The Architecture of Nothingness

Frank Lyons is the architect brother of the late SMN treasurer, Chris Lyons, and has been practising and teaching architecture for over 40 years. This profound philosophical and aesthetic reflection on order, form, content, meaning and beauty takes the reader on a complex journey to reveal parallels between the arts and sciences based on the same mental organisational principles resting ultimately on the structure of the human nervous system. The chapters cover order in nature, science and the arts, the order of content and form, the logic of aesthetics, the aesthetics of meaning, what he calls the order of nothingness and the 'phenomenal gap', and the nature of beauty as reconciliation. All this entails the relationship between the subjective and the objective and the way in which art converts subjectivity into objectivity in terms of form with content. In a broad sense, animals are also architects configuring space and building their own homes. In his discussion of form, Frank introduces the Gestalt, tracing the idea backed to Kant's statement that 'mind imposes a structure on the perceived world in this world is the only one we are capable of perceiving' (p. 79) – I am not sure that Swedenborg would have agreed, and this was indeed a bone of contention between the two men (Kant took Swedenborg seriously, but scurrilously satirised him in Dreams of a Spirit Seer).

The chapter on the logic of aesthetics brings in the work of Suzanne Langer and her distinction between 'presentational thought' characterised by wholeness and represented in art, and discursive thought or reason - words used by art critics to describe their immediate experience. Here Frank could have drawn an interesting parallel with the work of Iain McGilchrist on right and left hemisphere functions. Metaphors are crucial for translation across the arts, including music, where Frank gives a fascinating account of the work of Leonard Bernstein in this respect, comparing this with Frank Lloyd Wright: both make use of similarities and repetition, which Frank illustrates with a number of Lloyd Wright's architectural drawings.

The chapter on meaning argues for its subjectivity, drawing particularly on Wittgenstein and highlighting the paradox of communication, for instance via objects of culture. In the next chapter on the order of nothingness and the 'phenomenal gap', we arrive at the philosophical heart of the book building on Kant and Schopenhauer, with the former's distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal already implied in the quotation above. The noumenal is the inner realm characterised by unity or oneness, while the phenomenal is the outer diversity. The argument is illustrated with a series of constructive charts with a white circle in the middle of a pattern of dark rays. Frank accepts the definition of the noumenon as beyond experience, which put me in mind of the debate between philosophers of mysticism (Robert Forman vs. Steven Katz) about whether it is possible to experience pure awareness. I would argue that it is, as mystics experience unity or nonduality as the Centre or ground of being, which is both everything and nothing - this is not knowledge in a phenomenal sense, but immediate knowing or gnosis. Instead, Frank proposes a model of a phenomenal gap between these two realms, but which is the subtle source of great art. Missing for me in his analysis was Christopher Alexander with his four volume work on the nature of order, and also some reference to sacred geometry and the golden section, which some writers argue underlie our sense of beauty. There is much more to say about this richly textured and subtle work, and readers will find themselves thinking about art, science, beauty and meaning in new ways.