White, S., 2017.

The Greater Part: How intuition forms better worlds

This book is a major output of the AHRC-funded project Equalities of Wellbeing in Philosophy and Architecture. This book explores the surprisingly varied dimensions of this unacknowledged keystone of Spinoza's thought - Ratio. It takes the reader from Spinoza's geometrical diagrams to his concepts of mind, body, the emotions, and the cosmos. It shows how Spinoza's thinking about ratio influences the concept of proportion in Gulliver's Travels, the differential ontology of Deleuze, egalitarian design for wellbeing, and the notion of an affective architecture. My chapter explores connections between Deleuze's expressionist interpretation of Spinoza and a selection of architectural practices attempting to create more inclusive urban environments - involving simultaneous judgements of quantity and quality. This chapter constructs parallels between Deleuze's critique of 'representational thought' and architectural theorist Robin Evans' similar critique of design epistemology as 'picture theory' - in order to set out an alternative expressionist architectural approach.

This chapter was developed from peer reviewed papers presented at the 2015 Daughter of Chaos, Annual Deleuze studies conference, Stockholm and the 2014 Spinoza and Proportion Conference, Aberdeen.