I get pretty angry about the way our cities have been organized and designed for cars and not for people. We have a few parks as public spaces where one forgets the city whilst being in the city. And we have the contrast between a safe and homely house and the intrusion of a weird and alien presence when the city was turned into a metropolis.
This transformation had serious psychological consequences described by, among others, Baudelaire and Zola. The individual felt estranged in the metropolitan mass, estranged in all possible connotations of the word. The uncanny manifested itself in phenomena like agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the historical avant-garde movements tried to transfer the modern feeling of the uncanny to their public using techniques of defamiliarisation.
What also angers me is the way the core of my self in the metropolis is invaded by and controlled by the way the city is organized for the economy by town planners, by the incesant advertising everywhere and by the nose that invades my whole being.
The happenings in the urban world lacerate my self and distort my desire to live a passionate urban human life.
Hence I am subject to, and violated by, fortune----the efects of the polluted city on my body ----and this undermines my self-sufficiency and my desire for freedom from external control.
Should not a therapeutic philosophy build a wall around the self and protect it from the assaults of fortune? This appears to be the goal of Stoic philosophy.
Or should I give up seeking self-sufficiency and let go my desire for freedom from external control.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 8, 2003 11:28 PM | TrackBack