I realize that I am hunting.
Hunting for the fundamental ideas we often take for granted – ideas about the world and about one another – hidden in the shapes and spaces of the Place. A kind of conceptual legacy, embedded beneath what is visible, shaping how we understand and organize our world.
The intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy showed how certain patterns of thought reoccur throughout the intellectual history of the West. He called these patterns “unit-ideas” – fixed concepts that survive through centuries, generations, and ideologies, and still influence the choices we make.
One such unit-idea is the notion of a “natural” world order – and that this order is hierarchical.
To illustrate it, Lovejoy used this image by Didacus Valades from the 1500s:. You see the world arranged as a chain of hierarchical levels. At the top, God sits on His throne. Beneath Him, the angels – eternal spiritual beings. Below you see us humans – mortal, but with both body and soul. Below us you find the animals and plants and then, at the very bottom, inert matter, only there for us to use. All boundaries between these levels are eternal and unchangeable. The hierarchical world order cannot be altered.
This idea can be said to have been at play around 1900, when the district around the Place was planned: For the city’s decision-makers , it would have seemed entirely natural to design an exclusive neighborhood for the upper class – with stone buildings, spacious rooms, running water and sewage – while the majority of the city’s residents lived in overcrowding, slums, and sometimes even hunger, just a few kilometers away.
“Birds of a feather flock together” is a familiar echo of that same idea. Even today, it shapes Swedish urban planning through the principle of zoning – separating people, housing, and functions according to likeness.
That same thought-figure might in fact be sitting on the tram number 11, on any Wednesday in November, traveling from one end of the line, to the other.
O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Harper & Row, 1960.
Image: Great Chain of Being, by Didacus Valades, published in Rhetorica Christiana (1579). Wikimedia Public Domain.
