In response to a growing population and a resultant shortage of housing, it seems that every available space is now being built on in London and the surrounding suburbs. But whenever I see a new development, I always recall what Nietzsche wrote on the subject of high density housing and overcrowded city streets:
"One day, and probably soon, we need some recognition of what above all is lacking in our urban areas: quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection."
We need to build not just shopping centres, apartment blocks, and corporate skyscrapers, but sites free from commerce, traffic, and endless human noise (where good manners would prohibit even the use of mobile phones); public squares, parks and even rooftop fields that would afford men and women the opportunity to step aside, to breathe, and to briefly experience the joy of the vita contemplativa (for like other herd animals, man too is a ruminant).
Places that, as Nietzsche puts it, allow us to take a stroll round ourselves. And so the question is: where are the architects of the future who have the know-how and the vision to create such an environment; a home fit for men and cows.
See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 280. Note that I have slightly modified Kaufmann’s translation.
It wasn't for nothing that, on the cusp of madness, Nietzsche insisted, in an 1888 letter to Strindberg, that 'Ich bin ein Psychologue' . . .
ReplyDeleteThis drift also evokes what the late James Hillman had poetically in mind - or 'in soul', as he might have put it - when he wrote of getting psyche out from 'under the skin' (the narcissistic/capitalist individualism of the therapy room), and into the metropolis (or else, more 'romantically', out among nature) where we can, in 'forgetting ourselves', perhaps clasp hands with the Great Chain of Being. In so doing, we re-discover the vita contemplativa in the daemonic pathology (or inhuman sickness and sad soulfulness) of strolling 'unter den Linden' in Berlin, enduring the street grid of New York, or drowning in the transient excess of Kyoto's cherry blossom. I think of this as something like becoming a character, or multiplicity of characters, in a novel no longer of one's own making.
Significantly, for Hillman, this depersonalisation of the life of the mind is also to put one in touch with the sadness of the world, through a kind of 'dislocation' of reflective - which is to say psychological - being. The project of mirroring ourselves might well be an exercise in narcissistic futility for some, but break the glass into shards, or stain it, or use it as a sharp implement to open a vein, and the possibilities for lucent beauty become kaleidoscopically endless.
"To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It's in touch."
In the 'daimon of the heart', a thought Harold Bloom might also be delighted by, we find the heart of the daimon - which is to say a voice (or voices) that whisper to us, whether schizophrenic (think Peter Sutcliffe's claimed conversations with spirits among Yorkshire graves), epiphanic (Beckett's documentary revelation on the pier at Dun Laoghaire) or folkloric (Dick Whittington's submission to the message of the Bow Bells).
At any rate, 'beyond good and evil' . . .