Today’s text is excerpted from a Symposium speech c. 2021 or 2022. The content has been modified only slightly to protect the identity of those involved in this project.
Introduction to the Problem of Cities: The Opening Speech
To my friends, with whom I have shared many dinners over Symposium, they will know: Long have I said “Bring me a brick and I will build you a city.” Today, I propose, we should become the architects of good thought and critics of the life better lived. We may do that by engaging with meaningful ideas about what that city, our state, should look like. For this reason, but not for this reason alone—for we also gather to pour libations—have we congregated together here, in my home, to honor the tradition of Symposium.
But first, let us remember the reason for Symposium:
“We gather, in good company, to share in food and drink and thought, so that we may share what we have, while we have it, and make the Promise of Symposium to share with those who do not, while they do not.”
I invite you now to turn with me to the State (which is the term I’ll use to stand in—in English—for polis or ‘city’ or urbs). But to begin, at the outset of any project, we must set parameters for what we wish to accomplish, so as not to get off track, discussing the nature of tables and metaphysics when we are interested in ethics, and so on. For this Symposium, I propose the following, which is not my proposal, but instead an ancient one, with a long and storied history in the West:
Socrates, speaking for Plato with Allan Bloom as our translator, says in Book II:
“There is, we say, justice of one man; and there is, surely, justice of a whole city too?”
Adeimantus replies:
“Certainly”
Socrates asks:
“Is a city more important than one man?”
Adeimantus answers:
“Yes [for] it is bigger” (or greater than)
Socrates answers him:
“So then, perhaps there would be more justice in the bigger and it would be easier to
observe closely. If you want, first we’ll investigate what justice is like in the cities.
Then we’ll also go on to consider it in individuals, considering the likeness of the
bigger in the idea of the littler” (where we know ‘idéa’ to be something like ‘essenece
or ‘Form.’)
So, Plato is interested in ‘justice’ in the individual or personae and in the city, or polis, to get at what is in the smaller from the larger. I argue that while both are interesting, and the purposes of the remainder of this text, hopefully interrogating, it is the city that is more fascinating as we all live in the era of global networks and global centralization, and since 2020, it is estimated that more of the world’s population lives in cities and in the future, it will be the city, not the rural, that dominates the world-stage.
So, then, we arrive at this speech’s question: “What is it that makes a city a good place to live?”
I will reveal my proposal later, but I will introduce my division of the functions of the State; then our speakers will each tackle one and we will do right by the tradition of logoi at Symposium.
The speeches that night were exceptionally good, and I will not relay them here as I hope to form my own conclusion about the arguments that I draw on in this series of posts. The functions of state will receive their own full post in the coming week, as that is the groundwork and foundation on which those have taken up the problem of polis will deal in. That is the Idéa of the ideal city that I mentioned in the first post in this series; that a ideal city is one which is best organized to promote good living and good life.
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