ABSTRACT
The champions of rationalism, such as Descartes and Le Corbusier, seem to have had a contradictory understanding of nature. On the one hand they believed in a natural order that only needed to be discovered by science, an order so perfect it that could be expressed through mathematical relationships. On the other hand, the nature was wild, and needed to be tamed and suppressed by humans. On the one hand, humans were part of the natural world, which was so orderly that it was imagined as a mechanical clock or a machine. On the other hand, humans stood outside this world, which they saw as unpredictable and unruly, including their own body, hoping to conquer it. The notion of an autonomous and rational individual, which emerged in the modern west through a long historical process,1 therefore, had an inherent contradictory limitation: it was part of the nature, but sought mastery over it. In relation to aspects of the material world we often call nature, the result has been a series of challenges to the idea of reason. It was manifest in the power of the body’s conscious feelings and unconscious impulses; and in the power, as well as fragility, of the local and global environments in which cities have been built. These challenges have pushed for a revision of the conventional notion of rationality and for addressing the precarious position of being at once inside and outside the natural world.
