Philosophy of Face the City

The official suicide count of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers is over 1,200. Nearly every one of these jumpers looked towards San Francisco before their eternal leap. Even in their final moments, these souls made a final attempt to come to terms with the city.

Throughout the history of political philosophy the theme has been the City and Man. The theme endures for its focus on how man ought to live both as an individual and in society. For man to understand his individuality and his relation to the city, he must understand his self.

Yet the concept of self is elusive. Is a self something to be discovered, or must it be created? When a man contemplates the people he’s truly known and loved, the places that have become a part of him, and the joys and sorrows of his life, is he trying to understand what he is, or is he creating himself through the very act of thinking about himself?

Just when the dizzying difficulty of this question threatens to overtake me, another thought pops into my head. Why all this talk about the self anyway? Does it matter whether finding the self is an act of discovery or creation? Why do I care now, like so many others have before, about what it is to have a self?

No matter how dark and obscured the philosophical quest to understand the self becomes, the answer to the question of why I care to follow it is always clear. I care about the self because I want to BE. I want to be for myself and for all the people, the places, the joys and the sorrows that have been something to me. I must be, and to be, I must be me.

At some point in every person’s life one must face the city. One must embrace the challenges and opportunities that the city presents in a great leap of self-love. One must have the courage to be oneself amidst all others in the city who can and should have the courage to be themselves.

When I make this great leap of self-love—which is truly a love of life itself—I turn, standing straight and arms open wide, and face the city.

-Steven Pittz (Political Philosophy PhD. candidate, University of Texas)