Architectural Body

Introduction

Having observed near and far how the body moves through its surroundings, having thought lengthily of still other ways to surround it, and having built a few tactically posed surroundings , we now notice ourselves to have been tracing an architectural body, or at least a landscape for one. We see architecture not merely as that which stands by and gets linked up with, as structures that life lightly avails itself of in passing; not passive, not passively merely hanging around to provide shelter or monumentality, architecture as we newly conceive it actively participates in life and death matters. Architecture, in anyone’s de¤nition of it, exists primarily to be at the service of the body. The question arises as to how to be most fully at the service of the body. Who would not want to live in a world built to serve the body to the nth degree? The question arises as to what the body is in the ¤rst place. Serving the body to the nth degree will include as much as the body bargains for and more. It is mandated for the body that it fend off its own demise, and an architecture that would be unstinting toward the body, that would slavishly deliver up to the body all that it would seem to need, must take this as its mandate too. Once people realize that the human race has not yet availed itself of its greatest tool for learning how not to die, they will cease being defeatists in the matter. Although our species, like every other species, has a characteristic architecture that serves its members well by increasing their chances of survival, it is far from having an architecture that could rede¤ne life. The architecture we speak of in this book is within our species’ reach. It will be a way to undo, loosening to widen and re-cast, Introduction the concept of person. People will not be defeatists about a condition—the human condition—about which something can be done. The procedural architecture outlined in the pages that follow will function both as spur to and mainstay of an all-out effort to alter the untenable human lot. Who or what are we as this species? Puzzle creatures to ourselves , we are visitations of inexplicability. What is in fact the case? We must surely go to all possible lengths to ¤nd out what we exist in regard to. I want to ¤nd out, and so do I, what indeed is the case for those who sniff around this planet as us. We, the members of this species, have thus far failed to come up with a set of explanatory statements that could be universally countenanced as the de¤nitive ¤guring out of ourselves . To ¤gure ourselves out, to ¤nd out the operative basis of what moves as us and what we ¤nd ¤t to accord value to, we need to learn what makes the world tick. But whenever someone attempts to break open the world to see what makes it tick, to ¤nd operative hidden treasures, the world closes ranks as more world and that’s it. Figuring ourselves out must include determining what coheres as sentience. But sentience would seem constitutionally unable to determine either how it came about or what coheres as it; sentience always delivers more sentience as world. What are the particles and what are the waves of sentience? We cannot get beyond the world to¤nd out what operates as it, because it is of our making; it is us. And if, because we can never distance ourselves enough from ourselves to assess the whole in its particulars, because the world always gets in our way as still more world, should we not, then, judge as correct Wittgenstein’s assertion that “The value of the world must lie outside of the world”? The world, all that comes our way as world, is contingent on we know not what, on what try as we might to get at we never can; breaking through to the we know not what upon which xii INTRODUCTION the lived-world is contingent so that we may know its operative basis would seem impossible. But Wittgenstein’s assertion lacks the most important of axiological anchors. It is vague in regard to the assigner of values: For precisely whom must the value of the world lie outside the world? Those being led to contemplate an estranged value are most likely the only ones considering...