Architecture and the Will
On music, order, and the art we live inside
By Juan Carlos Portuese
The Music Lesson, 1665 by Johannes Vermeer. Public domain.
Every person has experienced, countless times, the incomprehensible and seemingly illogical magic of music. Through music we have lived every emotional state we know: joy, anger, sadness, fear, and let's admit, the occasional disgust. Music has that special characteristic of engaging us in a way that differs from the rest of our experience of reality in this world. It connects us to our own being. It makes us move to its rhythm, sing with its harmony, feel tense and uncomfortable, and then release the tension and leave us lighter than we were before. Music is our first connection to existence, the heartbeat of our mother while we are still in the womb. It remains the connecting tissue throughout our lives, a password to the memory we did not know we kept. Music embeds itself into our daily commutes, our exercising routines, the background of our study sessions. It quietly shapes us: our immune systems, our memory, and the way our brains hold the reality of our existence.
But what is it about music that a sequence of tones, with no subject, no image, no narrative, produces in us something that goes beyond measurable experience, something closer to recognition? The recognition that there is something out there, something that drives us and makes us move, and more importantly, that directs us towards a place that feels known.
Music does something evidently different from the other arts. It does not represent anything that we encounter in our physical realm. It differs from painting, sculpture or poetry, and instead, it seems to be a representation of itself. And yet, music touches us profoundly across many styles, genres, and cultures.
Almost completely deaf late in life, Beethoven wrote that music "is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy" (Beethoven, in von Arnim 1810). He composed by feeling vibrations through the floor of his apartment, and described his own work as the working-out of an inner necessity he could neither resist nor explain.
Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher whose work would shape much of modern thought, ranked music as the highest form of art, followed by poetry, sculpture, painting, and at the bottom, architecture. For Schopenhauer, this ranking was not a matter of taste but a matter of metaphysics. Music, he believed, did something none of the other arts could do.
The World as Will and Representation
In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant had argued that the world we perceive is not the world as it truly is. Behind the version of reality we encounter, there is something he called the thing-in-itself, the world prior to our perception of it. But this thing-in-itself, for Kant, is unreachable. We are forever sealed within our own mode of access to reality.
Schopenhauer accepted this, and then he made a distinct move.
He divided the world in two. On one side, the world as we encounter it, the world of objects, events, space, time, and causality. He called this the world as representation. Everything we see, hear, touch, or think about belongs to this side. The trees we walk past are trees as we are equipped to perceive them. The space we move through is space as our minds construct it. The other people we meet are, to us, representations, however vivid, however intimate. We are walking through a kind of dream we cannot quite wake from, except that this dream is the only world we have.
Schopenhauer then noticed something. There is one object in the world that we do not encounter only from the outside. Our own body. We see our hand, like we see any other object, but we also feel it from within. We do not simply observe the hand moving; we will it to move, and we feel the movement happen. The body is the one place where the membrane of representation thins, where something other than the perceived world becomes available to us. Through our own body, we have a second access to reality.
What we glimpse through that access, Schopenhauer claimed, is the world as it truly is. He called it the Will. Not the will of a person, not the choices we make, not desire in the everyday sense. The Will is the metaphysical force that drives all of existence. The same force we feel as striving in our own body, the same force that pushes a seed to break through soil, that pulls planets toward each other, that compels animals to hunt and humans to desire, is one continuous, blind, ceaseless drive. It does not aim at anything. It simply pushes existence forward, endlessly, into more existence (Schopenhauer 1818).
This was Schopenhauer's answer to Kant. The thing-in-itself is not unreachable after all. We carry it within us.
From this, the rest of his system follows. If existence is endless striving without final fulfillment, then satisfaction is always provisional. Every desire fulfilled produces another. Every rest is interrupted by new want. Suffering, for Schopenhauer, is the structure of life. Pessimism was his honest reading of metaphysics.
It is in this system that music acquires its extraordinary place. The other arts work within the world of representation. They give us images, scenes, ideas, all of them mediated by our perceiving minds. Music does not. Music has no subject. It does not depict a landscape, tell a story, or render a body in stone. It bypasses representation entirely and reaches us, Schopenhauer believed, as a direct expression of the Will itself. When we listen, we are not perceiving an image of the world. We are in contact with the force that drives the world.
Architecture, for Schopenhauer, sat at the bottom of this hierarchy. Where music expresses the Will directly, architecture is bound to representation in its most stubborn form, because it cannot escape gravity. Mass labours against mass. Stone presses against stone. The arch holds itself up only by the constant struggle of its parts. Architecture, in his reading, was the Will made visible as suffering, the striving force rendered as endless resistance, frozen in stone.
Suffering, Necessity, and the Striving Force
We can feel the Will as a striving force within us; we can perceive it at the macro scale of the Universe, trace it through the infinitude of mathematics, and read it in everything that lives. At the core of the atom, a strong nuclear force holds protons and neutrons tightly together inside the nucleus. Around it, electrons move between specific zones, absorbing or releasing energy, held in place by electromagnetic forces, drawn by their negative charge toward the positively charged centre. We can perceive this striving force even in the smallest unit of life, the cell. The Will is always pushing everything toward endless existence.
Schopenhauer linked reality's endless push toward existence with our insatiable desires, and from that link concluded that suffering is inevitable. Art and asceticism, for him, were the only ways to escape it. Suffering, however, may be better understood through the Buddhist concept of dukkha, which describes the friction inherent in existence. Within dukkha, we find the gap between how things are and how we want them to be. It includes pain, illness, grief, the sense that good things do not last, and a fundamental incompleteness in everything. Because of this, we are constantly wanting things to be different: more, less, or permanent. We cling to people and to states of being, and we are overwhelmed by impermanence and by the absence of a fixed self.
While parts of dukkha are inevitable, the layer we add through craving and resistance is not.
What the concept of dukkha offers is a distinction Schopenhauer's framework lacks: pain is not the same as suffering. Pain is the inevitable friction of being alive. Suffering is what we add through resistance, attachment, and the wish for things to be other than they are. Schopenhauer collapsed these together and concluded that existence is the source of pessimism. Held apart, a different reading becomes possible. The argument here is not Buddhist. It is that the Will may be something else than what Schopenhauer thought it was.
The meaninglessness that Schopenhauer attributed to the Will, its lack of a fixed end, its constant push toward desire, is precisely what gives this life its meaning. It is the ontological drive that sustains existence against nothingness. Hunger, gravity, matter, evolution, and the expansion of the universe are all evidence that being persists.
Over a century before The World as Will and Representation, Baruch Spinoza had written in his Ethics: "The free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life" (Spinoza 1677). The free man, in this case, is not someone seeking escape; freedom is the understanding of necessity. In other words, comprehending that the Will makes everything unfold by necessity allows us to stop resisting existence, and in that, a quiet freedom appears.
Schopenhauer's intuition about the purpose of art was right at its core, but not as a way to escape suffering. Instead, art can be understood as a hopeful passage between the known and the unknown, between the world of representation and the Will.
Logos, Music, and the Relational Order
Behind the Arts
Schopenhauer sees music as ontologically different from the other arts, a direct expression of the Will. He intuits a metaphysical nature in music for its non-representational character, for connecting us directly through a non-conceptual intelligibility, and for operating through relations in time rather than through depiction. He draws a correspondence between musical structure and levels of reality, except that what he sees as structure are superficial elements of the music he was familiar with: bass, harmony, and melody, each given specific relations to the Will. He recognizes something true about the metaphysics of music, but he misses the Logos that stands behind all the arts.
The word Logos comes to us from the Greeks. It is the name we give to what we already feel: that things in the world hold together, that gravity behaves the same way every day, that a melody resolves toward its tonic, that a wall stands. Heraclitus called it the underlying order of the cosmos, the rational principle through which a world of constant change remains coherent. The word has carried different weights in different traditions, but its core meaning has remained: order is real, order is discoverable, and order is what allows force to become meaning.
Where Schopenhauer fails is in elevating music to an ontologically separate category. While it is true that the visual and spatial arts employ modes of representation, their ontology is not, in itself, representational. Representation is a mode of appearance, not a foundation of being.
The underlying structure that gives rise to meaning in all the arts is the same, a relational order that precedes and exceeds representation. Music makes this structure more immediately legible because it is not mediated by depiction, but it does not possess a different ontology. It reveals, more directly, what is already present in all artistic forms.
The Logos in music is evident in its intervals, ratios, overtone series, tonal gravity, the dominant seeking its tonic, the pentatonic scale, chromatic departure and return, and the circle of fifths. Music's language rests on a structure that makes force legible. What music shows us is that the striving force driving existence uses the Logos to form and sustain being.
If this is what the Logos does in music, the question Schopenhauer placed at the bottom of his hierarchy returns. He saw architecture as the Will frozen in stone, weighed down by gravity, unable to escape representation. But if the principle holds, architecture is doing the same work music does, only in a different medium.
The Logos in architecture is evident in proportional systems that govern the relations between parts, in load paths that make gravity legible, in the modulation of light through mass, in the rhythm of openings, in the discipline of thresholds, in the alignment of axes that orient the body in space. As music's structure makes audible force legible, architecture's structure makes physical force legible. A wall holding itself up against gravity is the same act, in stone, as a tonic resolving a chord is in sound. The principle is the same. The medium is different.
Without Logos, the Will is noise. Without the Will, Logos is dead notation. The ontology of music is not the Will, nor is it the Logos in isolation. It is the relation between them.
Architecture in Time and Space
In experiencing music, we begin by hearing tones that set up expectations. Overlaid on these tones, a series of notes harmonically balances the leading melodic line. Soundscapes play with our emotions, producing shifts that move us from joy, to sadness, to tension. At the peak of the tension, in the moment when we feel at the border of covering our ears, the tension is released. We are moved from a precarious state to one in which gravity disappears. The cycle continues. We encounter motifs that, in their repetition, bind us. The tonal colours are like standing with eyes closed in a meadow, wind blowing, each strand of grass touching another, children laughing as they play, birds singing, small animals moving underneath our feet. The song reaches a climax, bringing us to a state of exhilaration before leading us to a fitting conclusion, sometimes filled with satisfaction, sometimes drowned in disappointment.
In the presence of architecture, a Gothic vaulted ceiling pulls our eyes and body upward. Our spine straightens, our shoulders drop back, and we take an involuntary deep breath. We encounter the seeming lightness of the pointed arch transformed into a rib vault. The ribs move our eyes through their continuation in the nave columns, grounding the space, gravitational forces dissipated through the floor that lets us stand under it. We feel small, and at the same time enlarged by the encounter of something that has endured. On the floor, we see patterns of shadow produced by light entering through the high windows. The stories portrayed in the stained glass become a composition of colour, geometry, brightness, and darkness. We become aware of the passing of time. Sadness may emerge. Then, with a sudden movement of clouds outside, a brighter ray of light becomes apparent. We hear the wind crashing against the stone, resisting and diverting its force, holding us in place, safe and protected, free to focus on the purpose of our being in time.
Music organizes the Will through Logos in time, but architecture organizes the Will through Logos in space.
These are not expressions of representational or symbolic experiences; they are moments when the relational order of forces is acting on us bodily, and we are participating in those forces simply by being present.
The Will's Medium
When architecture is conceived and built with the same relational order present in the Logos of music, when forces are enacted, light is mediated, and thresholds are opened to be crossed, architecture acts in the same way music does. Schopenhauer's brilliance was in identifying the Will's presence in our relationship with art, but his error was in thinking that gravity, mass, and structure were the Will's defeat in architecture. Instead, they are the Will's medium. A wall holding itself up is not suffering rendered visible. It is the Logos making the force of gravity legible, exactly as a tonic makes the force of dissonance legible.
Music expresses the Will sonically; architecture embodies it materially. We do not just hear the relational order, we touch it, we are weighed by it, we are sheltered by it, we stand on it.
It is in space that the striving force sits in perfect harmony with order, as an ontological embodiment. Embodiment means that the thing being talked about is present in the body, in the matter, in the actual physical configuration. We move through space, breathe inside it, and return to it. If the Will is the ontological drive that pushes existence forward, then architecture is not merely an art that points to the Will. It is the art that lets us dwell within it.
Inhabitation, Distraction, and Dwelling
In his essay Building Dwelling Thinking, Martin Heidegger tells us that "to dwell means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence" (Heidegger 1971). Dwelling, in this case, is care, belonging, and letting things be. For Heidegger, we dwell first, and therefore we build. We dwell in harmony with nature, culture, and our communities. An architecture that lets us inhabit the Will arises from dwelling and supports it.
Architecture shapes us in a state of distraction. We do not focus on a building the way we focus on a painting. We move through it, we use it, we lean against it, we encounter its light without noticing. The building is shaping us subliminally, through navigation, touch, and proprioception, as much as through what we see. In this, architecture shares a quality with music that it does not share with the other arts. Music can also be experienced in a state of distraction, as when we drive, exercise, study, or as the soundtrack playing in the background during dinner at a restaurant. Music too can shape us through habit and peripheral awareness rather than through focused gaze. This is distinct from painting, sculpture, or poetry, where attention is an absolute requirement.
Architecture, however, has an added layer as an art for the revealing of truth. The order with which it is conceived can enhance our awareness, allowing us to notice, to step away from the world of representation, and to dwell within architecture as the inhabitation of the relational essence of existence. Inhabitation happens whether we notice or not. Awe happens when we notice.
This is not a claim limited to canonical architecture. The palafitos of Lake Sinamaica, on stilts over the water of my own hometown, hold relations that are no less precise than those of a Roman portico. Wood meets water through the discipline of distance. The ground is refused; the dwelling floats above it. The body learns gravity differently in such a place. Carlo Scarpa, working in a different tradition, made every joint, every threshold, every meeting of materials a moment in which the relations between forces became legible. Architecture as the inhabitation of relational ground is not a style. It is a way of building that has appeared in many places and in many centuries, wherever the Logos has been allowed to give the Will a form we can live within.
At the threshold of the Pantheon in Rome, standing within the columns of the portico, before we even experience the dome and its oculus letting a soft but focused light into the mausoleum, architecture is not a shelter, a building, or a container holding us. It is a set of relations to which we belong. It is the articulation of relationships that allows dwelling to occur. It is the condition of existence that allows us to inhabit the Will.
The Art We Live Inside
Architecture's embodiment ultimately places us in the world. Physically, buildings give us a sense of where we are. They mediate between body, ground, and sky. Through their boundaries, they define inside and outside, up and down, public and private. In essence, architecture is a material act that grounds us in the physical reality of the world, in gravity, climate, structure, and construction. Beyond the physical, architecture places us culturally. It defines how we inhabit space in relation to others, through norms, rituals, and shared meaning. Buildings are cultural instruments. They express what we value, how we live, and who we think we are. At its deepest level, architecture connects us to being itself, giving us a sense of belonging and presence in this world. Architecture is about being in and of the world. As Wes Jones would say, "Architecture is built from the stuff of the world." Architecture, in this sense, is the act through which we reconcile our human consciousness with the material conditions of existence.
Music's relationship to time is sequential. A piece begins, unfolds, and ends, and its meaning emerges through that unfolding. Architecture exists differently. Its parts are present all at once. The wall, the threshold, the column, the light through the window, the sound of the room, all of these are available simultaneously. In this sense, architecture is timeless. It does not unfold; it stands.
But architecture also persists across time. The Pantheon has held its relations for almost two thousand years, and the people who have inhabited it have lived their full lives within those relations and then left them for others. The Will does not end with an individual life. It continues, pushing existence forward, taking new forms. Architecture is the art that lets this continuation be felt across generations. We inherit the rooms our ancestors built, and we leave others behind for those who will come. In this, architecture holds something that no other art holds: the relational continuity of human existence over time.
Schopenhauer was correct to point out the suffering present in our lives as a consequence of the Will, and his compassion towards others moved him to use his philosophy to find ways for us to escape it. But compassion is possible not because we share suffering. It is possible because we are constituted, ontologically, by our relations. We are not isolated subjects who happen to encounter other isolated subjects. We exist with each other and with our reality, and compassion is the recognition of that relational ground.
Architecture, when properly conceived, makes that ground inhabitable. Our path away from suffering is not to escape outward or to rise above the world, but to enter it more deeply. Art is one of the ways we enter. Music, in particular, gives us a passage that nothing else gives us, a moment in which the world of representation thins and we are placed in direct contact with the force that drives existence.
We do not perceive the Will when we listen to music. We participate in it.
However, we listen to music, and the music ends. We look at a painting, and we walk away. We read a book, and we close it. But architecture is the art we live inside. We sleep in it, cook in it, give birth in it, mourn in it, pray in it, party in it, study in it, meditate in it, play in it. Even when we are unaware of it, it is shaping how we move, where we pause, how we encounter light, what we hear, what we can and cannot see. Music suspends us inside the Will for the duration of a piece. Architecture does it for the duration of a life.
References
Beethoven, Ludwig van. Quoted in Bettina von Arnim, letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1810.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Building Dwelling Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1818. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969.
Spinoza, Baruch. 1677. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin, 1996.
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