I guess that’s what I’m saying, though with some more or less obvious caveats. One is that visiting metaphysical la la land (conjecture, imagination, bat-shit crazy ideas of any and all kinds…) is a highly valuable tool, as it modifies our experience of the here and now. We can afford to be playful. Some of the most amazing man-made structures in the world were made to “defy gravity”. The great astronomer Sir William Herschel strongly believed in complex, intelligent, organized life on the moon. I think fear of metaphysics can lead to degradation of this world. People have believed in Platonic forms, God, heaven, multiple universes, the existence of ideas, disembodied minds, ghosts, spirits, zombies, etc. etc. etc. It’s not the la la land aspect of all this that I have a problem with. It’s the idea that the truth of the matter matters. It’s the idea that there is a separate reality that we, for some unknown reason, must figure out and conform to. There are different nuances to the word “metaphysics”, which I am sorting through here a bit. A prominent architect, Louis Kahn, famously asked “what does a brick want to be”?..
[i]“To express is to drive.
And when you want to give something presence,
you have to consult nature.
And there is where design comes in.
And if you think of brick, for instance,
and you say to brick,
“What do you want brick?”
And brick says to you
“I like an arch.”
And if you say to brick
“Look, arches are expensive,
and I can use a concrete lintel over you.
What do you think of that?”
“Brick?”
Brick says:
“… I like an arch”[/i]
…which doesn’t mean, of course, that the deconstructivist architect is being mean to bricks.
Was Kahn discovering forms when he designed structures? Was he inventing forms? Does the answer even matter at all? If not, what does that mean for the realist outlook? What do we do with our realist tendencies?
Is this idea that there are true and false correspondences to “reality” really all that important? Is it required at all? Maybe it is. I’m just asking.
EDIT: Changed “concrete lentil” to “concrete lintel”.