The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City

Sharon M. Meagher, Samantha Noll, Joseph S. Biehl, Sharon M. Meagher, Samantha Noll, Joseph S. Biehl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317400639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics:

• Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities

• Modern and Contemporary Philosophical Theories of the City

• Urban Aesthetics

• Urban Politics

• Citizenship

• Urban Environments and the Creation/Destruction of Place.

The concluding section, Urban Engagements, contains interviews with philosophers discussing their engagement with students and the wider public on issues and initiatives including experiential learning, civic and community engagement, disability rights and access, environmental degradation, professional diversity, social justice, and globalization.

Essential reading for students and researchers in environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and political philosophy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is also a useful resource for those in related fields, such as geography, urban studies, sociology, and political science.

Part I
Urban philosophies

Section 1
Historical philosophical engagements with cities

1
Plato’s city-soul analogy

The slow train to ordinary virtue

Nathan Nicol

Now, the members of this small group have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and at the same time they’ve also seen the madness of the majority and realized, in a word, that hardly anyone acts sanely in public affairs and that there is no ally with whom they might go to the aid of justice and survive, that instead they’d perish before they could profit either their city or their friends and be useless both to themselves and to others, just like a man who has fallen among wild animals and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficiently strong to oppose the general savagery alone. Taking all this into account, they lead a quiet life and do their own work. Thus, like someone who takes refuge under a little wall from a storm of dust or hail driven by the wind, the philosopher – seeing others filled with lawlessness – is satisfied if he can depart from it with good hope, blameless and content.

Well, that’s no small thing for him to have accomplished before departing.

But it isn’t the greatest either, since he didn’t chance upon a constitution that suits him. Under a suitable one, his own growth will be fuller, and he’ll save the community as well as himself.

Republic (496e–497a)

Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is that last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart, than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set of men and women a sensibility of extraordinary merit.

R. Emerson, Experience (p. 304)

Introduction: from Socrates’s mission to Plato’s Republic

At risk of pedantry, we might begin by noting that “polis” is not captured perfectly by “city” or “state” (Cartledge 2000: 17–20). That I render it by “city” in most of the rest of this chapter is a reflection partly of convenience, but also of the fact that Plato is here our main guide: and as he comes to it, the polis is the city of Athens, and especially Athens as Socrates’s stomping grounds. In his account of Socrates’s trial, Plato is at pains to emphasize that Socrates would not accept a punishment that required him to recuse himself to a quiet life:

As long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good friend, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city [polis] with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” … I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young and old, citizen and stranger, but more my fellow citizens – more by as much as you are closer to me in kinship.

(Apology 29d–30a)¹

Driving the bravado here is a conception of philosophy as essentially a public activity, as entailing a commitment to participating in the polis in such a way as to insist on the priority of goods of the soul over other more external, conventional goods; and there is also a parallel conception of the city as needing guidance from philosophy. If by the time we arrive at Plato’s Kallipolis in his Republic (politeia), the polis looks more like a state than a city, we will finesse the snag by sticking with Kallipolis. For now, “polis” as “city” will suffice.

Although this chapter has to be highly selective, I try to focus on a cluster of issues that are most distinctive of philosophical thinking about the city in the ancient world, and so in particular on how Plato moves from Socrates’s mission to Athens to his own philosopher-kings in Kallipolis, where they are called “saviors” and “helpers” (463b). How does Plato pry into and redraw the boundaries of Socrates’s conception of philosophy and the city as thoroughly interdependent, and how does this lead to the conclusion that “until philosophers rule as kings … cities will have no rest from evils” (473c–d)? The key is Plato’s city-soul analogy, or so I suggest in what follows.

In brief, my aims here are twofold. First and foremost, I try to sketch the main contours of Plato’s city-soul analogy, how this analogy grounds and shapes his overarching argument in his Republic. This analogy is where he spells out the conceptual underpinnings of Socrates’s mission and thus a conception of the city as essentially tied to the flourishing of its inhabitants: a conception of the city as what would be commensurate to our capacities for reciprocal flourishing (496c–497a, quoted above, cf. 369b–c, 420b). Second, I turn to explore several interpretations of Plato’s analogy by focusing on two prominent objections that have been raised against it. I will not here attempt to adjudicate between the interpretations, except in the more general sense of suggesting that I side with those who find Plato’s analogy more or less deeply plausible.

A sketch of Plato’s analogy of city and soul

Plato has Socrates introduce the city-soul analogy in Book 2, as the first positive step forward in his response to the overarching problem of the Republic.

The investigation we’re undertaking is not an easy one but requires keen eyesight. Therefore, since we aren’t clever people, we should adopt the method of investigation that we’d use if, lacking keen eyesight, we were told to read small letters from a distance and then noticed that the same letters existed elsewhere in a larger size and on a larger surface. We’d consider it a godsend, I think, to be allowed to read the larger ones first and then to examine the smaller ones, to see whether they really are the same.

That’s certainly true, said Adeimantus, but how is this case similar to our investigation of justice?

I’ll tell you. We say, don’t we, that there is justice of a single man and also the justice of the whole city?

Certainly.

And a city is larger than a single man?

It is larger.

Perhaps, then, there is more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to learn what it is. So, if you’re willing, let’s first find out what sort of thing justice is in a city and afterwards look for it in the individual, observing the ways in which the smaller is similar to the larger.

(368c–369a)

Let us notice three points about this introduction. First, the turn to develop the analogy is explicitly in the service of addressing the overarching ethical inquiry: the more political dimension is invoked in order to shed light on the consideration of the individual, of how and why it is always in one’s best interest to be just. In other words, since Thrasymachus’s tirade in Book 1, duly revitalized by Glaucon and Adeimantus in Book 2, the main question has been whether it is one’s interest to be just: Thrasymachus maintains that “justice is another’s good but one’s own loss,” while Socrates has much the opposite view (392b, cf. 348b, 357a–367e). Socrates is now framing the question in terms of the analogy of city and soul. Second, the terms “larger” and “smaller” seem to circumvent the more pressing difference between justice in the city and that in the soul, which is that the salient workings of the city are open to the eye, whereas those of the individual soul are invisible. The basic idea is in any case to extrapolate from the manifest case of the city to the more obscure one of the individual. Third, however, it is important to recognize that the analogy is put forward as a working hypothesis, which must yet be tested in the dialectical fires of the later developments (e.g., 434d, quoted below; Blössner 2007: 346, pace Barnes 2012: 2). In short, Socrates is not insisting on the analogy but suggesting it as a sort of heuristic which will have the effect of acting as a control on the account(s) of justice in the city and in the soul: each will have to be tested against the other.

In Book 4 Socrates returns to the analogy, and enlarges its scope so that it significantly shapes the argument:

Let’s complete the present inquiry. We thought that, if we first tried to observe justice in some larger thing that possessed it, this would make it easier to observe in a single individual. We agreed that this larger thing is a city, and so we established the best city we could, knowing well that justice would be in one that was good. So, let’s apply what has come to light in the city to an individual, and if it is accepted there, all will be well. But if something different is found in the individual, then we must go back and test that on the city. And if we do this, and compare them side by side, we might well make justice light up as if we were rubbing fire-sticks together.

(434d–435a)

Socrates moves to transpose the results of the discussion of justice in the city to an account of justice in a person. A first result is that justice in the city turns out to be a matter of each of the parts “doing its own work and not meddling with what isn’t its own” (433a–b). In sum, there are three classes in Kallipolis (rulers, auxiliaries, and workers), and justice consists in the philosopher-kings ruling, the auxiliaries keeping the peace, and the workers producing the materials for survival and the economy more generally (433a–434d). Accordingly, the bulk of the rest of Book 4 is devoted to the derivation of the “parts of the soul.” Again, in sum, it emerges that there are three parts to the soul (reason, spirit, and appetite), and justice here, too, is spelled out in terms of each doing its proper work: reason theorizes and rules, spirit provides the motivational infrastructure, and desire acquiesces in its place rather than pressing its own agenda (443d).² The just person thus harmonizes the parts of his soul like three limiting notes in a musical scale (high, middle, low), and so cultivates and secures the “inner harmony,” which reflects the unity that is the greatest good in Kallipolis (462a–d). Hence, what began in Book 2 as a similarity in respect of being capable of being just has by the end of Book 4 been enlarged to encompass a correspondence of parts and structure, of hierarchy and harmony. In the case of the city, it is a natural intuition that the community benefits from the just behavior of its members, earlier suggested by Glaucon (358e–359b). By conceiving of the soul as itself also a community of diverse parts, Socrates plants the seeds to transfer that intuition to the soul: here, too, the whole benefits from the just behavior of its respective members, and suffers from their “civil war,” to borrow one of Plato’s favorite ways of putting it (547a, 554d, 556e, 559e).

While in Books 5–7 the city-soul analogy waits in wings, in Books 8 and 9 it returns to center stage. By contrast with the “natural hierarchy” we have just seen outlined in Book 4, Socrates here works through a series of transformations from one kind of constitutional and psychological type to another. These transformations trace out one and another falling off of the natural hierarchy, and so produce injustice and conflict. The prevailing pattern is that the ascendancy of one constitutional type is of a piece with the strength of the particular aspirations of the corresponding soul part(s). As Plato conceives of them, each of the parts of the soul has its own distinctive set of aspirations, its own agenda that it would set for the whole soul: reason strives for truth and the good of the whole soul, spirit for honor and prestige, and appetite for pleasure (580d–581e). In Kallipolis, then, the “natural hierarchy” is grounded in the domination, if that is the right word, of the rational part over the others: again, this is the model of the philosopher-king. When we turn in the next section to consider the critical reception of Plato’s analogy, we will return to examine more closely how exactly reason rules, and what this entails for appetite and the workers.

For now, let us review four other models that Socrates sets out: these are the next transformations of the constitutional, psychological types leading from Book 8 into 9. In the interests of space and simplicity, and since Socrates presents each type of person as the epitome of its analogous constitutional type more generally (576c, e.g.), we will focus on the persons, the epitomes of the type.

1 The Timocratic Person (547a–550b)

Socrates describes the timocratic person as dominated by his spirited part, and so as driven by “the love of victory and the love of honor” (548c). The timocrat is the first remove from the philosopher, and results from the struggle between reason, appetite, and spirit:

So he’s pulled by both. His father nourishes the rational part of his soul and makes it grow; the others nourish the spirited and appetitive parts. Because he isn’t a bad man by nature but keeps bad company, when he’s pulled in these two ways, he settles in the middle and surrenders the rule over himself to the middle part – the victory-loving and spirited part – and becomes a proud and honor-loving man.

(550b)

The timocrat strikes a compromise between dueling parties. On the one hand, he allows spirit to prevail as the dominant force in his soul, and so adopts the values more peculiar to that part, those of victory and honor. This is a significant step removed from the ideal, where reason is in charge. On the other hand, he has not let appetite rule him. To draw on terms that Socrates will soon set out (554a, 558d–559e, 571a7–572b9), the suggestion is that the timocrat has moderated both his necessary and his unnecessary desires. In short, he is not the picture of true virtue, but he remains a far cry from fully unmoored from virtue.

2 The Oligarchic Person (550c–555a)

The next transformation is to the oligarchic person, where appetite begins to take control of the other parts of the soul, and this is manifest in the priority given to the love of money. Socrates hypothesizes that an oligarchic person emerges from the misfortunes of his timocratic father, who lost both position and property:

The son sees all this, suffers from it, loses his property, and … immediately drives from the throne of his own soul the honor-loving and spirited part that ruled there. Humbled by poverty, he turns greedily to making money, and, little by little, saving and working, he amasses property. Don’t you think that this person would establish his appetitive and money-making part on the throne, setting it up as a great king within himself… . He makes the rational and spirited parts sit on the ground beneath appetite … reducing them to slaves. He won’t allow the first to reason about or examine anything except how a little money can be made into great wealth. And he won’t allow the second to value or admire anything but wealth and wealthy people or to have any ambition other than the acquisition of wealth or whatever might contribute to getting it.

(553b–d)

Socrates refers to appetite as “the money-loving” part “because such appetites are most easily satisfied by means of money” (580e), but appetite’s drive for money appears plainly to go beyond its instrumental value: part of what Socrates describes in the emerg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: transforming philosophy and the city
• Part I Urban philosophies
• Part II Philosophical engagement with urban issues
• Index