The Eternal Present. Vol. II: The Beginnings of Architecture, by Siegfried Giedion. Pantheon, $12.50 We got our civilization, as Euclid got his geometry, by making, millenia ago, certain assumptions: that rooms and pictures should be rectangular and the walls of buildings vertical; that flautist and orator alike should arrange their meanings sequentially; that structure implies symmetry and symmetry an axis; that nature is uniform; that there is great virtue in the circle.
To convince us, against our intense psychic resistance, that such familiar themes are in fact assumptions and not divine laws, has been the work of four centuries’ revolutionaries, from Kepler, say, to Wittgenstein. A set of assumptions specifies a universe, and most of us switch today without effort from cosmos to cosmos according to the activity at hand. Euclid’s geometry orders our building lots, but Einstein’s our cyclotrons. We predict eclipses by assuming, with Kepler, that the earth goes around the sun, and navigate the Queen Mary by assuming, with Ptolemy, that the sun goes around the earth. We know which way is up when we are rope-walkers; we no longer ask when we are astronauts.
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