[MUSIC PLAYING]
K. MICHAEL HAYS: In our consideration of the architectural imagination,
there were two primary points.
First of all, the imagination is productive.
It constructs schema that-- from sense data--
that it presents to the understanding.
So the imagination, which is part of the subjective realm, is productive.
The imagination doesn't actually produce knowledge.
It doesn't deal with concepts,
but it sets us on the path to knowledge.
Now, what we have there is a very powerful model
for aesthetic experience.
But there's a serious omission,
and that is, on this model, architecture doesn't have a history.
Aesthetics doesn't have a history.
We owe the conceptualization and the model for a philosophy of art history
to the German idealist philosopher Hegel.
In aesthetic experience, we have to distinguish between aesthetic pleasure,
let's say, and truth.
Hegel is after a model where art deals with truth--
that art discloses truths about the world
by giving those truths appearance.
And art in its highest vocation is an art in which the truth of beings, that
is to say of individuals, but also being as a whole--
that is the unconditioned, the absolute, the totality
in which that being opens itself up.
It appears,
and its historical existence is made manifest through art.
Now, another way of saying this is that cultures learn about themselves
through their art.
They learn about their objectives.
They learn about how they function.
Cultures represent themselves-- to themselves through their art.
And what Hegel imagines is that all the cultures through time
and all of the epochs of art can be assembled together
in this giant global mechanism.
Hegel is a very systematic philosopher,
and he wants a total system, a mechanism that
gathers up all the cultures and all the epochs of art
into a single, coherent, unified system.
Now, the idea that architecture should be thought of as having a history
is itself a historical accomplishment.
Hegel writing in the 19th century, earlier philosophers
writing in the 18th century--
they gave us the concept that architecture has a history.
Before that, we had manuals of building;
we had treatises that told us theories about building;
we had biographies of artists.
But we didn't have history as such.
I mean, why should it be that architecture is in the flux of history?
I mean, why don't we just have buildings,
and we refine how we make those buildings,
and we keep making the same kind of building
until we get the building as best that it can be?
Why, instead of that, should we think that architecture has to progress,
that architecture has to change?
But more important, how can it be that architecture, and art generally,
is involved with thought?
Not how can we think about architecture, but how can architecture
be thought-like?
What that involves-- and we owe this also to Hegel--
is a very special relationship of subject to object.
In our earlier model, the subject was dominant.
The subject is productive.
The imagination is constructing its reality.
Hegel, who is concerned with the truth of art, wants the object to push back.
He wants the subject to react to the object, the subject
being the categories, the interpretations, the way
we are in the world.
He wants the subjective realm to react back to the object,
so that the object takes on a more primary role
and, therefore, the subject can know truths
about the object, truths about the world,
because the subject makes those truths appear.