Architecture, Liberty and Civic Order: Architectural Theories from Vitruvius to Jefferson and Beyond

摘要

It is useful to begin this review of Carroll William Westfall's recent defense of the classical tradition as the wellspring of all that is "good, beautiful and true" in architecture by invoking a distinction the ancient Stoics made between truth (aletbeia) and the true (to alethes). For the Stoics, coherence was the touchstone of truth, and truth was a body, "a collection of several elements consisting in knowledge," equivalent to a certain degree to reality itself1. A body, they explained, was not a finger, a toe, an ear, an elbow, or an eye, but all of these together. The true, on the other hand, was hardly real at all. As a judgment or expression that was either true or false, the true was not a body. "The sky is blue," for instance, may be a true statement about some fragment of reality, but as a statement of enduring truth it is incorporeal and without value. The second-century philosopher Sextus Empiricus explained that when a doctor says something false for the good of his patient, or a general relays a false message in order to encourage his men, truth persists, and indeed is enhanced. The doctor's or the general's assertions are not true, of course, but "the true" has no value. Truth does, and this includes not only winning battles and recovering good health but ultimately the entire world order, of which victories and good health are a part. Needless to say, the inherent desirability of its ends made this a view intimately interwoven with the interests of those it served.