the sense of “means of production:” artifacts, machines, and social arrangements that make life easier and more meaningful (in that certain projects are spatiotemporally larger than any single person and their lifespan). Only action, however, is free. Only action gives priority to thought, initiative, political change, and artistic expression/appreciation. And only action cultivates true interpersonal relationships among equals: a world of I-You. One can see Buber’s thinking all over this formulation too, although Buber and Arendt clashed publicly over the trial of Eichman. For more on this moment in history, see Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work (E.P Dutton, 1988 [1981]) pp. 361-2. 86

I like to imagine these researchers becoming aware of the I-You relations developing between them, right there, next to the fMRI machine. 87

Buddhists might think that Buber is here describing karuna, or compassion. There certainly are affinities. Buber was impressed with Eastern religions, especially with the Taoism of Chuang Tzu, whose sayings Buber translated with commentary into German about twenty years before he wrote I and Thou. By then, however, Buber had disavowed any personal commitment to the truths of Taoism, later calling it “a stage that I had to pass through before I could enter into an independent relationship with being.” It was a stage, he said, that included “the belief in the unification of the self with the all-self, based on a genuine ‘ecstatic’ experience.” See Jonathan Herman, I and Tao: Martin Buber’s encounter with Chuang Tzu (Albany NY, State University of New York Press, 1996) p. 112.


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Buber addresses this point in many places, but see Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 20-21), where he contrasts dialogical I-You-ness with love. What prevents I-You-ness, in Buber’s view, from just as easily becoming the precursor of hate and domination as the precursor of love and respect is that (1) the origin of I-You is the one-and-only, terrifying but actually loving Creator who spoke to Job, and that (2) hate is not the emotion that naturally accompanies seeing another person in their particularity and fullness of being. To hate something or someone, you must have reduced their reality to only a few characteristics or qualities, characteristics or qualities which, moreover, are obstinately obstructive to your survival or flourishing. If there is evil to be found outside of the process of eliminating such obstructions (rather than going over, around, or under them, say, or dissolving them), it is to be found in adopting the language and mannerisms of I-You (the intimacy, the eye contact, the respect…) while treating others instrumentally—which is to say I-It-ly—without their consent or even knowledge. Skill at doing this is today called sociopathy. Noted Buber, “love remaining with itself—…is called Lucifer” (ibid., p.21). In distinguishing varieties of love and the evil of deception, Buber was in accord with the philosopher Max Scheler. Buber’s thinking had a considerable effect on Martin Luther King, as attested in King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and in his speech of the same year, “A Challenge to Churches and Synagogues.” There, King cites Buber by name. Buber himself did not spring out of nowhere, of course. One can find the lineaments of Ich und Du in one of Hegel’s responses to Kant. Kant had propounded that the existence of the self derives from the coordination of the senses and the requirements of rationality. Hegel, on the other hand, insisted that the self is formed in only in reciprocal communication with living other persons—such as one’s mother, father, older sibling or friend—not just with one’s own perceptual systems or the requirements of rationality. Through the lectures of Alexandre Kojeve in the 1930’s, Hegel’s rendition of the Other became crucial to numerous French thinkers from Sartre, through Lacan, Levinas, Bataille, and also Buber. The self is “socially constructed,” we say today. Self-awareness is first other-awareness first, as we will elaborate on in Chapter 8. Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” (also from Phenomenology of Spirit) was influential on Buber too. Here Hegel presents a psychodrama, a dialog and confrontation between two archetypal humans. The first, fearing for his life, gives himself over to the second for protection. The price he pays is his freedom. He becomes a slave. The master does not fear for his life but fears for his life’s legitimacy. He worries about his absolute moral worth, and so requires constant recognition as an especially moral and powerful being. The slave offers this recognition punctiliously, but not freely, not genuinely…until a certain point is reached. That point is when the slave, comfortable with his lot and truly admiring the master, chooses not to rebel even when given the opportunity to do so. At that point, the master becomes a/the beneficent Father…who ironically wants the slave (who would now prefer not to be free) to be free. The bird will not leave the cage. The “master-slave dialectic,” as this drama is called, silently permeates all social authority structures, including religion’s, as Nietzsche was to propound. 89

Might unrequitedness be a measure of love’s true-ness, as Shakespeare often tells us? If so, then the perennial complaint of many people—that they love the other more than the other loves them—would be expected as well as neatly explained. It is the feeling that one has received more (or less) consideration from the other than one deserves…but not by too much, which is to say, by an amount that is sustainable because love is fueled, precisely, by what tests it without weakening it too much. Love, in short, produces manageable feelings of guilt, jealousy, gratefulness, hope, redemption, and forgiveness. In love, these feelings are forever in play, being laid to rest and then awakened and then laid to rest again. Without this cycling, love itself might evaporate. One of the major disagreements between Levinas and Buber was over the issue of reciprocity, and it involved a misunderstanding on Levinas’s part. Levinas thought that Buber thought that reciprocity was required in order to make I-You bonds work (or I-It bonds, for that matter). In point of fact, Buber did


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not think reciprocity was required, perfect or imperfect, nor even verbal dialog. Silence was OK. Attitude was enough. And attitude can be utterly one-sided. Levinas found the notion of reciprocation intolerably economic. If, Levinas thought, one could freely choose to enter into relationship in I-It or I-You mode, as Buber indeed claimed, and if one could, moreover, be rewarded by reciprocation or by an approving observer or an increase in one’s self-estimation, then the choice was self-regarding at the outset, prudential, and thus not a foundation on which to base ethics, which is nothing if not altruistic at its core. Levinas preferred to locate the origin of ethics at the choice-less care-giving and care-demanding instincts of a parent, manifested most strongly and with least intellection by the mother-child relationship. This natural “I-You” is where ethics begins. Mothering is foundation of morality, Levinas argued, and so too, programmed in as it were, is the helplessness of the child whose first recourse is its face, made by God-orNature (pace Spinoza) to say to its mother (and perhaps more urgently, to a father uncertain of his parentage) “don’t kill me.” As for Goodness or God, he/she/it exists for Levinas “uncontaminated by being,” beyond all relation. Neither Buber nor Levinas (nor Plato) believed, as I do, that Goodness—or God—emerged from the processes of life and evolution to become a new basic force in the universe, gentle and persistent. Neither Buber nor Levinas would deny, however, that I-You relationships, or purely caring ones, benefit by being periodically tested. Recall the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (in Hebrew, the akedah). 90

Buber wrestled with the obvious problem that while the higher animals can be in I-You dialog with us and each other, the simpler life-forms—bacteria, for example, or viruses—cannot really be. In the realm of physics, chemistry, and biology, inanimate objects are certainly in a dialog of some kind with each other. The question is whether they are usefully thought of as communicating rather than just mechanically pushing each other around. The conclusion that inanimate things cannot really be in dialog with us is not so easily accepted in the case of artifacts, which, by their design and history, suggest their proper use, and wait for us to put them into play. The better designed a drawer in a chest of drawers is, the more it wants to be opened and closed. The better designed a boat is, the more it longs to be put on the water. The more handsome the guitar, the more it wants to be strummed. The shoes in your closet are sad, as you can plainly see. The point is this: intentionality is both built into, and expressed by, all things, but especially by long evolved and “successful” artifacts. If artifacts are “ready to hand,” as Heidegger famously put it, then it must be admitted that they have their own ideas of fulfillment too. Do we not kick cars that “refuse” to run, and curse at tools that break or injure us? Is it the car’s maker or tool's maker we are cursing, i.e. the people responsible for its manufacture? Not really; it is the thing, its obduracy, its faithlessness, its perfectly awful timing. It’s only then, Heidegger argues, that we even see the tool as an entity in its own right, and not just an invisible extension of our bodies. That is not quite right, as critics like Graham Harman have observed. Tools always have their own natures too, which we sense even when they are not in hand. Things, tools, artifacts, have reluctances and tendencies, then, but by the same token, the better designed, more evolved they are, the more they have ambitions. To the assertion by the National Rifle Association that “Guns don’t kill people; people do,” one could readily reply: “On the contrary. People don’t kill people; guns do,” and go on to explain: People hurt people, certainly. People can do grievous bodily harm to each other, but not so swiftly, remotely, and cleanly as with guns, which by design whisper to angry and solitary men, even as they (the guns) lie passively on their sides, or on a bed, or in a drawer: “I am so fine. Pick me up. Feel my heft; feel how I fit your hand in every way. Use me, use me, I am yours. I am Power; I am Justice. Ah, hold me just so. Yes. Why do you have me if you do not use me? Use me. Take me. Be a man of action! You will be far from the blood you so justly spill.” An armed man is not just a man who has a gun. It is a new entity, a 50:50 partnership of man and gun making up a differentlyabled, differently thinking and perceiving body. Inanimate objects can compel us to engage with them “their way” if they are the only means to necessary end, the way a door handle “forces our hand” if we wish to pass through. But it is enough that


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they facilitate, inspire, or seduce us (the favorite term of Jean Baudrillard), the way grapes do. The Golden Gate Bridge attracts suicides for reasons not hard to understand. There are still no nets along that bridge’s sides. In May 2017, a young man on my campus stabbed four students with a knife, in broad daylight, for no apparent reason. One student died. All those who knew the perpetrator (also a student) said he was a wonderful fellow. Unbeknownst to them, he had been taking Wellbutrin and drinking alcohol. Does this explain his behavior? Not fully. Witnesses did note, however, the size and beauty of the Bowie hunting knife he used; it was a prized possession of his. How shall we hold it—the knife, that is—culpable, at least in part? How can we perfect artifacts like guns and knives over hundreds of years—most are beautiful in result—and then deny that they speak their purpose? For what amounts to a confirmation of agency of guns, listen to http://storycorps.org/listen/david-ned150424/, although any number of news reports of disaffected men in the USA who went on shooting rampages over the last fifteen years will do. Most of them had gun collections. All were primed by gun culture. (On the notion of priming, see Chris Loersch and B. Keith Payne, “The Situated Inference Model: An Integrative Account of the Effects of Primes on Perception, Behavior and Motivation,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2011, 6 (3) 234-252.) In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, 179-80), Bruno Latour writes of guns in much the same way I just have, as objects with agency. For a comprehensive account of “thing power,” see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (Duke University Press, 2012). See also Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28 #1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1–22. Also, Max Fisher and Josh Keller, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer,” The New York Times, November 7, 2017, available online. In psychology, there is an effect known as “the weapons effect,” where simply seeing a gun increase aggression. A meta-study of fifty years of research on the weapons effect (Arlin Benjamin Jr., Sven Kepes, and Brad Bushman, “Effects of Weapons on Aggressive Thoughts, Angry Feelings, Hostile Appraisals, and Aggressive Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Weapons Effect Literature” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2017, pp. 1–29) confirms the conclusion of one of the pioneers of the field, Leonard Berkowitz, in 1968. “Guns not only permit violence,” he wrote, “they can stimulate it as well. The finger pulls the trigger, but the trigger may also be pulling the finger.” A final note, to bring us back to Buber. It would seem that for most animals, possession is provocation, or rather, possession is expression, and expression is provocation. What do I mean? If animal A visibly possesses an object or quality x, then animal B, by default, assumes that A wishes to express that he/she has the object or property x, that A is “showing it off.” And this, when B is in I-It mode, becomes a provocation to B to remove x from A's possession and use it for his/her own (i.e. B's) benefit. No crow thinks another's crow's crumb properly belongs to the first crow. To a bear, every fish is hers, including the fish hanging out of another bear’s mouth. Now "x" might be a physical object, and so detachable—i.e., steal-able, from A. Or it might a physical attribute of A that is quite un-detachable from being A: for example, A’s being female, or youthful, or having certain plumage, or odor, or way of moving. The simple possession of such characteristics by A is taken (by B) to be a conscious expression of A’s interest in applying those characteristics to what they are good for (or “meant for” by God). To B, they signal readiness, and, if not willingness, a provocation to others to put those possessions/attributes to their “proper” use, even it that involves theft, or assault, by B. This logic depends on B having an I-It attitude to A, i.e., on seeing A as a bundle of attributes and capabilities and functions in the first place. This attitude is not possible when the relation of B to A is I-You. 91

Louis Kahn famously asked brick “what it wanted to be.” He also spoke of architecture as “a society of rooms.” My hope is that these metaphors will become more powerful as this book progresses. Kahn also


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spoke several times about winking at a chapel or other kind of architectural object. What is winking but way of addressing another entity as -You, quickly, knowing of its social inadvisability. In art, the still-lives of painter Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) come to mind: arrangements of containers (glasses, cups, vases. shells)—similar but no two the same—that recall nothing so much as family snapshots, with all the elbowing and self-straightening for the camera (and sometimes hiding from it), parents at the back, kids in front, brothers lined up, everyone trying to look good, etc., etc. Frank Gehry sees his architectural compositions as social groupings too, as “people at a cocktail party” as he is known to say, often tipsy. In Part Three, we will see similarly-frank anthropomorphizing in the work of architects Aldo van Eyck, James Stirling, and John Hejduk. Now celebrated, now suppressed, anthropomorphism and animism may be necessary to art, and especially to sculpture. It certainly has been necessary to religion, as Stuart Guthrie shows in Faces in the Clouds: a New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and as E. B. Tylor did in his 1871 masterwork in anthropology, Primitive Culture. One might also remember Robert Vischer’s (1847– 1933) and Theodor Lipps’ (1851–1914) proposition that einfuhling, or empathy, is essential to art’s creation and appreciation, as well as Sir Geoffrey Scott’s adaptation of the proposition to architecture in his influential 1924 book, The Architecture of Humanism. We can also look to the scholarship of Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Today, neuroscientists know that most animals have specialized brain circuitry for decoding the attentional, intentional, and emotional states of other creatures. As we shall see in Chapter 8, it is just those circuits, turned inward, that give rise to consciousness. 92

“(T)he work of art is not…naively self-centered (as a natural object is); it is a essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and spirit.” G. W. V Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, transl. T. M. Knox [Oxford University Press, 1965] p. 71, my parenthetical.

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“Animism is a relational way of knowing” is Nurit Bird-David’s phrase. See her essay “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” in Current Anthropology, 40, S1, February 1999, 68. Among modern philosophers, Bruno Latour, as I have noted, comes closest to granting autonomy and relationship-power to inanimate and abstract objects, casting our (i.e. human) versions of these metaphysical facts as derivative of theirs. Reality is political all the way down. 94

For an introduction to the Uncanny Valley phenomenon, see Margot Talbot, “Pixel Perfect: The scientist behind the digital cloning of actors,” The New Yorker, April 18, 2014.) Also http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/Blog/relating-to-robots. Note that children are loathe to play with dead or taxidermied animals.

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The term “affective labor” is Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2004). They describe jobs that involve “selling one’s ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss” (p. 111). See also Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California Press, 2012 [1983]). French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu makes the case for the importance of I-It or “objective” relations: "What exist in the social world are relations—not interactions between agents or intersubjective (I-You) ties between individuals, but objective relations which exist 'independently of individual consciousness and will', and are essentially economic.” (My parentheses, from the Wikipedia entry on Pierre Bourdieu). Marxists such as Bourdieu are wary of those who would deflect attention away from unjust material economic relations and towards theological, interpersonal, love- and loyalty-based ones. The latter are easily made to seem socially just by appealing to religious law, the afterlife, the natural order, God’s ways, and so forth. Politically, Buber would agree. He was a moderate socialist and he never


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advocated that I-You relations replace I-It ones. The danger runs mainly in the other direction: that I-It attitudes would in time replace I-You ones, be it through overheated capitalism or bureaucratized, welfare statism. It is the inefficient-to-capitalism and troublesome-to-the-state I-You attitude that in fact needs our care and protection. 96

If only. That trend’s current culmination is surely “social finance” from companies like sofi.com and ablelending.com. 97

William Davies, “How Friendship Became the Tool of the Powerful,” The Guardian online, May 7, 2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/07/how-friendship-became-tool-of-powerful): Businesses today are obsessed with being social, but what they typically mean by this is that they are able to permeate peer-to-peer social networks as effectively as possible. Brands hope to play a role in cementing friendships, as a guarantee that they will not be abandoned for more narrowly calculated reasons. So, for example, Coca-Cola has tried a number of somewhat twee marketing campaigns, such as putting individual names (“Sue”, “Tom”, etc) on their bottles as a way to encourage gift-giving. Managers hope that their employees will also act as “brand ambassadors” in their everyday social lives. Meanwhile, neuromarketers have begun studying how successfully images and advertisements trigger common neural responses in groups, rather than in isolated individuals. This, it seems, is a far better indication of how larger populations will respond to advertising. All this – along with the rise of the “sharing economy”, exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, offers a simple lesson to big business. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift-exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible. As marketers see it, payment is one of the unfortunate “pain points” in any relationship with a customer, which requires anaesthetizing with some form of more social experience. The market must be represented as something else entirely. 98

Horace Newcomb (in Television: The Critical View [Oxford University Press, 1987]) argues that while watching network TV, Americans are actually dreaming, and that what they dreaming about are a few dozen vanished or vanishing ways of life. Television is our rear-view mirror, just as Marshall McLuhan argued in Understanding Media: TV is where once-viable “forms of life” go to die, shadows already, bidding farewell as they recede into idealized glory. This view puts a different perspective on the prevalence of relationships in movies, sitcoms, and TV series. Think of Friends, or Breaking Bad, or Downton Abbey: so full of confrontations and closeness, people treating each other I-You-ly and then I-It-ly and then I-You-ly again. If Newcomb and McLuhan right, then millions of people watch such shows transfixed precisely because their real lives are slowly draining of social relationships of any intensity or quality. Certainly, most of us watch them isolated even as we sit side by side on the sofa with our own personal servings of popcorn and our own smartphones ready to hand. Look how TV actors, talk-show hosts, news anchors in pairs and triples, commentators around tables on CNN, ESPN, and Fox…all have such a great time being genuine with each other. We watch them with envy. A recent development of stereo television allows two people to watch (and hear) different programs simultaneously on the same TV. Wearing specially programmed shutter glasses, one person watches the “left” image (show 1) with both eyes, the other watches the “right” image (show 2). Here’s a nice study: “The Era of Intimate Customer Decisioning Is At Hand,” a Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper commissioned by FICO, January 2013. In reaction see the work of Roman Krznaric (http://www.romankrznaric.com/) and Empathy Projects, as well as Theodor Zeldin’s The Oxford Muse (http://www.oxfordmuse.com/?q=what-is-the-muse). Also Note 84 above.


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Might constant exposure to false I-You-ness attract us to minimalist religious architecture of the kind I discussed earlier, experienced alone? Perhaps. It is no small irony that authenticity became the holy grail of proponents of the experience economy like Pines and Gilmore (op. cit.). Perhaps this is because authenticity is the one thing that those who “stage experiences” are hardest-pressed to provide. In their second book, Authenticity: What Consumers Actually Want (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2007, and which cites (admiringly) my own For an Architecture of Reality [New York: Lumen Books, 1992]), the question continues: how best to market authenticity? For an updated discussion of the antinomies involved from an architectural point of view, see my essay “Reality and Authenticity in the Experience Economy” in Architectural Record, 189: 11, p. 84, 2001, http://mbenedikt.com/reality-and-authenticity.pdf. More important is this seminal essay by Lionel Trilling: Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1972) and Jean Paul Sartre’s description of living in “bad faith” in Being and Nothingness (transl. Hazel Barnes [Philosophical Library, 1956] pp. 4767). It is also a staple of Marxist/Lacanian/Althusserian critical theory that ideology, not access to the real, is what allows individuals to become subjects—I’s. We need only, and can only, learn to perform predefined roles in relation to other individuals and institutions in order to become subjects. In this light, “I-You” is an ideology allied to other ideologies, whose purpose is to defeat yet other ideologies. We are subjects because of ideologies, and for this we become subject to them too. Authenticity is nowhere in this picture. 100

We might also develop better resources for living with a new kind of “thing” in the world. That new thing—which is neither a work of art, nor an animal, nor a person—demands relationship and provides companionship nonetheless. I mean the networked computer, smartphone, or robot. 101

Indeed, the humanism of Buber’s I and Thou was inspirational to the Team 10/CIAM urbanists of the 1950s and ‘60s, chiefly through the polemics and designs of Aldo van Eyck. This does not mean, though, that van Eyck got Buber right, as we shall see in Part Three of this book. George Teyssot provides a useful account of Buber’s reception by Team 10 and CIAM through people like van Eyck, Jorge Luis Sert, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, and Siegfried Giedion in “The Story of an Idea,” which is Chapter 5 of his essay collection A Topology of Everyday Constellations (MIT Press, 2013). To agree with the proviso that any new humanism be “non-arrogant” is to agree with David Ehrenfeld who, in The Arrogance of Humanism (Oxford University Press, 1981) argued that nature should not be seen as in any way here for humans, or to be assessed or measured by only human values and yardsticks. Every living thing is here “by rights” that not ours to give or take away, which attitude, he thinks, permeates humanism. Either that is so, and we should indeed move on to posthumanism, or Buber is not a humanist. 102

Age, gender, build, ethnicity, religion… Add personality and preference categories and one has the basis for the matchmaking algorithms that drive businesses like eHarmony, converting strangers into friends into perhaps lovers into perhaps spouses. One wonders what the equivalent would be for rooms. 103 Buber has a beautiful passage in illustration, too long to quote here. It is a section of an essay entitled “Silence Which is Communication” in Between Man and Man (transl. by Ronald Gregor Smith, New York: Macmillan, 1978 [1965], pp. 3-4). Another passage in that essay reports on a compositor relating I to You to his smoothly running printing press. (Note the possessive “his.” It has nothing to do with legal ownership.) In another, two strangers sit next to each other in a train, one ready to meet the world, the closed in refusal to connect with anything or anyone. The second gradually relaxes, and turns his foot an inch. In your own experience, think of looking at your cat or dog or child or lover deeply asleep. How amplified is the love you now feel for them, and uncomplicated. Now that reciprocation is literally impossible, it radiates from you in pure, one-way I-You-ness.


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It would be remiss not to mention somewhere the paradox of sexual love also noted by Theodore Adorno. I mean the possibility, roundly denied by religiously-inclined marriage counselors, that, in lust, and certainly in the throes of sexual ecstasy, it does not matter who your partner is; and more, that dwelling on the other’s uniqueness, wholeness, personality and subjectivity during sex, and even on one’s own subjectivity (rather than object-likeness), can extinguish passion in seconds. If this is correct, then the reason that lovers in the process of lovemaking (much less during orgasm) do not look into each other’s eyes has nothing to do with shame, or self-involvement, or the lack of real love between them. It is because, if lovers they truly are, they have passed through the gates of I-You to a place where, temporarily, there is nobody, not even themselves. They exist in the state of pure relation—relation stripped of its end points like a magnet stripped of its poles—in pure tension, pure bond between nowhere and nowhere, thrumming.

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I take this to be the underlying theme of such popular television shows as The Office (British and American versions) and Parks and Recreation, which tap into the perennial concern of so many ethicallyminded dramas and comedies, i.e., the conflicts that arise when we need to treat the same people both officially (I-It, on the job) and personally (I-You, as a friend or family member) in a given situation. As for relationships with non-human animals, some kind of gradated scale is necessary. Although you may approach your dog and your goldfish with the same love in your eyes, it is doubtful that the goldfish can reciprocate, much less instigate, that feeling towards you. I-You attitudes and possibly I-It attitudes too, insofar as they can be recognized in oneself, may well be out of the reach of most animals. The ability to simulate these attitudes, and thus lie, may well come along with the capability of having/feeling these attitudes at all and then choosing which to adopt.

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Actually, Buber often denied that he was a philosopher. He did this partly for modesty’s sake (some thought it was rhetorical), but partly because he genuinely thought that modern philosophy had committed itself entirely to explicating and promoting the realm of I-It. He also recognized that, sixty five books notwithstanding, he had not built a rigorous philosophical system with a finite number of concepts rigorously arranged. He was not a real philosopher in his own estimation. Perhaps following the lead of Max Scheler, he liked to refer to himself, rather, as an “anthropologist”—a student of human-ness. Buber was also wary of organized religion. Although he was a lifelong Zionist and a Palestinian sympathizer, he was not, himself, an observant Jew. His interest was in the life of spirit, which he often called “religiosity without religion.”

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This is not to say that Buber had no influence on personal/interpersonal psychology in the twentieth century. He did. See for example Rob Anderson and Kenneth N. Cissna, The Martin Buber - Carl Rogers Dialog: a New Transcript with Commentary (State University of New York Press, 1997) and, by the same authors, “Theorizing about Dialogic Moments: The Buber-Rogers Position and Postmodern Themes,” Communication Theory, 1998, 1, 8, 63-104. The dialog itself happened in 1957 and was discussed for years after. Both Buber and Rogers agreed to the fleetingness of I-You, even in relationships as intimate as the “one-on-one” dialog that is psychotherapy. Both also agreed that mutuality did not imply equality between therapist and patient. Today, books numbering in the hundreds propound “the dialogical view,” and all owe their thinking to Buber. Now compare this http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/would-you-want-therapy-from-acomputerized-psychologist/371552/ .

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Walter Kaufman’s Prologue to I and Thou makes the same point (op.. cit., p 16). Most people cannot bear to encounter animals at feedlots and slaughterhouses: “facilities” whose physical locations, tellingly, are very hard to find.


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108

Buber did not want a future saturated by I-You relations, much less a future governed by them, as I have noted several times. Modern institutions and technological arrangements are so complex that civility among strangers—a certain coolness, impartiality, and instrumentality—is absolutely necessary. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with engineering as an activity or an attitude: I-It is not ipso-facto unethical or amoral. The “life of the spirit” simply means being open to the irruption of I-You anywhere in the midst of I-It. It means making a world of places, spaces, institutions, and customs in which I-You is always possible, even encouraged. As I will explore in Part Two, the life of the spirit charges “relational architecture” in particular (a) with making rooms and buildings and streets, etc., that promote I-You human relations, and (b) making rooms and buildings and streets, etc., that themselves stand in I-You relation to each other, to the extent that they can, and so offer us a model. This does not involve taking down all the walls between rooms, or fusing multiple buildings into one super-building, any more than IYou attitudes between humans requires melding two people into one. In fact, quite the contrary.

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For evidence that having a best friend at work makes one more productive, see Tom Rath, Vital Friendship: People You Can’t Afford to Live Without (Gallup Press, 2006). I-You in service of I-It? Or IYou simulated?

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As Sherry Turkle has studied for decades now, the world is slowly and drastically being altered by digital access to each other, and most recently by ubiquitous smartphone access to “social media” as well as one-on-one voice contact from anywhere to anywhere. Certainly, patterns of attention are changing from attending to the larger environment and the people there, to attending to the screen in the palm of one’s hand and to the voice in the space of one’s head. How can the environment not be neglected? What lacks attention withers. Indeed, the worse the physical environment becomes the greater is the temptation to escape from it via the portal that is one’s own mobile device. The very prevalence of smartphones is a critique of what our environment has become. Certainly, “social media” via mobile devices reflects a yearning for tribal village life, which architecture provides ever less of. Village life, after all, was paced by spatial encounters with familiar others at significant locations at knowable frequencies, which in turn required vibrant public spaces and frequent festival days: places to wait, mingle, look, find, be bored, and be in company. It was all rather inefficient. 111

This is not to propound that relating to animals, plants, objects, God, or abstractions in a personal way should be a substitute for relating to humans that way, especially at crucial, early stages in life. Close mother-child relationships are especially essential to mental health, but so too are brother-sister, husband-wife and other loving relationships, which can in some degree substitute for mother-child ones. What seems, here, like a digression is not. In their article “Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction: Loneliness and Perceived Agency in Gadgets, Gods, and Greyhounds” (Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 2 [Feb., 2008], pp. 114-120), Nicholas Epley and his co-authors conclude that people who are socially isolated (or who expect to be isolated soon) are especially sensitive to (i) the “life” of anthropomorphic artifacts, (ii) the “humanity” of pets, and (iii) the realness of a personal God. These three sensitivities, they argue, go together in lonely people. The compatibility of Epley et. al.’s finding with Buber’s theology is striking and unnoted. Epley’s purpose is to prove (once again) that religion, superstition, and animism all have the same to-betranscended roots. Their article concludes by wondering whether the converse would follow, i.e., that popular, well-connected people are more likely to think of those outside their circle as not-human, and by implication, think of artworks as mere objects, of animals as machines, and of God as an “unnecessary hypothesis” (pace Pascal) or totally impersonal Force. Epley et. al. do not test this corollary hypothesis. In their bestselling book Connected (Little Brown & Company, 2009, pp. 243–7), Nicholas Kristakis and James Fowler cite Epley et. al. favorably, and suggest that orthodox believers are apt see God as a human-like social agent too precisely because they are either recently bereaved or chronically peripheral to their society’s social networks. Such people are consoled, Kristakis and Fowler suggest, by the thought


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that they have access to God, the One Agent who, because He knows everybody, is centrally located in all the world’s social networks. If you have God’s ear, after all, you are not alone. Nor are you without power, since He, not you, knows the whole Network. It all fits nicely. Setting aside the fact that Epley’s measures of social isolation were self-reported, temporary, and primed (i.e., subjects were experimentally manipulated into feeling momentarily disconnected and isolated), the trouble is that both Epley et. al. and Kristakis and Fowler seem unable to think non-I-It-ly about the topic. Where Buber, looking at the same findings, would argue that God is social connection of a certain sort (i.e., ethical I-You connection), or that God is properly seen in or through (if not as) I-You relationships, these authors insist on lumping “gadget animism” (their dismissive term) together with the love of animals and religious faith as solaces for loners and losers rather than existentially-heroic rebellions against the actual meaninglessness of world. Their argument is a variant on Marx’s “opiate of the masses” critique of religion, except here “the masses” do not have the comfort of each other. The need for I-You-ness is real for everyone, and people who get too little of it from people are more likely to look for it in pets, plants, things, books, art, sports, and ideas. Such people are neither losers nor loners, however. Nor are they bereaved or think they are about to be. They may just be temperamentally shy people and/or average people surrounded by too many manipulative and/or robotic coworkers and friends. Indeed, they may be unusually strong and creative people looking for genuine I-You-ness in a human world full of its simulations. Nor does it hurt Buber’s rendition of faith to observe, as Kristakis and Fowler do, that the growth of evangelical churches in suburban America owes almost nothing to their “spirituality” in theological, Christological terms, and almost everything to how effectively they provide young families (usually just moved into the neighborhood) with large, high-trust, face-to-face, apparently I-You social networks. The danger facing these young families is falling victim to the pretenders who tend to congregate there. 112

Here is this idea’s spiritual counterpart, in the Buddhist view:

In order to be intimate with others, we need first to be intimate with ourselves. In the latest episode of Tricycle Talks, contributing editor Amy Gross speaks with Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, Abbot of the Village Zendo in New York City, on how to cultivate compassion for ourselves through honest reflection, breaking down any sort of “fixed self-identity,” and living in the present moment. Once we develop this compassion for ourselves, Enkyo says, we start to realize the lack of distinction between self and other, which ultimately leads to wisdom and compassionate action. (http://www.tricycle.com/blog/tricycle-talks-roshi-pat-enkyo-oharagetting-intimate). 113

It also ties in with the “mechanicological” I-It view: one must have components—parts—in order to have assemblies that will be “greater than the sum of their parts” (like molecules, machines, corporations, armies, or society…), with the difference, of course, from individualism or solipsism, that assemblies are usually organized to maximize the survival and happiness of the whole, not the survival or happiness (or evolution) of every, or any, individual part. 114

Michael S. A. Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Michael S. A. Graziano and Sabine Kastner, “Human Consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis,” Cognitive Neuroscience, 2011, 2 (2), 98-133, which is a discussion paper with commentaries and a reply. My account over the next few pages does not do justice to the thoroughness with which Graziano surveys the neurobiological literature to make his argument. As perhaps befits a scientist, however, Graziano makes no use of the philosophers who have wrestled with the problem of consciousness’s origins in relationship to oneself as a mapping, or reiteration, of one’s relationships to others. For example, as Hazel E. Barnes noted in her introduction to Being and


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Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre challenged Descartes’ cogito on the grounds that my thinking, and my awareness of my thinking are two different mental processes, with only the latter delivering consciousness. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Buber, and many others owe this line of thinking to Hegel’s discussion of lordship and bondage in Phenomenology of the Spirit (transl. J. B. Baille, 2009, Digireads edition, p. 86ff)—specifically, the way both need each other to be anything to themselves. 115

Discussion of this capability is often found under the rubric of “theory of mind.” For an overview see http://www.iep.utm.edu/theomind/, or this TED talk by Rebecca Saxe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOCUH7TxHRI. Up to the age of four, children do not lay down memories in the way they will later, which is why it’s so hard to remember one’s own babyhood. The connection between this fact, consciousness, and “theory of mind” is unclear. There is also a related literature on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which is a neurologically based disorder among whose symptoms is an inability to see things from another person’s (or animal’s or thing’s) point of view, the inability to understand metaphors, problems resonating with others’ emotions (laughing with, crying with), and an insensitivity to animistic language. 116

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1961 [1945]), transl. Colin Smith, cited by Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 5. In “The Child’s Relation With Others,” which is Chapter 4 in his The Primacy of Perception (Northwestern University Press, 1964), Merleau-Ponty comes close to Graziano’s point when he writes that before the age of three, the ego, the I, scarcely exists until it “doubles itself with an ego in the eyes of the other” (p. 153, his emphasis). MerleauPonty also recognized the importance of body-to-body contact for the child’s formation of self, as well as adult identity-maintenance and well-being. Graziano places these moments deeper in the evolutionary neurophysiology: circuits that not only give us “I,” the social being, but the I am—the sense of being—at all. Wrote Theodore Adorno: “People know what they want because they know what other people want.” Said Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Other men are the lenses through which we read our own minds.” 117

Michael S. A. Graziano, God, Soul, Mind, Brain (Kindle edition, 2011), 62. Graziano is not the first to understand that our understanding of ourselves is premised on our understanding of others. See for example R. E. Nisbett and T. Wilson, “Human Inference: strategies and shortcomings of social judgement,” Psychological Review, 84(1), 231–259, and P. Carruthers, The Opacity of Mind: an integrative theory of self-knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 118

See for example Giulio Tononi, “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto,” Biological Bulletin, 215, 216–242, December 2008. Modern, neuroscience-informed philosophy of mind is so vast a topic that I cannot begin to do it justice in these pages. I am happy to have found a respectable thread in it that serves.

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See George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). See also Kenneth Gergen, “The Social Construction of Self Knowledge” in T. Mischel (ed.) The Self: Psychological and Philosophical Issues (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), Wolfgang Prinz, “Emerging selves: representational foundations of subjectivity,” in Consciousness and Cognition, 12, 512-528, 2003. As is well known, Freud attributed the superego to society and social-relational norms, but not the id, which is wholly rooted in biology and nature, and not the ego, which strives to reconcile id and superego. No one who holds that being-in-(essentially)-social-relationship is prerequisite to individual consciousness would think this phenomenon—this conditionality—goes down to the “bonds” between atoms in molecules, say, or to purely mathematical “relationships,” as in y = F(x). In water, oxygen’s relationship to hydrogen is not “bigamous.” (Friedrich Engels did think social relationships went all the way down to atoms.)


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“There is a crucial difference,“ writes Alf Hornborg (2006, op cit. p. 29), “between representing relations between people as if they were relations between things (Marxian fetishism), and experiencing relations to things as if they were relations to people (animism). The former is an ideological illusion underpinning capitalist political economy, the latter a condition of phenomenological resonance.” I will cite this passage again in the main text. 120

One of the aims of Zen Buddhism is to transcend one’s small-s self. True story: once, after a lecture on the topic at Yale University (I was a Zen enthusiast as a graduate student), I asked the visiting Japanese Zen Roshi (master) who gave the lecture: “How can I get rid of my self when in everyday life people keep acting as though I have a self by asking questions like: ‘what do you think, Michael?’, ‘what did you decide, Michael?’, ‘what do you prefer?’, ‘how do you feel?’?” “Meditate as I might,” I said to the Roshi, “it seems to me that others insist on creating and sustaining a self for ‘me’ to have for them.” The translation took a while, during which time the master nodded many times. Then he smiled at me directly and said: “Yes, it is very difficult.” The self-creation and self-awareness arise through social interaction and subside only in its absence. Society requires not just the machinery of selfhood (drivers licenses, signatures, bank accounts…) but the behaviors of selfhood too (self-preservation, opinion-holding, preference-having, promise-keeping, grade-making, personal pride, memorability, personality, and so on). Zen’s fondness for long hours of meditation, for simple labor, for silence and solitude, Zen’s cultivation of the natural and the spontaneous in settings “cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown” with every still-necessary social exchange cut as short as possible, is the consequence of wanting to weaken the processes of self creation—of ego-making—at their source. Graziano shows how deep-seated the neural machinery is that Zen tries to starve; also, how close-topathological Zen’s goal is of “acting without acting.” The Zen ideal is to feel like an animal—like a heron or lion, all unselfconscious grace and capability—and yet to behave like a refined, moral human being. How can that be done? The trick was (and remains) this: to stay within the ethical bounds given by Buddhism (or Confucianism or Christianity or any long-tested environing ethical system) completely and without second thought, and then to confine one’s spontaneity, one’s exercise of freedom, to what micro-scale activities remain—walking, sweeping, cooking, eating, gardening, painting, sleeping. The way you peel potatoes is individual self-expression enough. This is why, at its beginning as a spiritual movement circa 1100 A.D., Zen Buddhism was only for the mature, that is, for people (mainly men) who had been civilized by decades of social life and who no longer had familial or social obligations to fulfill. Retirees. To this day, Zen offers no ethical precepts of its own, and no resources for making new ones. Traditional story: Zen master Hui-Neng was passing through the monastery’s vegetable garden with a disciple when suddenly a rabbit darted away, frightened. Asked the disciple: “Why did the rabbit run away?” Replied Hui-neng: “Because I like to eat meat!” (Zen monks, of course, are vegetarians). 121

Some readers, reading of “brains in vats, given nutrition…and sensory inputs,” may be put in mind of the difficulties of children raised in front of TV’s and other screens. These difficulties are not just sociability ones; they are also ontological ones, i.e., doubts about the weight of their own existence, their own effectiveness, and the reality of others. Certainly, there is more to selfhood in media than amalgamating the traces of our activity on the Internet into single, software versions of ourselves capable of answering questions in natural language. For this idea, see Martine Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality (New York: Macmillan, 2014). To see I-You-ness between humans and robots struggling to come into being, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/10/japanese-robot-asimo-welcome-our-robotoverlords_n_6840326.html, and Notes 83 and 87 above. Almost all philosophers today, humanist and post-humanist, argue contra Turing that physical embodiment and a capacity for action in the world that was not only symbolic (i.e. via language) would be essential to constituting even an approximation to a human or animal intelligence. For a useful


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overview, see for example N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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Graziano uses the term “attention schema” rather than “pattern of attention.” Consider with what precision we (and many other animals) can detect the direction of the gaze of another animal, and on what miniscule data: the relative size of the whites of the eyes to left and right of the iris at a range of fifty feet (plus head direction, of course). “Monitoring someone else’s gaze is at the heart of social perception,” Graziano writes. “It allows us to guess at whether someone is listening to us, noticing us, attending to that other person or that passing car, aware of this or that object. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then a neuronal machine for monitoring gaze direction goes a long way toward computing a model of someone else’s soul.” GSMB 99. 123

Graziano and Kastner, 2011, op. cit. p. 99: A commonly overlooked…component of social perception is spatial localization. Social perception is not merely about constructing a model of the thoughts and emotions of another person, but also about binding those mental attributes to a location. We do not merely reconstruct that Bill believes this, feels that, and is aware of the other, but we perceive those mental attributes as localized within and emanating from Bill. (T)hrough the use of the social perceptual machinery, we (also) assign the property of awareness to a location within ourselves.

Graziano is especially interested therefore in ventriloquism. Might young children’s attributing of consciousness (and will) to toys be an essential stage of development, a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny? For a window onto recent research about human infants’ ability to track the intentionality of others, including animated geometrical shapes, see J. K. Hamlin et. al., “Social evaluation by preverbal infants,” Nature, Vol. 450, November 2007, pp. 557-559. Another neuroscientist building on the second person perspective is Vittorio Gallese. See his 2014 article, “Bodily selves in relation: embodied simulation as second person perspective on intersubjectivity,” Philosphical Transaction of the Royal Society, B, 369: 20130177. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0177. See also, Doris Bischof-Kohler, “Empathy and Self-Recognition in Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Perspective” Emotion Review, Vol 4, No, 1 (January 2012) 40-48. On the notion that consciousness reports on only a small fraction of our thinking and feeling, see Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Harvard University Press/Belknap, 2002). Freudian “repression” is the least of it. And indeed, it seemed that Freud already held Graziano’s consciousness-as-a-module view. According to philosopher David Livingstone Smith (“Freud the philosopher,” Aeon online journal, August 10, 2017): Most descriptions of psychoanalytic theory claim that Freud held that there are two kinds of thinking: conscious thinking and unconscious thinking. Furthermore, psychologists often claim that they embrace a cognitive conception of the unconscious mind, in contrast to Freud’s view that the unconscious mind is chock-full of instinctual drives and emotions. However, both these claims are incorrect. Freud believed that all cognitive processes are unconscious. What we call ‘conscious thought’ is just the brain’s way of displaying the output of unconscious cognitive processing to itself. To use a familiar analogy, cognitive processes are like the central processor of a computer, and consciousness is like the monitor where the outputs from the processor are displayed. And as far as the psychologists’ claim about the ‘cognitive unconscious’ goes, Freud explicitly repudiated the idea that emotions and instinctual drives can be unconscious. In his view, all cognitive processes are unconscious, and all unconscious mental processes are cognitive.


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The idea that human cognition involves the formation of mental models that can be “played with” is neither Graziano’s nor mine, but has been part of cognitive science and AI theory since Kenneth Craik’s The Nature of Explanation (1943) and Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1987). 125

Certainly, the great apes are capable of this. See Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014) esp. pp 24-26. Primatologist Frans de Waal reports male chimpanzees selectively revealing their erections to females while at the same time hiding them from dominant males (only when the latter are visible), this by strategically placing a hand to one side of the groin area. He reports also a chimp turning his nervously-grimacing face away from a dominant male, manipulating it with his hands to remove the grimace, and then turning back to show his nowunperturbed visage. Changing one’s voice to sound bigger is common; as are exaggerated expressions of suffering (like downed soccer players), and attempts at ventriloquism. See his Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among the Apes (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). As for whether and how animals are conscious and have feelings, and trends in thinking about this issue, see Alex Halberstadt “Zoo Animals and Their Discontents,” New York Times Magazine, July 3, 2014, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/zoo-animals-and-their-discontents.html. Learning by imitation is common among primates in the wild, and with that a form of cultural transmission of new ideas and techniques. See, for an intro, Catherine Brahic, “Chimps spotted playing copycat in the wild,” New Scientist, October 4, 2014, p. 19. On what human culture owes to the company of animals, see Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (University of Georgia Press, 1983 [Viking 1978]). 126

I say “on-the-spot” because many species have evolved predator-deceiving coloration and behavior presumably over many generations. Only some primates, and perhaps dogs and wolves, are able to misdirect the attention of another animal at will and with a degree of improvisation. Among animals, social and not, sincerity is the rule. It can be argued that language itself evolved as an acoustic, attentiondirecting “technology” whose first use was deceiving others (with, for example, issuing false alarms or making meretricious status displays). See Note 112 above. On certain animals’ capacities for flexible deception, see Daniel Cossins, “The Impersonators,” New Scientist, May 2, 2015, 41-43 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0262407915302682) 127 “

Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7, NIV Bible. 128

Perhaps Buber should have called it the “emergence point.” Be this as it may, this is not the religious sense Graziano himself makes of his theory. Rather like Feuerbach, Graziano sees God (and gods) as entities created by the human mind’s tendency to see purpose everywhere, to assume an invisible locus for that purposiveness’s origin, and then to feel regard-able by that locus, even able to influence its purposes. “God,” for Graciano and most scientists, is our social-neuronal machinery overshooting its truth-grounded function. Cf. Note 86 above. 129

I had to add “(also)” to the previous sentence because Buber was committed to portraying God as traditionally (i.e. as Biblically) as he could whenever he could, i.e., as that unfathomable entity of limitless power, knowledge, and wisdom who was also the Creator of the universe. Buber was sensitive to audience. The everyday miracle he wanted to herald, however, was that this awesome God—this very same One— could be glimpsed in every genuine I-You encounter with another being. Neither the Grand Canyon nor the starry skies would do. It’s worth noting that Buber would spend years after Ich und Du translating the Hebrew Bible into German with Franz Rosenzweig. The project was completed only in 1961. In Buber’s hands, Graciano’s “I


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am because you are,” becomes “I am because You are,” and thence “I am because God is.” Nowhere to my knowledge does Buber say, as the Bible does in many ways after Genesis 5:7, “I am because God is” and not mean “because God created the universe first (or also).” But this, I believe, is the implication.

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I take this to be Levinas’s point too. For an exploration of this view and its precedents in religious philosophy, see my God Is the Good We Do (op. cit.) or, at article-length, “Another Word on ‘God and the Twenty-First Century’,” Tikkun Magazine, 26, 2, 2011, http://mbenedikt.com/another-word-on-godand-the.pdf. See also Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little Brown & Company, 2009) and Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 2nd Edition (New York, Routledge 2001). For a recent expression of the view that interpersonal relations have political consequences, see Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013). 131

Here Buber would argue that it benefits us to practice a religion nonetheless (i.e., regardless of our theological beliefs) because the religious life, embedded as it is in a very long history of place, language, and consanguinity, is centrally concerned with the how of how we live, with the what of what we say, and the why of what we do. There is a reason, Buber would remind us, that the language of religion resonates so much more deeply than the secular language of philosophy does, or of the state, on the occasions of birth, marriage, and death. Both of these languages seem leaden and abstract by comparison, even when striving to be poetic. Why? Because the resonance—the eloquence—of religious language has to do with how old religion is, how rich in metaphor, how repetitive, musical, and concerned with correctness it is, grown in the humus of ancient narratives and allegories. It has also to do with the fact that religious thought addresses itself to social relations and moral effects through the emotions rather than through reason. Faith does not want your mind. Faith wants your heart. Science, on the other hand, eschews the heart, especially when its subject is “the heart,” i.e. the emotions. Ironically, when it is about the stars, emotion is perfectly in order in science. Astrophysics, at least as it is presented to the public, is riddled with quasi-religious and emotional sentiment. Did you know, for example, that stars are born, and die? Did you know that we are made of “the same stuff as stars?” That what pre-existed the Big Bang we Cannot Know. That Dark Energy permeates the universe. Venus is the “dazzling morning star,” while the moon’s “dark side” is illuminated by the earth’s “ghostly glow.” Listen to any episode of Stardate (http://www.stardate.org). Nature is marvelous. Really? 132

On beauty, see Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999). “Beauty is goodness written into matter” is how Alain de Botton explains Islamic beliefs about esthetics in his video “A Perfect Home – Part Two,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaL8S7vRA2s, 9:50. He sites 11th century philosopher Ibn Sina: “God is at the source of every beautiful thing” (10:32)

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Depths open up to view. What, for example, is the significance of my awareness (when it happens) of the fact that I am seeing you see me with (or without) your being aware that you are seeing me see you? “Perceiving others perceiving” is no doubt a critical step in neural evolution (as George Berkeley said: “To be is to be perceived”). But it does not imply that others are perceiving you in particular, much less that others are perceiving you perceiving them (perceiving you...) etc., etc. Let two people encounter each other, however, and a corridor of endless, darkening reflections fans opens, one that might be logically questionable (‘infinite regresses’ are not preferred by philosophers), but that might be essential to the IYou attitude, characterized as it is by one person’s being open to the “fullness of being” of the other. That fullness-of-being surely contains the other’s perception of you perceiving them, in at least one round of reciprocation if not two. And it contains in trace or memory all the other people the other person is connected to, not just you. So, in a Buberian encounter, what stops infinite fanning out, infinite radiation, until every person on earth stands in front of you and not just the one standing in front of you? Two things. First: a natural fading away, as in facing mirrors, which is a function of our own, limited, information-processing


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capacities, and second: It-ness. It-ness marks the place in the corridor of reflections at which the image’s consciousness is finally denied, disbelieved, refused possibility: first consciousness of their consciousness of you, next, consciousness of their consciousness of the world, then, consciousness as a possibility for them, and, finally, consciousness as a possibility for oneself. (“I was so drunk last night. What did I do?”) What else, other than denial of consciousness, makes it possible, cognitively as well as ethically, to treat each other as embodiments of rules and roles (as father, officer, boss, teacher) rather than as people-infull? What else makes it more ethical to eat potatoes rather than fish, and fish rather than pork? Why do we conceal the location of abattoirs? Distance lends It-ness to the view. And every framing. A second consideration. “I think therefore I am,” wrote Descartes. If knowing or being aware that I am thinking is what Descartes actually meant, then the circuitry Graziano speaks of is what Descartes was identifying, and “the Cogito” (as philosophers call it), “I think therefore I am,” becomes equivalent both to “I think because you are” and to “I am because you are,” or to “you are, therefore I must be.” That’s when Buber’s “two-fold attitude” comes into play and gives us the two “primary words” I-It and I-You. And a third consideration. Graziano’s theory can also be directed to better understanding the benefits of Buddhist meditation, which exercises our skill at self-observation, or what is sometimes called mindfulness. The claim is this: that when skill at self-observation is combined with Buddhist ethical teachings and a life lived among other human beings more or less ordinarily, it leads not to solipsism but to improved skill at other-observation, which is necessary for the further development of natural (today we would say “mirror neuron”) compassion. This is no doubt true. Graziano’s suggestion is that otherobservation ontogenetically, phylogenetically, and neurologically enables self-observation. In his view, Knowing the Other becomes the way to Know Thyself, as Socrates advised. Is it not a short step to treat the other the way you wish they would treat you? For a window onto a view of “transcendent architecture (TA)” by leading thinkers in the field that engages none of the above considerations, see Nader Ardalan, Julio Bermudez, Prem Chandavarkar, Alison Snyder, and Phillip Tabb, “Transcendent Architecture: A Pilot Study of Works, Conditions & Practices,” at http://www.acsforum.org/symposium2014/papers/ARDALAN-ET-AL.pdf . 134

Graziano and Kastner (2011, op. cit.), 98.