Convivimus Ergo Sumus 1

There appear to have been three periods when the city was significant to Western philosophy. Proper sense of the works of Plato and Aristotle cannot be made without understanding the polis, although neither buildings nor urban topography ² play a prominent role in their writings. ³ Conversely, Vitruvius is quite reticent about civic life, preferring to concentrate meaning in architectural physiognomy, through decorum, proportion, and the Orders. Augustine’s De civitate dei is the last (theological) consideration of reality for which the city is important until the reflections on the republican city that begin to appear contemporary with Lorenzetti’s frescoes in the Sala dei Nove, Siena (Salutati, Bruni to Machiavelli). Once past Descartes’ advocacy of tabula rasa ⁴ and Rousseau’s tree, around which huts gathered, instituting the passage from the benign state of nature to the malign state of society, ⁵ the third period where the city re-enters philosophical or quasi-philosophical writing includes Constant, Kierkegaard, Engels, Weber, Simmel, and Benjamin. Between Constant and Benjamin, the European city becomes a metropolis, and writing about it transforms from the essay to the compilation of fragments that are Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and One-Way Street. This is also the period during which Heidegger records the recovery of Aristotle, foundational for phenomenological hermeneutics. ⁶ Despite Heidegger’s evident commitment to concreteness, to particular situations as the basis for involvement in ‘world’, cities seem less relevant to his philosophy than does the conception of Greco-German inhabitation of the Danube developed in his lectures on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’. ⁷