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Where is philosophy? This is not a typo. What is philosophy is a common question. But rarely do we wonder where it is, physically speaking. Imagine a philosopher at work. Where does this scene take place?

Philosophy is typically depicted as a solitary activity conducted in remote natural settings — a hut next to a fjord, a clearing in the middle of a forest, a cave on the slope of a mountain, or, these days, a rocking chair on a porch in a quaint college town. Certainly, some great thinkers (Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Nietzsche among them) were responsible for promoting this bucolic ethos. But even a superficial familiarity with the history of Western philosophy reveals that the city is virtually a necessary condition for the possibility of doing theoretical work, which may then be carried on in other, less hectic places.

Ideas prevail not because of their immutable logic but because they are embedded in the social environment at hand.

It might be enough to mention the critical importance of Athens to the birth of ancient philosophy with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; or the way that modern philosophy got its start in Bacon’s London, Descartes’s Paris and Spinoza’s Amsterdam; or the deep roots of American pragmatism in New York, where William James spent the first years of his life as a curious child, and John Dewey spent the last years of his life as a revered professor.

These biographical notes are not inconsequential, especially if we acknowledge one of the most basic pragmatist beliefs: Ideas do not operate in a void. They respond to and depend on human beings in particular situations. Ideas prevail not because of their immutable logic but because they are embedded in the social environment at hand.

To speak of “urban philosophy,” then, is a bit misleading, or redundant. Isn’t philosophy always already urban through and through? Can it even help being so? Urban philosophy suggests that there are kinds of philosophy that are not urban, or that it is itself a branch within the larger field.

When a need to refer to two things as if they were one emerges, we often invent amalgams — words like frenemies or Brangelina. Perhaps the term metrosophy can better express this bond between the metropolitan and philosophical experiences. It is meant to help us see cities not only as hubs of economic activities but also as fountains of abstract meditations.

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Curiously, modern philosophy was less than enthusiastic about the rise of the modern city.

In the 18th century, as Paris was beginning to take shape as the capital of the world, it also nurtured the person who would prove to be its most impassioned critic. Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrived there as a young man with no money, status, education, or reputation to speak of. But he soon began to garner invitations to some of the most fashionable salons, where he befriended some of the most notable intellectuals of his generation. It was during the few years he lived in Paris that his philosophical star rose.

With Rousseau’s fame also came his deep aversion to the city: “The manner of living in Paris amidst people of pretensions was so little to my liking. The cabals of men of letters, their little candor in their writings, and the air of importance they gave themselves in the world, were so odious to me. I found so little mildness, openness of heart, and frankness in the intercourse even of my friends. Disgusted with this life of tumult, I began ardently to wish to reside in the country.”

In a letter to Denis Diderot, which put an end to their friendship, Rousseau concludes: “It is in the country that men learn how to love and serve humanity; all they learn in cities is to despise it.”

Everyone knew to whom Diderot was referring when he later wrote that “only the wicked lives alone.” Yet it was Rousseau who had the final word, long after both men were dead. Diderot and his fellow French philosophers, who were inclined to cherish their burgeoning city, eventually lost the intellectual battle to the German Romantics.

Spearheaded by the philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried Herder, the Romantics continued Rousseau’s legacy by treating the countryside as the Eden that would save humanity from the Gehenna of urban existence. The solitary genius was viewed as the savior of the masses. “Is not a man better than a town?” Ralph Waldo Emerson could then ask his American readers across the Atlantic. He seems undeterred by his question, which, from the standpoint of metrosophy, is rather absurd.

What was at stake in this line of thought was more than an aesthetic choice concerning the setting for some 19th-century books and artworks, or even an ethical choice concerning the preferred residence of a few privileged intellectuals. The real issue was political.

Among thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Hegel, the critique of the city did not simply go hand in hand with an infatuation with the pastoral. Very often the idea championed in opposition to urbanism was nationalism. The modern sovereign state was all the philosophical rage, while the metropolis was often treated as no more than a collateral damage of the Industrial Revolution.

The nation-state was a new idea when Rousseau, Hegel, and their cohorts rationalized its existence and predicted its ascent. Today, the entire earth is parceled out according to their ideology. But this sweeping transformation of theory into reality is far from being a happy one. Just recall the rivers of blood that flow whenever a border or a people stands in the way of this unstoppable political project.

It is interesting to notice how Rousseau’s two personas — the contrarian who detested the city and everything it stood for, and the authoritarian who promoted the social contract and the general will that is embodied in a powerful sovereign — have continued to inform the way modern society thinks and acts. It is also important to find ways to reevaluate these two distinct sets of values.

The difference between the logic of the city and that of the state is difficult to pinpoint. Though geographically the city is usually just a splotch on the nation’s map, philosophically the two are worlds apart. For example, notice how the modern nation-state operates as shell and shield. It does not only include and protect within its borders certain elements (citizens), but also excludes and forsakes others (refugees).

By contrast, the city tends to work as a zone that facilitates associations and interactions between many elements (ideas, commodities, skills, persons, interests, fortunes, desires, sensibilities, ideologies, stupidities). At least in theory, the city is not a container for lives but their meeting point, which is not to be confused with a melting pot. (A meeting point permits the differences of the parties involved. A melting pot turns them all into a single stew.)

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Many philosophers give the city the cold shoulder not only on political grounds. The more hard-to-shake reason is epistemological. Following Kant, they prefer to think universally, or globally, rather than locally. Their job, they assume, is to decode the principles of human reason, which are not supposed to change from one place to another.

Some modern philosophers even believe, after Descartes, that thought is divorced from extension, that minds don’t have a particular location in space. Though Descartes came to trust that he thought, where it was that he thought remained a matter of the greatest uncertainty. So philosophical thinking prefers to play it safe by staying detached from the place in which it finds itself.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

In a letter from 1631 Descartes could therefore write: “In this large town everyone but myself is engaged in trade, and hence is so attentive to his own profit that I could live here all my life without ever being noticed by a soul.” But does the fact that your surroundings fail to notice you give you the license to fail to notice your surroundings?

As late as the 1970s, Hannah Arendt could sit in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and ask: “Where are we when we think?” Her answer: “Nowhere.” And this was written after brilliant works in anthropology and critical theory (including those of her good friend Walter Benjamin) have demonstrated the viability of thinking locally.

Although the act of thinking and the object of thinking were severed from the idea of place, the marriage between traditional philosophy and the city runs deep, and Arendt would be the first to acknowledge this in her studies of ancient Greece. Already in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” the titular character reproaches Socrates for not exploring the world outside the walls of Athens. Wouldn’t it be nice to pack a bag and go hiking? Instead of a measured reply, the original philosopher famously snaps: “Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me! Only the people in the city can do that!”

This is one way to make sense of the bitter quarrel Socrates’ posse had with the sophists. To its citizens, living in the Greek polis felt like a protracted lesson that took an entire lifetime to complete. You never really graduate from the university of the street. The philosophers got irritated by the sophists, these private tutors or traveling salesmen who were so cocksure of their wisdom that they promised to teach the intricate complexity of urban life to their paying students in seven easy steps.

It didn’t take long before Plato calcified his teacher’s chance encounters in the Athenian marketplace into pages in a book and institutionalized his legacy through a venerable academy. From then on, philosophy for the most part gradually retreated into princely courts, monastic cloisters, and ivory towers.

The exile of philosophy from the city continues to haunt our urban thought to this day. It tends to crop up in the most unexpected places, far away from professional academic settings. For example it was succinctly expressed in the early 20th century by Henry Miller, apropos of his Brooklyn childhood: “In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”

Even today, a city like present-day New York has no urgent need of Plato’s sanitized Socrates. Because the city is, in itself, a very efficient Socratic device. It is a ruthless, ironic, but also benevolent machine set to strip its inhabitants of their sense of certainty, self-importance, and claim to ultimate knowledge.

David Kishik is an assistant professor of philosophy at Emerson College. His most recent book is “The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City.”



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