Le Corbusier's heartbeat Mgr. Andrej Gogora, PhD. Institute of Philosophy of Slovak Academy of Sciences – Bratislava – Slovakia Abstract This paper proposes to investigate the occurrence of emotions in the modern urbanism of Le Corbusier. It assumes that emotional factors are present not solely in urban conditions and in everyday life of citizens (it's damn truth), but also in urban theories and projects. Is modern urbanism really so pure and rational? Either reason or emotion? The hypothesis is a statement that in Le Corbusier's modern rationality, we can find essential elements of emotional and nonrational flows. We are talking about emotion as well as various noises, deviations and transitions. Keywords: Le Corbusier, modern urbanism, emotion, noise Introduction Anyone who is concerned with Le Corbusier's theory of urbanism has inevitably encountered with the problem of objectivity, truth, clarity, strictness and so on. This concepts conditioned his approach to the industrial city and shaped his proposal to its modernistic transformation. Much has been written about it, critics have created a doubt around it and have furiously disputed the legitimacy of this kind of urbanism. Nevertheless, we are still very fascinated with the human ability to cope with the mess by means of simple operations: „In other words, the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions“ 1 What are the losses and gains of this unique effort? What about the emotions? Sleepy man But first, let's illustrate the fundamental source of this streamlined demand. French philosopher Michel Serres in his book The Parasites (1980) depicted the story of a sleepy man. The householder of residence can't sleep because of rats that are, night after night, running around in the attic. They are making annoying noise and the landlord just wants to relax, he is becoming more and more irritable. One night, he set a house on fire, he send it all to the hell. But he knew in advance that he'll build a brand new house, where rats will never get into and he won't be disturbed. He raised the dwelling very quickly and on the new foundations, then he retired to rest. In the dark, however, the rats have returned. Actually, they have already penetrated through the masonry during the construction. Desperate creator of the new order beat his brains. How it's possible? Behaviour of this miserable character markedly reminds of philosophical undertaking of René Descartes and the birth of the modern scientific rudiments. In the Discourse of Method (1637) we find everything that was in the story of a sleepy man. In the first chapter Descartes complained of mistakes and doubts in the knowledge, he took note of slight defects, superstitiousness and 1 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, p. 24.