You couldn’t miss it. Plastered on the bus stop glass calling on the new Prime Minister to save a local school. It paid no heed to the autumn budget or to international affairs, it just demanded that he stop this primary from shutting. Who knows if Keir Starmer ever rides this route, through a busy London high street, but it had an audience of assorted people all waiting to continue their journey. I didn’t need to catch the bus, so I didn’t hang around to see if the audience started chatting. The stark, plain design of the poster lent an urgency to its demand though, making it feel like it could have provoked a response if the bus took long enough. Large Arial font, all upper case, taking up most of a single piece of A4. In a stroke it had turned this bus stop, these couple meters of pavement where you have reason to pause, into a site of reflection in public life.
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I studied philosophy at university and one way of thinking about what it is concerned with always stuck with me. This was the notion that philosophers explore ‘logical space’; variously defined, but essentially it is the space of logical possibilities. Oceanographers explore the inky depths of the seas, astronomers, the far reaches of the universe. Philosophers travel around obscure corners of human thought, trying to discover, prove and disprove what, logically speaking, could be. This is just one, quite gendered, picture of philosophy, but part of its appeal is its neatness. Understanding if there is a god, or what is right and wrong, or whether we have free will – these are all things we can determine without too much help from others. No need to delve into the messiness of people and the varied ways ideas like god, morality, and choice play out in their heads.
Of course, this only gets you so far. At some point you realise that this mess is no mess at all – it is another space of possibilities, albeit of a different kind. From this perspective, when you look across a crowd it is a constant flicker of human thought; a thousand bulbs coming in and out of a bright glow as they are charged with recollections, intrusions, musings, intentions, epiphanies. Other people are very much a part of the answer to your questions, philosophical or otherwise. So, instead you might adopt a different image of doing philosophy associated with the philosopher Walter Benjamin: strolling the streets, engaging in flânerie. It encapsulates the idea of an observer of urban life, who takes in all around them and is spurred to reflect in turn. The problem is this retains some of the detachment of those logical spacemen.
Engaging in philosophical reflection is no different from engaging in all manner of reflection: you do it best when you immerse yourself in the world as a participant, because this is an inescapable role. We are, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, ‘thrown’ into the world. As Heidegger expert Simon Critchley puts it in a way far easier to understand than the original, ‘thrownness’ is just our “simple awareness that we always find ourselves somewhere”; we are always experiencing the world as a participant in it. Simon goes on to add that from birth we are thrown into a world “with which we are fascinated, a world we share with others.” Yet not all are fascinated by the world, or keen on sharing it with others. Some say they are tired of others or try to act as if there is nothing to share. They remain thrown into the world, all the same.
In resisting the world, people also avoid creating a space to reflect with others. They might make their own, but it will be impoverished. To reflect alone is to try to remain in a space of logical possibility. Once you descend from that plane and are walking down the street, your space for reflection is only partly shaped by you. Here, others shape it too; people both present and absent, who bring possibilities and ideas into public life. Local people irate about school closures. Fellow city-dwellers awaiting their bus. Governments, developers, financial speculators, activists, and urban planners that have made the ground you walk on and the buildings that surround you the way they are. Beyond all this, larger forces shape our environs; money, power, sex, work, war, and culture, as architectural historian Richard J. Williams suggests.
Examples of our space for reflection in public life can be revealing about what opportunities people have. Whoever put up this poster for Keir felt a conversation was missing about this school closure. They may have felt the space did not exist for politicians at the national stage to reflect on this even. What is more certain is that they felt this space did not exist, or at least not adequately, in their local area. Whether it was their intention, they were fostering space for collective reflection in public life by turning this bus stop into an opportunity that was before only dormant; it remained possible, but not yet actual. Despite all Williams’ powerful forces, this local parent, teacher, student or otherwise was using what wiggle room a blank bus stop window and a printer afforded them to shape the space for reflection they had on their streets.
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Before I saw the bus stop, earlier in the day, I was in a different public space freighted with the possibility for reflection. My train hurtled through a field outside London, and I was reading The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes. The book documents him wandering through private landscapes, like hunting grounds, and reflecting on the history and notion of trespass. He brings out just how much we – and landed aristocracy in particular – have shaped environments that are often presented as entirely natural. Forests and meadows, fields, and waterways, which are really the product of human hands.
Gazing up from Hayes’ book I looked out at the scenes of green blur we rattled through, wondering now who had shaped and continued to shape which bits of the ‘natural’ world I could see. As the train was passing through a county in the southeast of England, I thought too of a different group of people who shaped these spaces. I had recently been dipping into A Darker Electricity by Mark Harrison, a memoir of his time as co-founder of a travelling soundsystem in the heyday of rave culture. This was part of the burgeoning ‘free party’ movement in the 1990s that “reclaim[ed] social space in warehouses and out under the stars” across Britain. There has been a resurgence of interest in this movement and era. Books, podcasts, and films that are putting the story in its wider historical context, bringing out its relevance for understanding the country’s changing politics and culture, its connections to much older ideas of carnival and festivity, rebellion, nomadism, and much else.
The booming soundsystems were long gone when I looked out of my train window, but the ability of these scenes to evoke these ideas – to evince reflection even in the absence of anyone – struck me as peculiar. Cultural memory transmitted through stories retold, allowing others to look at this space anew (I was born in 1993, so probably a bit young for listening to acid house in a field). A kind of strange magic that lets us shape the space of reflection for others long after we’re gone.
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‘Sonder’ is a wonderful word coined by the writer John Koenig in 2012 to describe:
“The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
Koenig’s ‘sonder’ is a touch mournful. There is a sense of loss at being distant from others. Yet, when people conjure space for reflection in our lives in the ways I have described above it reaches across the gaps between us. If I read a bus stop proclamation or know what a field meant to others at some point in its past, I am forced to encounter others; at first, in my head, but perhaps then in person as I turn to conversation with others around me. Experiences of sonder remind us of the vastness of thought that surrounds us throughout life. This is true even in the pristine quiet of ‘natural’ place, as we are in the presence of an environment likely shaped by human endeavour, and the ideas that propelled these efforts.
The book I am writing is about the space for reflection in our lives today, and the current chapter I am writing is about how this looks outdoors on streets and by rivers, in city squares and atop mountains. What makes these into spaces for reflection is in part power and money, directing hands to pour concrete and dig up earth. But it is also a result of how we come to think about what these spaces can be. Materially, we can come up against constraints, but always, logically speaking, the possibilities are endless.
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