The Good Life

What is the function of a city?  More precisely put, what should the human function of a city be?

This is a question that I presume will have a vast array of possible answers that are predicated in no small measure upon each persons respective position in life.  Moreover, for most people the city is something that has long since transcended the limits of individual conception, leaving a mere sliver for them to inhabit let alone conceive of.  This conception - or rather misconception - allows individuals in turn to view the city simply as a sort of rudimentary means towards fulfilling singular needs.  For example, Manager Kim has a home in Mok-dong¹ in order to secure educational opportunities for his children. (full stop).  Any other advantage(s) secured by happening to reside in a specific space is simply the happy result of pure coincidence.  To this mind at least, such binary 'choice making' - because to consider this sort of behavior as something even approaching thinking would merely indicate how much one is not thinking to begin with - is a direct refutation to (of?) life itself.  Like, why are you even living, guy?

The simple answer to why we are living, why we who have been afforded the accident of life at this particular juncture in this particular form with the sum total of human actions so far (i.e. history) serving as our latent potentiality + α is simply thus: to have our total life etherialize² into impact itself.  What this abstract statement looks like is quite simple: an idea, usually in written form, that aims to better life or put simply, the pursuit of the good life³.  It was in ancient Greece that this idea of the city as the container of this so called 'good life' found it's own voice, and as the fates would have it, it was none other than Aristotle who said, "People come to the city to live; they stay in order to live the good life." Of course ancient Greece is respected more for the fact that this ideal was allowed to form, conspicuously within Athens, but no less in Cos or Rhodes for example, as opposed to serving as a direct model because, err well, slavery.

Obviously the good life cannot be static; it must be something inherently dynamic and organic in the sense that it can only exist and can only be brought about through a continuous, free dialogue between citizens and the city itself.  This dynamic presupposes a few things: Firstly, both the psychic and physical possibility of withdrawal and return and Secondly, a truly autonomous city.  From the collapse of the medieval guild societies the ancient universitas⁴ for long was the means for withdrawing and returning to society.  The layout of Oxford in super blocks, quite nearly another world within a world, not only allowed for physical freedom from the city at large but existed for the mind to focus on concerns completely other than the normal (for that particular period) day-to-day matters at hand.  Today, are not the university and city itself just two cogs in the wheel of global capitalism?  This is not to imply that the pursuit of capital ipso facto is inherently negative; this is merely a call to resuscitate the dialogue of what the good life can or should be, and towards that end the collective as well as individual questioning of our basic assumptions that must occur, for questioning is the piety of thought.


¹ 'Dong' or '洞' refers to a single administrative area whose amalgamation with other similarly demarcated areas make up one of the twenty-five larger municipal districts or 'gu(區)' of Seoul.

² Etherialization, according to Arnold Joseph Toynbee (A Study of History), is the counterpart of 'Materialization' wherein a (material) idea is refined closer into its essential aspect (e.g the church was the etherialized form of the ancient city that allowed the culture of a particular city to be transposed across long distances as well as through time, or the mp3 file as the ultimate etherialized form of music itself, etc.).

³ The 'good life' spoken of here is none other than that earthly place where everything that is good co-exists as the Same, in that everything benefits life, or what is known as eutopia which is derived from the Greek εὖ + τόπος (meaning literally the good place); differentiated from the purposefully abstract and ambiguous conception of utopia (οὐ + τόπος literally meaning 'no place') as that ideal which has no earthly counterpart.

⁴ Universitas being the collective name for all guilds, originally.