The Contradiction Between Form and Function in Architecture by Hendrix John Shannon;

Author:Hendrix, John Shannon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1128265
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Berkeley

In An Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision in 1709, George Berkeley (1685–1753) asserted that the quality of distance, as in the qualities of space and time for Immanuel Kant, cannot be immediately perceived of itself, but must be a judgment which is learned through an accumulation of sense perceptions in relation to discursive thought. Judgment, according to Berkeley, or acquired understanding, is the product of experience rather than immediate sense perception; it is therefore necessarily the product of memory, of the mnemic residue in perception, the accumulation of which leads to the development of the imagination.

Berkeley wrote in the Fourth Dialogue of the Alciphron, “we perceive distance not immediately but by mediation of a sign, which has no likeness to it or necessary connection with it, but only suggests it from repeated experience, as words do things” (Berkeley 1963: §8). The sign is an abstraction from a particular, a product of discursive reason, which is itself a product of intelligibles. For Berkeley, in the same way that signs or signifiers, that is, words, in language immediately and unconsciously produce ideas or meanings, signs in the act of perception, such as distance relationships, immediately and unconsciously produce ideas and judgments about the perceived sensible world, in a process inaccessible to discursive reason, but which can be understood by discursive reason through the illumination of intuition. For Berkeley, perception functions as a language of signs.

The sign is constructed by reason in intellect, and has no necessary relation to the sense perception of the object, in a contradiction between form and function. As Berkeley explains in the New Theory of Vision, we are “exceedingly prone to imagine those things which are perceived only by the mediation of others to be themselves the immediate objects of sight” (Berkeley 1963: §66), just as in language we experience the immediate recognition of an idea, and not the mechanism by which the word conveys the idea. When we perceive an object, we are unaware that what we are perceiving is the sensible form of the object, which has no immediate connection to the object itself, and that the sensible form is formed in relation to the intelligible form, the idea of the form of the object, by the inaccessible nous or intuition. In the Alciphron, Berkeley asks, “may we not suppose that men, not resting in but overlooking the immediate and proper objects of sight as in their own nature of small moment, carry their attention onward to the very thing signified?” (Berkeley 1963: §12).

It is the idea of the object as given by intellect which is immediately grasped, the intelligible form, rather than the image itself of the object (the sensible form), which is imprinted on memory as a seal or sign. The objects themselves, according to Berkeley, “are not seen, but only suggested and apprehended by means of the proper objects of sight, which alone are seen.” The proper object of sight is the seal or sign, the imprint or mnemic residue, the intelligible form, which are constructed in intellect and language, memory and imagination.

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