Socrates, awaiting his execution in a prison cell in Athens, tells his protégé this nugget of wisdom: “the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same” (Crito, 48b). The just, the beautiful, and the true are intrinsically linked together, for they take their ideal form in the wholly abstract world of forms. In this essay, I do not seek to argue for the nature of beauty, or for aesthetic characteristics of an objective standard of beauty, but only that the current manner in which aesthetic degradation has permeated into life is subversive to the ends of the polis — namely, it actively works to subvert human flourishing, broadly understood — and must be dealt with in the strongest possible terms. The importance that is attached to this subject arises from a strong sense of architectural exceptionalism and the moral character inherent in architecture and in any sort of grand design.
Lewis Mumford notes in his essay ‘Utopia, The City and The Machine’ the surprising paucity of Plato’s vision for his utopic poleis, especially in the Republic, which is for Mumford “the utopia that is most lacking in any concrete image of the city.”[1] Even in the case of the Laws, Mumford notes, “there is no need to go into Plato’s merger descriptions of the city.”[2] Both Kallipolis and Magnesia are wholly lacking in physical form beyond explanatory principles for the institutions and moral precepts they hold to be true and final for their existence. The aesthetic possibilities of the architect are reduced to naught in the former, it must be observed, because the architect is every bit a generalist the poet is; the same sort of specious reasoning through which Plato finds the will to expel the poets from the city and then censor those which remain amongst the cultural memory of those in the city can also apply to the architect, who claims to know many ‘arts’, and thus does not develop his nature, which is necessarily in a single ‘art’ (Republic 595a–602b). Plato’s general mistrust of the creative spirit is perhaps the only sign we have — he prefers that his poleis are the product of planning by erstwhile philosopher kings, and not the mere mortals that inhabit the underclass, who serve and remain in their stations only in accordance with their belief in the ‘noble lie.’ The question of aesthetic development is hampered, if only because man is condemned to an existence where even the smallest degree of negative liberty is met with suspicion if it is acted upon, even though it may always be in the nominal possession of such individuals who may choose to live in Kallipolis. Magnesia, the city of the Laws, suffers from the same issue, but in another form: Plato, having recognised the error of producing a formal world where man seeks perfection and is wholly infallible, looks instead to a nomocracy, not of the sort that a constitutional polity would seek, but rather a polis of laws and laws alone, where even the smallest action is prescribed by the laws. Perhaps it is of no surprise to the reader that it is by far the longest of the Platonic dialogues. But it is also important to note that both Platonic dialogues that deal with cities, imagined or real, produce objections to aesthetic sensibilities in literature, drama, and poetry only because they have the opportunity to be more abstract in meaning and comprehension than, let’s say, the preamble to each law the Athenian stranger provides. They evoke expressions of sympathy and empathy which subvert the strict hierarchies that Plato seeks to force upon Kallipolis; they evoke strong emotions of other sorts in Magnesia that induce curiosity, another cardinal sin in a city found on blind obedience to the laws. Thus, in either instance, Mumford notes that “the model that seduced him was that of Sparta,”[3] a city that may have rival led and successfully subjugated the Athenians of Plato’s time but left virtually nothing behind. Sparta might have been Plato’s model, but today, almost nothing of it survives.
Thus, it is in Aristotle’s Politics that we find the first inklings of the moral examination of the polis. Mumford admits that “it is Aristotle who considers more definitely the actual structure of the ideal city,” but he still accuses Aristotle of rampant idealism, for “the concept of utopia pervades every page of the Politics.”[4] The question of ideal form aside — Aristotle’s formalism in considering the ideal and corrupted form of each regime is significantly different in scope and intent from Plato’s — we must recognise that the Aristotelian “polis was potentially a work of art.”[5] Mumford only presents Aristotle’s views en passant; for some reason he finds them either unsatisfactory or insufficiently interesting in some form. But this does not take away from the major point, an idea that is increasingly hard to quantify empirically and qualify abstractly, which is the polis as the site of human flourishing. The measure upon which the polis is judged is its “ideal value of human development,” Mumford writes;[6] but there seems to be no further discussion of the importance of aesthetic concerns that this may imply for the philosopher of politics and space. But then, we are tasked with a curious comment:
“Aristotle, even when in the Seventh Book of the Politics he outlines the requirements for an ideal city cut to his own pattern, still has his feet on the earth: he does not hesitate to retain many traditional characteristics, even such accidental ones as the narrow, crooked streets which might help confuse and impede an invading army.”[7]
This is a most curious remark, and warrants an examination of the ideas in Book VII of the Politics, if only in brief, to examine what the original intention of the remark could possibly be:
“For reasons of military security, however, the very reverse is preferable — they should follow the old-fashioned manner, which made it difficult for strangers to make their way out and for assailants to find they in. The two methods of arrangement should accordingly be combined; and this may be done by adopting the system which vine-growers follow in plating their ‘clumps’ of vines. In this way regular planning will be confined to certain sections and districts, and not made to cover the whole of the city. This will conduce at once to security and to elegance.” — Politics, VII.11, 1330b29–31.
Thus, we are faced with the Aristotelian principle in action. The entirety of VII.11 is dedicated to general precepts of city planning, but there is only one maxim that ought to suit the Aristotelian mind best (and why precisely it is pervasively utopic and simultaneously the work of someone who “still has his feet on the earth” is left to the unexplained passage of a few hundred words of no linked discussion). It is my contention that Mumford gravely misunderstood the Aristotelian schema, especially when it came to the principles of spatial awareness and allocation in the Politics. The question we face here is simple: that the Politics is either the luscious fruit of a utopic imagination or the embodiment of an underwhelming imagination which cannot transcend the present into the eternal. But the ruling principle is a reflection of virtue as Aristotle understands it: moderation; neither an excess nor a deficiency. If different regimes have different preferences — “a citadel suits oligarchies and monarchies; a level plain suits democracy; neither suits an aristocracy, for which a number of strong places is preferable” (VII.11, 1330b17–22) — it is only because the principle which governs the regime, especially the central question of who rules and and is to be ruled in turn (1275a31–33), is of significant important to ancient political thought. For a regime that has as its central principle the subjugation of the many under the permanent rule of a few — monarchies and oligarchies — has its corollary in the pure form of the natural aristocracy, which is the rule of the best, the aristoi, and not the rule of the richest, the oligarchs. They require not citadels, but only strong places; the former are acquisitions and representations of force, while the latter are the rewards of positions in virtue of excellence. It is unclear as to whether the landscape or the regime comes first, and seeing as though Book V of the Politics is dedicated to changing regimes, if only in part, we are then forced to table the idea of the correspondence of the landscape to the form of regime for the moment: it is only an option available if the regime is gifted with a tabula rasa. Ostensibly the advice is aimed toward colonists.
And yet, we have managed to digress. From the above application of the Aristotelian principle to the idea of politics and its relations to space, we fail to capture the intent of this investigation, namely, the potential principles for the preliminary study of the politics of space: an important arena, for if we are admit in full the principle that the polis is the site of human flourishing, we must be faced with the corresponding moral/aesthetic question, namely, what must animate its sensibilities? How must it be organised in shape? How must it look? Surely, the space that one inhabits is related to the forms that one can take toward actualising some higher good: the limits of human frustration are embodied as capably and fully in the fight to fit a futon through the door or a bookshelf into some crevice that may be opportune at first sight, or other seemingly banal and trite matters that are of at least a functional importance to the consideration of the whole, the telos of such activity.
We are then forced to restate our examination of the polis through its origins: as existing by nature, but also the product of human action.[8] In Book I of the Politics, Aristotle writes that while the polis “comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of the good life” (I.2, 1257b29–30). It is this line of thought that we observe in the discussion of planning in VII.11 — that “this will conduce at once to security and elegance” (1330b31). Because the city has two aims, the first being the guarantor of such things as may be necessary to enable those most suitable to live the good life, it must be practical, namely that is must allow the defence of the realm, among other things. The second being that it aims to secure the good life beyond the realm of necessity; such a line of inquiry has as its necessary conclusion the understanding that beauty and elegance are the rightful aims as well. And thus, in advocating for a sufficient mix of both, Aristotle advocates for both definitions of the polis simultaneously. Pulling this analogy further, the example of the crooked streets interlaced with streets of organic character bring to mind the discussion of cow paths in Ancient Rome: many of the roads that we see in Rome, snaking through Esquilino or other such areas, are the shortest possible distance for those in the know; straight roads exist for grander building projects. Take, for example, the ancient Roman system of highways that radiated out of the city gates. Such principles of urban planning as those that require compromises between the city already present as an organic outgrowth of the polis from the village and from other smaller forms of cohabitation and association are preserved, in part, because the Aristotelian city is by necessity not a tabula rasa. It represents the natural, and yet, the human growth of a form of association, and the analogy provided herein is the analogy that ought to animate those opposed to the vile Plan Voisin or some other castle in the sky that would destroy with misplaced equanimity the growth of the polis as an organic association. It is not the faint memories of the past and the need for cultural preservation but the importance of recognising the competing principles at play within an examination of the politics of space. As such, this warrants a necessary comparison with both Platonic utopias, which are not suitable exemplars for any study because they are outgrowths of the domain of the fertile imagination and not the Fertile Crescent: they require a blank space because they are unlike anything that we have seen and will see in the future. The Platonic utopia — bare and naked, bereft of the Muses — is the template for many an architect nowadays, who have the mental acuity and geometrical perception not of the genius of Palladio and Michelangelo and Bramante, but of a toddler in preschool: the former lot are capable and thrive in the context of the city as a palimpsest, while the latter must play only with shapes of no remarkable subtlety and after destroying everything given to it.
*
We return now to the Socratic maxim: “the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same” (Crito, 48b). Expressed somewhat differently, we must remark that the good life has two important components, which are necessary but not sufficient for its existence: the beautiful and the just. The good life is meaningless, I venture, without the necessary aesthetic components of the beautiful. And it is only in the polis, in the immediate surroundings of one’s lived environs, that one can find and experience on a regular basis the aesthetic experience that the beautiful entails. It is the built worlds that we see everyday when we pass by our house, on the way to work, or on a walk, that we subconsciously experience these sights; sometimes the occasion is such that a certain sublimity is formed that impresses upon the mind a notable reaction of some kind. At the fundamental level, then, the politics of space is political insofar as it exists within the polis, strictly understood: the polis is an autarkic collection of multiple oikos in some permutation and combination. This does not mean that judgements of taste lack objectivity — that is far from it — but that judgements of taste, insofar as they apply to architecture, are more complex because of the wide array of subsidiary and ancillary judgements they operate alongside with. From Aristotle, we know that all built spaces must necessarily have a functional part, but function is the necessary but not sufficient precondition for the whole: aesthetic concerns and matters are as important as more mundane functional concerns.
What relationship does justice have to play in this? One may think of the injustices of racial redlining and segregation during the Jim Crow era — important issues, I will admit, that must be addressed. But this goes far beyond that. It admits wholly that its object today is the building as we know it, and have known it for the better part of the last century. The modernist revolution in architecture — the rebellion against traditional styles that uprooted the uniqueness of oriental and occidental styles alike — imposed a more substantive anomie upon the polis that we fail to recognise substantially because we are so enthralled by it. The thraldom of the modernists and the postmodernists is the demise of the good because it denies that essential and inalienable element in architectural form. It takes the polis away from its foundational blocks, its visual embodiments, and seeks to replace it with one universal style of death and deficiency. It seeks to make man everywhere the same, even though his environment is not. It takes away the peculiar and renders it moot; it takes the cow path and bulldozes it down. It is lacking precisely because it feigns indifference to aesthetic appeal, or crouches appeals to other-than-functional aspects in dogmatic rubbish.
It is manifestly unjust to condemn man to a sensory world where all he has access to is straight lines and geometrical shapes, but nothing that can inspire his imagination. Gone is the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of the neoclassical. It is not that these styles are seemingly antiquated, but that they represent the West’s patrimony. They give its built spaces the peculiar characteristics of a shared heritage and language across poleis while permitting within this system of seeming rigidity an openness that permits a wide range of expressions: the classical idiom thus employed is not constraining, but emancipatory. It provides a sense of being and belonging absent from the concrete jungle but does not shy away from concrete — one need only look to the Pantheon in Rome to see the majestic and appropriate use of the aforementioned material. The classical idiom represents the organic growth and patrimony of a certain idiom common to all.
There are certain other moral obligations that are entailed in the planning and construction of the polis, which is always in motion. But what can be said about the role of the polis in determining the politics of space? Architects are, I believe, men, and are intrinsically political animals, zoon politikon, like all other men. But is there work political, too? Many believe so. But their belief is based upon some pre-existing notions of their ‘whole’ self, namely that they may espouse some ideological attraction to a certain group or entity which may or may not be involved in electoral politics or related activities. We are concerned more with the choices made by these individuals, these architects and urban planners, as a sum total; we are concerned with how they choose to process space and visualise life and their visions of it because they seek to make man anew. Each has an existing view of man and beast, of what separates them, and it is this that we analyse when we seek to examine the effect of their built scapes. It is, as I examined some time ago in my consideration of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex, a moral question and a primarily political one, but I did not make that connection then.[9] Upon further reflection, it is apparent that the architect responsible for the complex took seriously the Le Corbusier’s maxim that the house was merely “a machine for living in,”[10] and I wrote then that:
“Yamasaki left the complex in a netherworld where the resident was treated in a contemptuous manner, where he intended to build a better set of built spaces for those who needed it, but in his own version of modernist planning fervour, condemned a pliable continuum upon which the house was aestheticized into the home to a dangerous dichotomy insistent upon the binary designation of space as either public or private.”
This was not the result of naïveté but of a fundamental ignorance about the nature of man and his place in the world. It is, at heart, a denial of the polis as the level of autarchic households coming together as an association. It is this that strikes at the heart of the philosophy of the polis, because it is an exercise in denying the polis, not enriching it.
[1] Lewis Mumford, ‘Utopia, the City and the Machine’, Daedalus 94, no. 2 (1965): 271–92, at 272.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 275.
[5] Ibid, 276.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Mumford expresses such a sentiment at ibid, 276. But it is here that we diverge from his examination, but it is unsatisfactory for our aims.
[9] https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/ishaanhjajodia20/files/2020/05/IJ_Aesthetics_Of_Architecture.pdf
[10] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 87–88.