Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment

5. Philosophy

5 PhiLosoPhy Philosophers have distinguished the nuances of affective tonalities with the utmost finesse: pleasure,sensuality,happiness,satisfaction.Every great philosopher has focused on one such quality and given it a particular meaning. Before delving further, we might ask ourselves if the philosophical breakdown of what we have referred to with a single“positive” word—enjoyment—doesn’t contain an error of some sort, that of philosophy itself. Spinoza inquired into the secret and meaning of joy. It arises from understanding, the highest form, that which grasps the (divine) substance in its unity and totality and that consequently is eternalized the moment it rises to this sublime degree of understanding, the “intellectual gaudium”that does not transcend the body and space but comprises them as such and accepts them. Nature (causal), which is grasped in the human being, consists of knowledge. Spinoza’s theory of joy never condescends to a preoccupation with the particularity of the body and space, the humble need for shelter or a physical expression of the totality of art. Satisfaction? Hegel determined its essential qualities, and it assumes a primordial function in his system. A need is satisfied when it encounters the object that corresponds to it, which it destroys while preserving . It disappears momentarily and returns if the need is genuine. The needs of humans living in rationally organized societies are never isolated ; they constitute a system, the system of needs, that appears as a subsystem in the social totality.The State, which actualizes this totality, is composed of subsystems; it contains them and holds them within itself.The objects that satisfy needs are the result of socially divided labor. To the system of needs there corresponds a system of labor: each need 60 Philosophy 61 corresponds to the labor that produces the object intended to satisfy that need.The system of needs and the system of labor adjust to one another like two parts of the State machine (the total system, philosophical and political).Outof theinterplayof objects(producedandconsumed),needs (satisfied and, therefore, momentarily abolished, then resurgent), and labor (executed according to a rigorous finality), life results, the internal mobility of a society. It goes without saying that needs and labor change, that they have a history and participate in history. Moreover, architecture is part of the whole; it satisfies needs in practice, which does not prevent it from also beinganart(satisfyingverysubtleneeds)and,inthissense,beingincluded in an aesthetics. But where does happiness fit in? There is little doubt that it was with Aristotle that philosophical thought attempted most forcefully to understand it. For Aristotle, the essence of the human being finds its fulfillment in happiness, which consists in living according to reason (Logos) within the perfect framework of the polis.The nature of man, the political animal, expands and is fulfilled within this frame. The Greek city assured its citizen-inhabitants of the exercise of all their activities and faculties: the body in the stadium,the intellect in the agora, the heart and the family home, thought in the temple of the city’s divinity . Aggression and combativeness were to be found there as well, and the taste for the agon, or the warfare of violent games. Out of these activities, each of which was exercised in its own time and place, arose a plenitude. This is the teaching of the Nicomachean Ethics.1 In this prestigious analysis, and even though Aristotle doesn’t insist on this point, which he finds obvious, the harmony among times, places, actions, and objects is part of the rational unity of the polis. Enjoyment? The concept, in the broad sense, seems modern. It arises in medieval thought and the idea of the“fruitio”(from frui, fructus) of an object, especially an object created for such use by nature. Intentional activity has general scope. The medieval meaning persists in the willfully archaic language of the law. For example, jurists distinguish enjoyment and usufruct from an ownership right (a person can enjoy an asset without possessing it, while someone else may have“bare ownership” of that asset).The term refers,therefore,to the relationship of need and even desire to the object, emphasizing the act rather than the result, as we find in Hegel (satisfaction, momentary disappearance of a tendency). 62 Philosophy No longer limited to legal language, the term is found today in everyday use. However, its absolute sense (to enjoy, to obtain pleasure) connotes an egocentric tendency...