I consider Edward Casey’s book The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History my raison d’être in the critical debate on the meaning of the concepts of place and space. With this article I want to pay tribute to this fundamental work, which, for me, was complementary to a couple of other texts, more focused on the scientific perspective concerning the concepts of place and/or space: I’m speaking of Max Jammer’s renowed essay ‘Concepts of Space’, and Julian Barbour’s text ‘The Discovery of Dynamics’, which will be discussed in subsequent articles.[1] In this way, by the comparison of two different perspectives regarding the history of the concepts of place and space – Edward Casey’s historico-philosophical approach and Jammer and Barbour’s historico-scientific approach – we will gain essential insights to reflect on and a solid foundation for analyzing the meaning of place and space. As I mentioned in a previous article, Preliminary Notes, to gain a broad perspective on the concepts of place and space, I believe it’s essential to examine the diverse histories and varying positions of different thinkers on these two concepts; in this regard, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History is a major, fundamental, and excellent starting point for critically understanding place and space.
Before introducing Edward S. Casey’s work, I want to explain why I consider The Fate of Place to be my raison d’être in the critical debate on space and place: reading that book helped me realize that concepts of space and place have a broader range of meanings and implications for understanding the world around us than the traditional understanding we commonly accept. Ultimately, I realized that when we discuss or read about space and place, regardless of the context, we often use these concepts in the guise of unclarified notions;[2] we tend to view them as established facts, learned through common speech and education, without much interest in exploring their origins. The common understanding of space as a generic extent – a broader extent with respect to place – and their common use to define the general (space) or the specific (place) located character of objects and bodies are too vague notions that miss the core meaning of these fascinating and complex concepts. Moreover, their traditional meanings can be now considered scientifically outdated. It wasn’t until I became interested in the history of place and space, as beautifully narrated by Casey, that I gained a comprehensive understanding of the two concepts, surpassing both my technical understanding as an architect and the traditional sense understood by non-experts. Ultimately, my new understanding enabled me to re-examine the traditional knowledge on space and place I had accumulated over nearly two decades as a student of architecture and an architect. The comparison between Casey’s text and my previous reading of Jammer’s Concepts of Space led me to realize why there is so much confusion around the concepts of space and place, despite the same terms being used by architects, psychologists, social scientists, historians, philosophers, and physicists. For instance, the differing interpretations of Jammer and Casey regarding Aristotle’s fundamental theory of ‘topos‘ illustrate this variability: while the physicist views it as a theory of space, the philosopher sees it as a theory of place. This raises the question of how they can understand each other, unless we assume that space and place are almost synonymous and can be used interchangeably, differing only by a factor of scale or an abstract principle such as generic vs specific – ideas that I reject due to the ontological and epistemological differences between the two terms. Given the influence of philosophy and physics on other disciplines, this misunderstanding can generate a vicious circle of confusion. Are we – philosophers, historians, physicists, mathematicians, architects, psychologists, ecologists, social scientists, politicians, or laymen – referring to the same entity when we speak about space and place? Or are there subtle but important differences that need to be uncovered to avoid significant misunderstandings? Thanks to Casey and my confrontation with Jammer’s book, I also realized the danger of anachronistically attributing meanings to the concepts of space and place, understanding that our current concepts do not unequivocally correspond to those of Vitruvius and Lucretius’s spatium or locus, and much less to Plato’s chōra, or Aristotle’s topos – the Latin and Greek terms we usually translate as space and place.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, redefining the concepts of space and place is a fundamental aspect of knowledge and understanding, which involves a continuous, historically-based process of alternating between redefining knowledge and systematizing it, allowing us to consolidate past learning and extend it into the unknown future. In this respect, the periodic oscillation between placial and spatial notions over the centuries, as seen in concepts like apeiron, apeiron pneuma kosmoi, kenon, ether, chōra, topos, spatium, locus, absolute and relative space or place, the field concept, spacetime, relative ether, etc. signifies the alternating periods of redefinition and systematization of knowledge driven by scientific and philosophical interests. Regarding the concepts of place and space, I believe we are currently experiencing an era of redefinition – hence the name of this website, ‘rethinking space and place’ – or, as Casey puts it, a third ‘peripeteia’, marking the shift from space to place that we are witnessing.[3] The explicit merit of Casey’s book lies in its encouragement to consider the concepts of space and place within a historical perspective, as a continuous thread – a fil rouge – that reflects our understanding of reality and the fundamental placial and/or spatial aspects of it.
Image 1: The History of Place and Space is a long continuous and convoluted thread that explores the placial and/or spatial modes of understanding reality’s fundamental structure; many notions (locality, dimensionality, extensivity, finiteness, infinity, materiality, etc.) and the terms behind those notions (apeiron, kenon, chōra, topos, etc.) have contributed to the development and refinement of our current understanding of place and space concepts.
The Fate of Place not only revealed the origins of these concepts to me but also highlighted the intricate relationship between them. I believe the alternate historical fate of place and space narrated by Casey (in the end, the fate of the concept which Casey puts his focus on – place – resulted in being bound to the fate of the other concept – space – as in a system of communicating vessels) can be seen as a sign of the differences and the reciprocity of meanings inherent in these concepts, which convey distinct visions of an epoch (Weltanschauung). In fact, each term conveyed a different cosmological vision, almost opposite to the other (on the one side, Aristotelian cosmology centered on place, described a finite and relational cosmos, whereas, on the other side, Newtonian cosmology, built on space, portrayed the universe as an infinite and absolute continuum where bodies are located and move). I believe that before assigning specific meanings to the two concepts, such as physical, mathematical, geographical, social, political, or architectural meanings, we should first determine their differences and reciprocity at the ontological and epistemological levels. This passage is critical: if we fail to understand the true nature of the relationship between space and place, and the ways in which it can be clarified, I believe we will remain lost in the maze of interpretations surrounding placial and spatial concepts that have persisted for the past two millennia. Reading Casey’s The Fate of Place is a necessary step for anyone who critically engages with concepts of space and place and seeks to escape the puzzle of interpretations or their use as unclarified notions. I’m not saying that you will finish the book with the awareness of a solution to the question of place and space: I’m saying that after finishing the book, you understand better what the real problem is concerning the nature of that question. If we know what the real nature of a question is, I believe we have more chances to find a proper solution to a question (a proper solution, not the only solution). There is a lot at stake behind questions of place and space: that’s what I ultimately understood by reading this book.
Edward S. Casey, an American philosopher influenced by phenomenological thinking, is active in the field of continental philosophy. As regards his production, I consider The Fate of Place to be the culmination of a series of books, in which the author explores the bond between place, experience, and existence, or experience as a primary mode of existence. The first three books were concerned with the analysis of everyday phenomena: the first focuses on imagination – Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, 1976; the second on memory – Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 1987; the third on place – Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, 1993. The fourth – The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, 1997 – which I will introduce in this article, goes beyond the intimate connection between place and experience, focusing on the concept of place as a philosophical idea with universal character, as seen through the history and development of Western thought. As the author says, ‘this is an essay in intellectual history and, more specifically, in the history of philosophical thinking about place.’[4] This book focuses on place – as the title says – for the obvious reason that also characterizes the fundamental blueprint of the author in the other three books: to remove the veil from the concept of place so that we can recognize, once again as in the past, not just the power of place as the central focus of experience, but also the power of the very notion of place – the power of the philosophical idea of place.
‘How could we fail to recognize this primal fact?’ is the author’s introductory question. How could we fail to recognize that ‘to be at all – to exist in any way – is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place?’[5] However, the book’s title does not have to mislead the reader: the concept of space is always present, either in the background or in the foreground when the concept of place appears to lose significance after certain intellectual developments; thus, the success of the concept of space has led to the temporary decline or reduction of the other (in the case of place, a physical downsizing, not just an ideological one). To me, the use of the term ‘fate’ in the title implies a promising future for the concept of place, a kind of redemption after centuries of neglect: a future that is not yet fully defined but has already been hinted at by great thinkers like Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, among others. I side with Casey in reading this history, and, most of all, I side with him in the common desire to write a different future for the concept of place.
1. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Summary
In brief, I’d summarize Casey’s The Fate of Place as exploring the intersecting histories of two concepts: the focus is on the concept of place, on the history of its alternate fortune; however, we frequently come across the concept of space – the idea that, over the centuries, has contributed to the demise or reduction of the power of the concept of place. Using a sort of biological allegory, this history can be seen as that of a parasite (space) that emerges from a body (place), dwells within it, and grows to the point of reducing the guest organism to a subsidiary function, keeping it alive for mere opportunity (space – ‘the triumphant beast’, as Casey notes in the text, at a certain point).[6] Despite this, the guest organism – place – has the vital resources within itself to recover and fight for its own survival – to return properly – defying ‘the beast’ or, rather, redefining its functional role within a more proficient symbiotic relationship. Although the remark about the ‘proficient symbiotic relationship‘ between concepts of place and space is a personal opinion rather than a direct quote from the book, it summarizes the fascinating philosophical history of the concept of place, and its connection to space, as outlined by the author.
The book begins with a thesis statement: the idea that place is primary, as expressed in the Archytian axiom, which is a recurring theme throughout the book and can be summarized as ‘to be is to be in place.’ [7] After a historic-philosophical journey spanning over two millennia of debate on place and space, the author returns to his starting point with the analysis of contemporary authors: ‘to be is (still, or once again), to be in place’ – as Casey notes in the Postface;[8] however, this place is now richer and more diverse than initially conceived, with its primacy established on multiple bases rather than solely on physical, metaphysical, and cosmological arguments as in ancient times: ‘the new bases (…) are themselves multiple: bodily certainly, but also psychical, nomadological, architectural, institutional and sexual…’.[9]
Image 2: The Primacy of Place is the point of departure and arrival of Casey’s historico-philosophical journey, which spans over two millennia of debate on place and space.
NOTE: all of the images that I have used and that I’m going to use in the present article are not included in Casey’s book. Image credits are given at the end of the article.
Image 3: Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
1.1. Part One: From Void to Vessel
In the history narrated by Casey, there are mythical and religious beginnings in which place represents the material matrix, or medium, necessary for creation.[10] In these origins, place is seen as a concrete, primordial entity, opposed to the unbearable concept of the void. ‘To create “in the first place” is to create a first place’,[11] Casey notes that ‘cosmogenesis’ – the creation of the cosmos –, can often be interpreted as ‘topogenesis’, the creation of place, or places. Here, he presents various mythical and religious accounts of creation, including Genesis, the Babylonian Enuma Elish, and narratives of creation from Pelasgian, Navajo, Hopi, Hesiod’s Theogony, and brief references to Chinese and Japanese creation myths. As far as accounts of creation rely on time or language (‘In the beginning was the Word’, the Old Testament says, and an analogous cosmological power to the Word is also attributed by the Dogon of Mali), ‘it is evident that narrative accounts of creation must bear on place’, Casey says. [12]
The first systematization of knowledge, which marks the transition from mythos to logos and the origin of Western Thought, was characterized by a strong sense of place, as seen in the works of Archytas (ca. 428-ca. 360 B.C.) and, most notably, Aristotle (ca. 384-ca. 322 B.C.), who are the champions of this historical phase, according to which place (the Greek topos) ‘takes precedence of all other things.’[13] It is the bounded character of place – an immobile bounding container, according to the definition of place given by Aristotle –[14] that offers things the possibility to exist: ‘without place, things would not only fail to be located; they would not even be things: they would have no place to be the things they are. The loss would be ontological…’. [15]
Casey includes such mythical and religious beginnings and the subsequent phase of intellectual systematization of knowledge in ‘Part I – From Void to Vessel’. In this first part, serving as the missing link between the aforementioned mythical and religious narratives of creation and Aristotle’s detailed treatment of place (in the book Physics), we find Plato’s (ca. 428-ca. 348 B.C.) ‘quasi-mythical’ cosmology (in the Timaeus); here, we find the crucial concept of ‘chōra’, a complex and ambiguous notion essential for understanding the reciprocity between placial and spatial aspects of reality. Plato was the first thinker in the Western world to propose a spatial/placial model – chōra – based on the notion of room (through which he ponders the fundamental structure of the cosmos) as a mediatory entity, or Receptacle, arising from the interaction between the realm of sensory phenomena and the domain of ideal forms.
1.2. Part Two: From Place to Space
After that, there is a historical phase spanning over two millennia, roughly from Aristotle to the preparatory period preceding Newton’s groundbreaking theory, during which the concept of place was questioned: at first, as Casey suggests, ‘deepened and broadened’ – in the Hellenistic and Neoplatonic periods; then, in medieval and early modern times, ‘curtailed and limited’ ultimately giving rise to the concept of space, which finally emerged as the winning concept out of a background composed of the three basic spatial/placial notions – topos, chōra, and to kenon – which the ancient Greek thinkers used to explore the principles of reality; such ‘emergence’ of space as a fully-fledged notion finally happened in the form of the Latin term spatium and, later, in the form of its Medieval variation spacium.[16] In such a long period of transition, the concept of space eventually triumphed over the concept of place not without the interference of religious thinking, because of which the infinite power and ubiquitous presence of the Christian God could be transposed into the idea of an infinite extent or space.[17]
In the book, Casey divides such a long period into two sections. In the first section (i) – The Emergence of Space – Casey discusses the alternative models and the different modes of spatial and/or placial thinking developed during the Hellenistic period, which offer views that differ from Aristotle’s theory of place and are necessary for the concept of space to emerge: not so much the apeiron of Anaximander (ca. 610-ca. 546 B.C.), but, rather, the void – to kenon – of the Atomists Leucippus (active in the 5th century B.C.) and his disciple Democritus (ca. 460-ca. 370 B.C.), and, most importantly, the void identified as extent or room where bodies roam – the Greek chōra – by the latter-day Atomist Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), who was probably ‘the first ancient thinker to isolate space in the broadest sense.’[18] At the same time as Epicurus, Strato of Lampsacus (who died ca. 269 B.C) by understanding place (topos) as an extension (diastema) that might, or might not, contain bodies, proposed that place ‘is a matter of sheer volume, presaging the idea of an “absolute space” that is still alive in Newton and even (with important modifications) in Einstein.’[19] Epicurus’s idea of “space” (actually, intangible substance–anaphes phusis), coexistent with place (topos) and the void (to kenon), and Strato’s idea of extension, whether occupied or not by physical bodies, was further developed by the Stoic Chrysippus (280-206 B.C.) who believed that ‘room is not just space for roaming – as it was for Epicurus – but extension allowing for possible occupation.’[20] This conceptual breakthrough expanded the understanding of space, leading to two significant outcomes: the growing tendency to use the term ‘space’ instead of ‘void’, and, as a result, the integration of place within space.
In this part of the book, the intersecting histories of the two concepts are analysed through the visions of the Stoics, the Neo-Platonists, and other contributors. While the Stoics laid the groundwork to expand the concept of space, believing the Cosmos to be a finite place within an infinite extra-cosmic realm,[21] the Neo-Platonists adopted a two-pronged strategy to extend the meaning of concept of place: on the one hand, extending the power of place beyond the Aristotelian characters of delimitation and location, to include distinctive qualities: in fact, with the Neoplatonist Iamblichus (A.D. ca. 250-ca. 325) place ‘can preserve and order, support and sustain, raise up and gather’;[22] this model of sustaining, which was later supported by Simplicius (active in the sixth century A.D.), ‘engrafts the dynamism of implacement onto what exists in place’ to the point that – as Iamblichus explicitly states – ‘place is naturally united with things in place.’[23] This place possessed an ‘intrinsic causal power… a power that acts.’ [24]
Image 4: ‘Place is naturally united with things in place’, Iamblichus said. This Neoplatonic conceptualization is very close to the way I understand place: see my previous articles Places Everywhere—Everything Is Place, and The Place of a Thing.
Image 5: Sunset on Krishna’s Butterball, a characteristic gigantic granite boulder in Mahabalipuram, India.
Despite that, other Neoplatonic thinkers outlined a protomodern concept of space that overlaps with, and will eventually overshadow, the concept of place: place (topos) is ‘a certain extension in three-dimensions, different from the bodies that come to be in it, bodiless in its own definition – dimensions alone, empty of body’, Philoponus (A.D. 490-570) said. [29]
The Neoplatonists also raised two fundamental questions about the nature of place and/or space that will shape discussions for centuries to come:[30] whether place and space are absolute or relative (a question that was present in the mind of Philoponus, given his concern for the arrangement of things in place or space, and also intrinsic in Aristotle, other than quite explicit in Theophrastus, ‘the first theorist of the essential relativity of place’ Casey says), [31] and how the finite nature of place relates to the infinite, particularly in the context of the place of the cosmos:[32] ‘Is there a place of this world? Is there an infinite space beyond the cosmos? Casey inquires about the unanswered questions posed by the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. By the end of this lengthy period, spanning from Theophrastus to Philoponus (the Hellenistic period in Greek philosophy) and already into the first millennium, ‘to be is still to be in place but a place that is part of an unending space.’[33]
Image 6: Archythas’s vexing question about the nature of the cosmos as a finite place: ‘If I came to be at the edge, for example, at the heaven of the fixed stars, could I stretch my hand or my stick outside, or not?’ (elaboration based on a wood engraving by an unknown artist, first documented in Camille Flammarion’s book, L’atmosphere: météorologie populaire, 1888).
The second section – of ‘Part II – From Place to Space’ – focuses on (ii) The Ascent of Infinite Space; here, speculations from the Medieval and Renaissance periods are explored. This is a critical moment in the debate between space and place since it prepared the way for the complete ascendancy and supremacy of space. Two issues characterize these two periods: the importance of religious thinking, and the ascent of a purely modern scientific mode of thinking about the cosmos. Where is the cosmos? Is it in place or is it in space? Is it stationary, or does it move? With these questions, Casey introduces a new chapter in his philosophical history. The fundamental problem of motion, which I will discuss in my next article (Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One), is closely tied to the development of the concept of space and its rise as a term that represents a new cosmological vision, one that could ultimately surpass the closed world of antiquity embodied in Aristotle’s cosmological vision and Ptolemaic astronomy.
Those questions and the modes of thinking about them, including religious and scientific approaches, were interconnected. For instance, the Condemnations of 1277, which rejected doctrines that denied or limited God’s power, played a significant role in the development of infinite space and modern science.[34] These condemnations by explicitly allowing ‘the freedom to project purely possible cosmological scenarios’ informed on God’s power, ‘certainly prepared the way for a science significantly committed to the actual infinity of physical space.’[35] As a matter of fact, according to Casey, such explorations, ‘directly or indirectly inspired the bold thought experiments of thinkers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, engendering the conceptual ventures that laid down the foundations of modern physics, above all its commitment to the infinity of the physical universe.’[36] I completely agree with Casey’s point.
During the Middle Ages, along with ‘the distinctive spatial infinities already posited’ by certain theories or lines of thought within philosophical currents like Atomism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neo-Platonism, other intellectual speculations contributed to a shift in the balance of power between place and space: on the one hand, the appeal to infinite space as ‘imaginal-hypothetico-speculative’ concept with the recurrent use of mental experiments (Gedankenexperimente), as well as its appeal as a divine attribute;[37] on the other hand, the effort to overcome the confinement of the Aristotelian concept of place (topos as immobile container, an idea still influential at that time) that resulted in a new interpretation of the very concept of place (now locus) according to three prevailing senses: place as ‘in’ (place in the cosmos), place as ‘of’ (place of the cosmos) and place as ‘between’ (place between worlds).[38] While the first sense was still Aristotelian in its fundamental locatory power, the other two showed a tendency to be seen as space, that is a proclivity for ‘place to becoming space’.[39] This is possible ‘if place has three dimensions’ and if ‘it can be emptied of bodies in principle (only space is capable of this)’.[40] This latter question sparked discussions that would continue for centuries to come, centering on the nature of the substance – ether or light – that might fill infinite space or place.
Two thinkers who made significant contributions to the development of the concept of space as sheerly infinite in the Late Middle Ages were the English scholastic philosopher and theologian Thomas Bradwardine (ca. 1290-1349), and the great Jewish thinker Crescas (1340-1410).
Thus, we’re up to the Renaissance period, a term – Renaissance – which means ‘renewed, new again’ properly, Casey notes. What is ‘renewed’, that is, what is taken from the past and made ‘new again’ in the context of our placial and spatial considerations? ‘A primary case point is the very idea of spatial infinity’,[41] Casey says, a notion that had its precedent in the ideas of the Atomists, Epicurus, and other thinkers, among the Stoics and the Neoplatonists; an idea that was also revived in the medieval period after the Condemnations of 1277, as we have just seen.
Within this context, the positions of thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Francesco Patrizi (1529-1597) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) are especially taken into consideration. What is remarkable about this and other thinkers of the same period is that they managed ‘to combine recognition of the importance of place with an equal acknowledgement of the value of infinite space.’[42] Yet, with the growing interest in the actual (not just imaginary) infinity of space, indeterminacy is still what characterizes the relation between concepts of space and place in the speculations of those thinkers until the end of the sixteenth century. After them, space and place were left as unclarified notions: a literal confusion (‘place is space…’ or even ‘space is place…’) results from the analysis of their positions.[43] This ‘muddle’ – as Casey calls it –[44] is the historical precursor to the clear distinction between the terms in the coming century, where any ambiguity between space and place could be resolved, and the transition from the concept of place to that of space could be completed within what I metaphorically call the second grand systematization of knowledge (the second watershed – after the first, Aristotle – culminating in Newton’s work).[45] This is the subject of Part III – The Supremacy of Space.
1.3. Part Three: The Supremacy of Space
‘Descending from its position as a supreme term within Aristotle’s protophenomenological physics, place barely survived discussion by the end of the seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, it vanished altogether from serious theoretical discourse in physics and philosophy.’[46] That’s Casey’s telling incipit of a new, intense phase in the philosophical history of the concept of place. Now, the ancient power of place has faded into a faint memory if the English philosopher and physicist William Gilbert can say: ‘place is nothing, does not exist, has no strength.’[47] Four interrelated issues will shape the future of place and space, influencing discussions about these concepts for centuries to come: (i) the notion of space as absolute and infinite; (ii) the quantification of space (and subsequently place) through the geometrical notion of extension; (iii) the possibility of understanding space as a relative and abstract entity; and (iv) the abstraction of space and place as site and point. Casey dedicates a chapter to each issue.
The supremacy of the idea of (i) Modern Space as Absolute (and Infinite) is considered through the analysis of three major thinkers: Gassendi, More, and, most importantly, Newton. The work of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) laid the groundwork for Newton’s: for example, ‘he was the first to proclaim that a moving body will continue in a rectilinear direction indefinitely, and he explicitly rejected the ancient model of the impetus as the cause of motion.’[48] Gassendi took a crucial step towards fully liberating space from place and matter by distinguishing between spatial and corporeal extension and asserting that space itself is dimensional and measurable. Such possibility entails the notion of pure space (isometric and isotropic, uniform in just one word); according to Gassendi, space is a real entity – ‘a real thing’ –[49] on the same level as corporeal substance. Moreover, by positing the co-extensiveness of the universe and space, Gassendi also attributed the character of infinity to space. Regarding place, its nominal function remained, as it continued to serve as a useful term for describing the movement of a body from one location to another (locomotion, from its Latin meaning, is movement from place to place). However, this traditional concept lost its power, as place, like space, can now be quantified as a portion of space itself, without any relation or causal effect on the intrinsic dynamics of bodies in space.
Finally, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) formalized the reduction of place to space in his groundbreaking work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Matematica (1687): not only was place assimilated into space, but the almost impalpable and intangible idea of space was definitely reified – turned into substance – so that the more concrete place could be subsumed under space for all intents and purposes, physically reduced or downsized, as Gassendi had predicted. As Newton famously stated in the Scholium: ‘Place is a part of space which a body takes up’.[50] What is truly remarkable about his work of systematization is that it laid the foundation for the absolute-relative debate over the nature of space and place for the coming centuries. Although Newton used the concept of place in his theoretical work, distinguishing between ‘movable place’, ‘immovable place’, ‘relative place’, and ‘absolute place’, ultimately, place is merely a subdivision of space, inferior to both space and material bodies, and is ‘subsumed under space and collapsed into body’–this is the fate of place under Newton’s guidance.
An important aspect that Casey also mentions with respect to Newton’s speculations is the role that theological thinking played in the interpretations of space and place, and particularly in relation to Henry More‘ ideas (1614-1687): not only is the infinity of God at stake with the infinity of space but also God’s spiritual or corporeal nature is at stake with it. While Newton resists the temptation to equate the corporeal essence of space with God’s essence, which he considers spiritual, More will ‘take a bold step beyond fourteenth-century theology: not only is space divinized but God is spatialized… God Himself is “an extended thing”, thus present in the physical world.’[51] As Casey also points out, More had an enormous influence on Isaac Newton since ‘the latter’s idea of “absolute space” is, arguably, a tidied-up version of More’s “Infinite movable Extended”’ through which More considers space and God as ‘alike extended beings.’[52]
A entire chapter explores the philosophically and scientifically crucial idea of (ii) Modern Space as Extensive: it was the merit of René Descartes (1596-1650) to have systematized within the rigid and precise language of mathematics, particularly geometry, such fundamental issue with roots in the distant past (and it is primarily the joint achievement of Descartes and Newton that common sense associates the idea of space as an external, three-dimensional, neutral, and invisible steel framework – a continuum – that encompasses our lives and all events). As a matter of fact, geometrical space is an invention of Descartes.[53] Since his early works, ‘extension (extensio) is the core concept in Descartes’s view of space’, Casey says;[54] however, much of his mature philosophical argumentation concerning the concepts of space, place and matter are primarily discussed in his Principles of Philosophy (1644). Contrarily to the Neo-Platonist Philoponus, Descartes does not pose a distinction between corporeal and spatial extension, for, as Casey says, ‘we are unable to imagine any body that is not extended or any extension that is not bodily’ so that ‘extension and extended things are inseparable’. So, we arrive at Descartes’s ‘purely conceptual distinction between matter and space’ or, put it the other way, we arrive at ‘the equation of matter and space’ from which – Casey continues – the following crucial corollaries follow: the indefinite extension of the world, the impossible existence of the void, and the subordinate character of place (to matter and space).[55] As for place, by introducing the ambiguous distinction between internal place and external place, Descartes says that ‘space or internal place and the corporeal substance which is contained in it, are not different’ (Principle X), and that ‘the names “place” or “space” do not signify a thing different from the body which is said to be in the place; but only designate its size, shape and situation among bodies’ (Principle IV);[56] then, place (or space) merely appears to be a body-predicate. Ultimately, in Descartes’ philosophy ‘the fate of place, merging with the vicissitude of space (and of matter – I add) is left dangling. Its final status… is literally ambi-guous… Place is a hybrid entity: as volumetric, it is like a thing; as situational, it is unthinglike and purely relational.’[57]
Another chapter is dedicated to the interpretation of (iii) Modern Space as Relative. In this regard, Locke and Leibniz are the two thinkers who more than others addressed counterarguments to Newton’s concept of absolute space. If Descartes, tried to tackle the absolute-relative debate by way of his two-sided notion of place, which is, in turn, based on the equation of corporeal and spatial extension – ‘Descartes clings both to absolutism in his notion of space as internal place and to relativism in his description of external place’, Casey says –,[58] John Locke (1632 –1704), in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), relies on the concept of distance to distinguish between place and space. Unlike Descartes, he rejects the idea that space, internal place, and matter are equivalent, arguing that ‘Space is not body because it includes no Solidity, nor resistance to the motion of Body’, Locke underlines;[59] and, by means of the notion of distance, he proves the nature of space and place as well: while space is barely characterised by being a dimensional notion, a mono-dimensional factor of length – that’s why he speaks of ‘simple Space’ (‘in simple Space we consider the relation of distance between any two bodies or Points’) –,[60] place is characterized by ‘relations of distance or, more exactly, of double distance’.[61] With Locke place clearly assumes a relational role (‘our Idea of Place is nothing else but such a relative Position of any thing’);[62] he also emphasizes that place is a matter of convention, a product of human imagination ‘made by Men, for their common use, that by it they might be able to design the particular Position of Things’. This perspective contributes to another significant step (following ‘the phoronomic Physics of Galileo and the analytical geometry of Descartes’) toward reducing place to site, as Casey notes.[63] Although Locke’s distinction between space and place allows him to differ from Newton in terms of place’s relative character, it is not enough to distinguish him from Newton’s spatial absolutism: in fact, as Casey highlights, Locke’s ‘place-relativism comes paired with space-absolutism.’[64]
The first consistent criticism concerning the Newtonian idea of absolute space is due to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716). While Descartes and Locke emphasized extension and distance, respectively, to establish the theoretical foundations of their discussions on place and space, Leibniz concentrates on the concept of situation, which determines space and place, suggesting that it is the situatedness of things that enables us to imagine space as an ideal system of relations, as Leibniz clearly expresses in his fifth letter to Clarke. If space is an ‘order of coexistence’, as Casey observes, ‘this means that space is not only relative, but also ideal in status’; so, Casey continues, ‘what is at stake in space is an ideal nexus of entities, not the entities themselves.’[65] Leaving the conclusion to Leibniz’s own words, space ‘can only be an ideal thing, containing a certain order, wherein the mind conceives the application of relations.’[66] With Leibniz, the concreteness of place, displaced within a sea of relations, is threatened: even if, as Casey points out, he has the chance to avoid place from vanishing into relational space (in a fragment of the work ‘On the principles of Indiscernibles’, by subsuming position and quantity under quality Leibniz seems to embrace the idea that the quality of the things in place is determinant for space; moreover by claiming that ‘in actuality that which has a place must express place itself’ he seems to believe that no extension can exist without place and no place can exist without a body, thereby opening the way for place to recover part of its ancient concrete power),[67] ‘in the end Leibniz (…) succumbs to the view of place as parallel to position and even, finally, subordinate to it (…); place is dissolved, if not diffused, in the abstractness of the spatial system.’[68]
To sum up, according to Casey, after Leibniz, place is lost in space three times: first, it is lost in the space of quantitative abstractness; second, it is lost in the infinity of space under the influence of God’s immensity, which is necessary to comprehend an infinite number of monads; finally, it is lost in the relativity of space, that is, lost in a set of relations. Place literally vanishes into space in the form of location or site. Taking Descartes’s discourse of external place to the limits, with Leibniz, ‘place has become so external and so relative that it is utterly indifferent to what occupies it; all that matters is (…) the simple location that place furnishes to whatever takes up position in it – while it, place as reduced to position, falls free of any influence from this occupant, much less of any influence on this occupant in turn’;[69] and place as simple location has only one way of representation: as a point. If with Descartes we have witnessed the geometrization of space, with Leibniz we witness the geometrization of place: ‘analysis situ’ – analysis of site, the name of the geometric discipline invented by Leibniz – describes place in terms of position and points.
Casey’s conclusion of this chapter on space (and place) as relative is illuminating: ‘even if salutary for space, Leibniz’s achievement proved to be disastrous for place—disastrous for its survival as a viable concept in its own right.’[70]
The final chapter of Part Three explores to the supremacy of space – (iv) Modern Space as Site and Point –, examining how the confinement, absorption, and dissolution of place into position as well as the dissolution of space in the positional relativity of sites occurred. The metaphorical j’accuse is directed at ‘the resolutely relationalist’ thinking of Locke and Leibniz, who were responsible, for having laid the groundwork for that fatal outcome. However, this mode of understanding space and place, that is, ‘the clearing away of place to make room for position as the very basis for the supremacy of space in its relative nature’ was a trend that continued throughout the eighteenth-century and manifested in different forms of life and culture: ‘perhaps most revealingly,’ – Casey argues – ‘in architecture, a whole manner of building flourished around what I shall call site. By this term, I here mean the levelled down, emptied-out planiform residuum of place and space eviscerated of their actual and virtual powers and forced to fit the requirements of institutions that demand certain very particular forms of building.’[71] Through the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Casey analyses that eighteenth-century trend: the triumph of the conceptualization of place and space as ‘site’ through architectural examples of ‘disciplinary and institutional space.’[72]
As this is my area of expertise, I’d like to briefly digress and say that, unlike Casey’s cautious stance (when he says ‘perhaps most revealingly, in architecture…’), I’m not surprised if new architectural forms reflect new understandings of space and place (see Image 7, below). Architecture has always been a medium through which society concretizes concepts, core values, and beliefs, and this will continue in the future. This is another reason why architects should read Casey’s book: architecture embodies society’s understanding of reality, specifically the relationships between entities and their surroundings—a question of place and space, ultimately. Therefore, it is no longer permissible to talk about space and place without a prior, careful reconnaissance of their historical meanings, either in philosophical or physical (i.e., pertaining to physics) senses, as these are the foundational senses that underlie all other considerations (including architectural, social, anthropological, geographical, psychological, artistic, literary considerations, just to name some of the disciplines that, more than others, make use of concepts of space and place).
Image 7: The Panopticon: how to reduce place to site in architecture (Presidio Modelo, in Cuba).
Casey concludes this significant historical phase by introducing Immanuel Kant‘s work (1724-1804), which marks both the culmination of The Supremacy of Space and the starting point for the final argumentation on The Reappearance of Place, covered in the book’s fourth and final part. As regards the concepts of space and place, in his first writings Kant agrees with Leibniz on the relative nature of space: as an order of position, space is relative. However, he soon took a crucial step towards absolute space by recognizing that relative regions of space formed by the system of relations between positions have to be considered with respect to ‘the absolute space of the universe’ rather than to the regions thmselves; in other words, what matters to Kant is not the relation between positions, (relative space is the direct consequence of this reasoning) ‘but the situation of being encompassed in universal space as unity.’[73] Here, we are in the middle ground between relativism and absolutism, but this is an ideal rather than an actual form of absolutism, since, in the transcendental view of Kant, which he presented as a fully-fledged system of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), space is an abstract entity existing solely ‘in the mind of the epistemic subject’, as Casey puts it. And what about place? ‘Place is outright reduced to point by Kant’ as it appears evident in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) where ‘both absolute and relative models of space are embraced’ – Casey says – and where, as Kant explicitly announces, ‘the place of everybody is a point.’[74] With Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz we have witnessed the reduction of place to position; after Leibniz and Kant, the final reduction of place from position to point is finalized. In a manner similar to Newton, the status of place is regarded as an epiphenomenon, being merely a part of one universal space; however, unlike Newton, this space is presented as a pure form of intuition, according to Kant.
By the end of this significant historical period, the concept of place has dissolved into points, becoming dispersed or submerged in space, regardless of whether it is viewed as a real or ideal entity. As points or parts of space (singular), places (plural) are irretrievably lost: ‘lost in space’, Casey concludes. What a distance between Aristotle, who believed sensible things were located in place, and Kant, who believed places were located in the mind of the subject as parts or points of an abstract space! [75]
1.4. Part Four: The Reappearance of Place
Given the hegemony of space ‘how (…) can we rediscover the special non-metric properties and unsited virtues of place?’ Casey asks. This is the opening question to which the fourth and final part of the book responds. The answer is quite direct: first and foremost, we can rediscover place (i) By Way of Body – this is the title of the first section of Part Four – which examines the thoughts of authors like Kant and Whitehead, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
With respect to the possibility for place to regain philosophical consideration, Casey examines two key writings by Kant: the dissertation of 1770 – ‘On the Form and Principles of Sensible and Intelligible World’ – and his brief 1768 essay – ‘On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space’. In the dissertation, by insisting on the fact that sensible things must occupy particular places contrarily to those entities (such as angels or God) that are exempted from a genuine local presence, Kant invokes the ancient Archytian axiom: ‘Whatever is, is somewhere and somewhen’;[76] in this way, as Casey explicitly states, ‘Kant in effect adds a crucial rider to Archytas’s axiom: namely, to be – to be sensible – is to be in place.’[77] In the other essay, Kant reveals the fundamental role of the human body, which is inherently asymmetric, in providing directionality to things; as Casey explicitly states, ‘the dimensionality of space follows from the directionality of the body’, that is, it stems from the fact that the body presents the inherent directionality of right-left, up-down, and front-back.[78] Rather than with respect to absolute space, it is from the body as an absolute source of directionality that the orientation of entities within space is possible; without the body, Casey says, ‘space would be merely a neutral, absolute block… of pure relations built up from pure positions’ within which no orientation would be possible. ‘But as we in fact experience the spatial world – Casey continues – this world is composed of oriented places nested in diversely oriented regions. For this – Casey concludes – we have the body to thank. And for bringing all this to our attention, we have Kant himself to thank.’[79]
Regarding the argument on The Reappearance of Place, the first post-Kantian philosopher Casey considers is Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who, in his book Science and the Modern World (1925), criticized the XVII century views of space and the fundamental assumption of ‘simple location, the view that whatever is in space is simpliciter in some definite portion of space’;[80] actually, Whitehead says, ‘among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location’;[81] and, of course, ‘among these elements is place, which is never simply located’, Casey notes.[82] Similar to Kant, but from a different perspective, Whitehead’s recognition of place is tied to the human body, which determines our immediate experience. As Whitehead states, ‘we have to admit that the body is the organism whose states regulate our cognisance of the world. The unity of the perceptual field therefore must be a unity of bodily experience.’[83] As Casey notes regarding Whitehead’s argument ‘The perceiver’s body is an active participant in the scene of perception’ and the body-as-implaced entity assumes within itself aspects of the universe at large making the notion of simple location – understood as ‘the primary way in which things are involved in space-time’ – obsolete. As Whitehead continues, ‘in a certain sense everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in any other location.’[84] Whitehead introduces the concept of ‘modal location’ to describe how the there of an object ingresses (through perception) into the here of the perceiving body-as-subject, thereby explaining why any location ‘there’, is contemporary ‘here’ with the body. In this way, place becomes the common milieu where objects and body, there and here, are all situated in what Whitehead calls ‘the obvious solidarity of the world’. Therefore, the togetherness or ‘withness‘ (a concept developed by Whitehead in his 1929 magnum opus ‘Process and Reality‘) between the body and the surrounding world inevitably leads to the abandonment of the idea that things have a simple location and, consequently, the rejection of place as a simple location, which is a notion that was previously reduced to a site or even a point by thinkers like Newton, Gassendi, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant.[85]
The next thinker that Casey takes into consideration for this retrieval of the crucial role of place is Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the founding father of modern phenomenology, which is a philosophical attitude that focuses on the concrete experience in ‘the surrounding world of life’, or ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt), as Husserl calls it. It is through the agency of the body, understood as a ‘lived body‘ (Leib) rather than a physical object (Korper), that experience, as well as the inroad to place and space, is possible. Husserl identifies the logical connection between place and body in ‘kinesthesia, that is, the inner experience of the moving or resting body as it feels itself moving or pausing at a given moment.’[86] The way we feel our body has a profound impact on our experience of place, to the extent that our body, through its perception of internal and external movements, can be seen as constituting place itself, as Husserl notes: ‘the place is realized through kinesthesia’.[87] This concept of place is distinct from the traditional notion of place as a mere site, point, or confined region within space, and instead has a qualitative value. This is a ‘lived place’, a ‘field of localization’[88] that Husserl identifies with the concept of ‘near-sphere’ (Nah-sphäre), the place of my body with all of the immediate places within its direct reach, the ‘nearby areas in/to which I can move’ and which differs from ‘my far-sphere [that] contains places to which I do not have immediate access’.[89] Starting from this perspective, Casey continues, ‘spatiality is constituted as objective insofar as its composition results from the concatenation of places available to me (…). What we call space is not the correlate of my kinesthetically felt near sphere but its very expansion’, or, to use Husserl’s own words, ‘the apperceptive expansion (Erweiterung) of the near-sphere is realized in a homogeneous infinite open world of space.’[90] Following Husserl, it is from the concatenation of the lived places available to my kinesthesis and movements (at first, in my near-sphere, and, then, in the far-sphere) that the constitution of an absolute space can be realized (in this regard, walking is the supreme act that accords place an implicit dynamism – that’s why it is a lived place, in the end – and through which it is possible the coherent unification of the concatenation of near and far places).[91] As Casey notes, ‘what was posited by Newton as itself bodiless cannot be constituted, much less apprehended, except by a body’. [92]
Image 8: The constitution of place and space according to Husserl’s model of spatialization.
The concluding paragraph of this first section on The Reappearance of Place by way of the body explores the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), particularly his ‘Phenomenology of Perception’ (1945); as Casey notes, ‘Merleau-Ponty culminates a late modern effort to reclaim the particularity of place from the universality of space by recourse to bodily empowerment.’[93] According to Merleau-Ponty, the ‘the lived body’ plays a central role in determining the origins of space and place, building upon Husserl’s idea of kinesthesia as a condition for being in place and generating space. In fact – as Casey expressly says with respect to Merleau-Ponty – ‘the origin [of space] is found straightforwardly in the body of the individual subject. Or, more exactly, it is found in the movement of that body; for space to arise, our body (…) must be in motion.’[94] Hence, space is ‘neither a collection of points nor a conglomeration of sheer relations [but] becomes an expressive space…’[95] because from the very beginning it is oriented by and subjected to the lived body, which is the very source of space. ‘One immediate implication – Casey says – is that place cannot be reduced to sheer position in objective space (…). It also ensues that we cannot reduce place to its ideational representation’[96] like previous thinkers tried to do. Casey continues: ‘A place I inhabit by my body is not merely some spot of space (…) but an ambiguous scene of things-to-be-done rather than of items-already-established’; it is a place of open possibilities for my body (whether virtual or actual, which means that, with Merleau-Ponty, ‘place has a virtual dimension overlooked in previous accounts’ – Casey notes) or ‘a place defined by its task and situation’ in Merleau-Ponty’s own words.[97] The connection between place and body is so strong (‘it is clear that there is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place’, Merleau-Ponty says) that it creates an unbreakable circularity/continuity between place and body, leading us to consider the body itself as a place: not only ‘the body provides a privileged point of access to place, [but] the places we inhabit are known by the bodies we live. Moreover, we cannot be implaced without being embodied. Conversely, to be embodied is to be capable of implacement.’ In this regard, Casey explicitly says that ‘Merleau-Ponty teaches us not just that the human body is never without a place or that place is never without body; he also shows us that the lived body is itself a place. Its very movement, instead of effecting a mere change of position, constitutes place, brings it into being.’[98] The phenomenal experience of the flesh of the body precedes any abstract possibility of space, which comes to us already forged by the asymmetries of our body. With Merleau-Ponty, the body, besides being place-productive, is space-productive. This being the case, how far we are from some previous ideas on the isotropy and homogeneity of space.
‘By regarding the body as the crucial clue, they [Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty] have begun to retrieve the importance of place for Western thought’: this is Casey’s conclusive remark of the first section of Part Four.
Apart from the body, there are ‘other means of access to place as subject of renewed philosophical importance’, Casey says in the introductive part of the following section – (ii) Proceeding to Place by Indirection: this is the case of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who rarely addressed the very concept of place as a direct topic of his philosophical discourse (temporality was his primary concern), but he does it by means of recurrent concepts that have a more or less explicit spatial/placial value or meaning: nearness, gathering, region, the Open, clearing, Dasein, Ereignis, etc. Casey analyzes the evolution of Heidegger’s thoughts on spatiality by examining his works in chronological order, starting with his most acclaimed work, ‘Being and Time’ (1927), which introduces the structure of being in the form of ‘Dasein’, literally being-there, the form of being-in-the-world that is peculiar to human beings. Although Heidegger explicitly attributes the basic structure of Dasein to temporality, as Casey astutely notes, the character of being-in inherently involves place: the ‘in’ of being-in is not the description of a positional quality, it does not indicate a situation of sheer confinement but is an indication of ‘Dasein’s proclivity for inhabiting and dwelling’, two terms that inevitably refer to place. For Dasein to dwell, reside, or be alongside the world, a ‘distracted involvement in the affairs of the everyday world’ is necessary: such is the involvement of Dasein with ‘ready-to-hand’ entities.[99] It is properly our closeness to and concern with the immediate environs of the ready-to-hand entities that directionality arises and with it a sense of basic orientation out of which place results, in the end: ‘place is not something we come across as something we are simply in; it is what we precipitate by the conjoint action of directing and desevering [the action of bringing close] – thus something to which our direct intervention gives rise.’[100] This place is pragmatic: it is the where of Dasein’s involvement with the ready-to-hand entities. In turn, Casey says, this place is unthinkable apart from regions: a region does not merely provide an increased room with respect to place but ‘it is the very condition of possibility for the implacement of the ready-to-hand.’ While place is the product of Dasein’s individual constitutive activity, a region is too massively public in his gathering power of the ready-to-hand entities to be the product of any individual Dasein – as Casey notes. Therefore, Casey goes on to say, a region ‘is something that Dasein is already alongside and that provides for ready-to-hand things a matrix of spatial involvement.’[101] ‘What, then, about space?’ Casey asks. ‘Space is the belated and dilated legacy of region: it is what region becomes in the realm of the present-at-hand.’[102] A key notion which is necessary for space to arise and which mediates between place, Dasein, ready-to-hand entities, region and space is the notion of ‘room’ and especially of ‘making room’: ‘space emerges from spatiality for which room has been made for a totality of involvement… There can be no such homogeneous medium as space unless room has been made (and thus spatiality opened up) within a given region of the ready-to-hand.’[103] Three conclusions can be drawn from the spatial model presented in Being and Time: 1) space is not mental, as Kant believed, since the subject is not mental but spatial, located in-the-world. 2) An entire genealogy of space becomes possible which is related to the concrete activity of the subject (such as mapping spaces derived from surveying, architectural spaces from building, theoretical spaces like the space of analysis situ, or other typologies of abstract spaces, and so on). 3) The homogeneity of three-dimensional space arises from the present-at-hand neutralization of spatiality of the ready-to-hand entities.
So much for the model of spatiality articulated in Being and Time, which, according to Heidegger’s intentions, is a model subordinated to the primacy of temporality, rather than of space or place. Nonetheless, in the subsequent pages of The Fate of Place, Casey, by analysing the different works that Heidegger produced in the following years, argues that Heidegger’s focus shifted from temporality to spatiality, henceforth a turn towards place and related concepts. So, for instance, in ‘The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic’ (1928), when Heidegger considers thrownness ‘a primordial feature of Dasein’, Casey points out that ‘to be thrown into the world is to be placed there in a body and by a body’, whose involvement with the multiplicity of ‘ready-to-hand’ entities promotes the dissemination of Dasein itself in a multiplicity of modes of being-in-the-world. So, Casey asks, ‘how can such a multiplicity exist but in spatial terms?’[104]
The intrinsic closeness between Dasein, body, and spatiality is even more explicit in a subsequent text – ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ (1935) – with respect to which Casey openly says that ‘Heidegger – belatedly – underlines the placial significance of Dasein’. In fact, as Heidegger himself says, ‘Dasein should be understood, within the question of Being, as the place (Stätte) which Being requires in order to disclose itself.’[105]
Other instances of spatiality, place, and related concepts like boundary, gathering, the Open, nearness, etc. – are analyzed in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935), ‘Conversation on a Country Path’ (1944/45, published in 1959) and ‘The Thing’ (1950). However, it is in the well-known essay (at least, particularly popular among architects) ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1951) that a new and distinct vision of place emerges in its entirety. Again ‘residing in the nearness of things’, that is dwelling or inhabiting, is the topic of that essay: by taking the case of a built thing – the bridge – Casey, drawing on Heidegger, notes that place is not a pre-existing instance of spatiality but ‘arises with the bridge regarded as a thing.’[106] Then, Casey, following Heidegger, is explicitly saying that ‘things are themselves places and do not just belong to a place, much less merely occupy positions in an empty homogeneous space’[107], which is a fundamental thesis I also maintain at RSaP-Rethinking Space and Place.
Things are themselves places and do not just belong to a place, much less merely occupy positions in an empty homogeneous space
When the bridge/place emerges, it does so because it is ontologically locatory for the thing itself (the bridge as a physical and functional object) and for the fourfold:[108] ‘only something that is itself a location can make space for a seat’ (the seat of the fourfold and of the thing itself) – Heidegger says.[109] This model ‘permits both space and locality to be spun off from place as its eschata, its extremities’, Casey notes. ‘Space, as Heidegger adds, is in essence that for which room has been made, by being (…) gathered, by the thing as location… Spaces receive their being from locations and not from space’; and again, ‘if there is a ground – Casey says – it lies in place and not in space.’[110] How far we are from Newton’s assertive Scholium! Through Heidegger’s mature argumentation, we have come to understand that space is an epiphenomenon of place, rather than the other way around.
Heidegger’s late turning to place and spatiality is perhaps most evident in the essay ‘Time and Being’ (1962), where, as participant spectators, we witness the recovery of the concept of place, leading to the ‘implacement of time’. ‘Where is time? – Heidegger asks – Is time at all and does it have a place?’[111] Indeed, Casey says: ‘the three temporal modalities [past, present, and future] come close to each other only by respecting their remoteness from one another in one and the same place.’[112] In the wake of the Einsteinian ‘spacetime’ notion, the spatial/placial character of time that is present to human beings is rendered by the Heideggerian term ‘time-space’. It is but a short step from the implacement of time to its assimilation to Being: the complex pattern that connects spatiality to time and Being is found in the quite complicated Heideggerian concept of Ereignis, which ‘as event [this is a possible translation of that technical term] is ineluctably spatiotemporal: to be an event is to exist in space and time alike. Or more exactly: it is to exist in place’, Casey says.[113] Ultimately, ‘… we have gained insight into the origin of space in the properties peculiar to place’ Heidegger notes. Casey, concluding the analysis of this essay, remarks: ‘the generation of space (…) is possible only from within (…) the spatiotemporal appropriation of place.’ [114]
To conclude this section, Casey takes into consideration Heidegger’s last major text – ‘Art and Space’ (1969) – in which, finally, Heidegger asks the fatal question: ‘Still, what is place?’ drawing these crucial conclusions: ‘Place opens a region by every time gathering things into their belonging together… Place is not found in pre-given space construed as physical-technological space. Space unfolds only from the free reign (Walten) enjoyed by the places of a region.’[115] In turn, Casey, building on this idea, makes a insightful comment for artists and architects: ‘Even the empty spaces in a building or piece of sculpture count as places, and, more generally, the plastic arts represent the embodiment of places.’[116] I would say that this is a neglected and unheard truth. To support that thesis, I can share a personal experience: I felt like an architect when I began to view space as a plenum (a place in the end) rather than when I received my degree.
Even the empty spaces in a building or piece of sculpture count as places
Following a lengthy, intricate, and engaging discussion on the historical and philosophical developments of the concept of place, we have arrived at the present day, which is covered in the final section of the book: (iii) Giving a Face to Place in the Present. This section is more of a chronicle than a history, as it explores contemporary authors and recent works, covering a vast and diverse range of topics, from history to ecology, politics to religion, architecture to sociology, human geography to gender discussions on place and space, and from philosophical to poetic perspectives. As Casey notes, this chapter provides ‘mere sketches of several promising and evocative contemporary directions… signposts for future explorations’ without attempting to be exhaustive in its coverage of the current panorama. [117]
Then, in a brief excursus through different authors and disciplines, we explore various ways to understand place (and space). With Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) and his argumentation on the development of the poetic image, we discover the placial character of the psychical realm: ‘to be psychical is to be in place’.[118] In the realm of the poetic and the imaginary – which is also the realm of the psyche and the symbolic (this is the way I call the final stage/state of place in the operational definition that I give to place, see Paragraph 2 in the Article: What Is Place? What Is Space?) – we discover that the difference between place and space is suspended: ‘they coalesce in a common intensity.’ [119]
Along with the French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984), we find that ‘ideas of place and space vary widely from era to era and from society to society’ or, to put it differently, ‘space and place are historical entities subject to the vagaries of time’ and power: this is Foucault’s ‘genealogical thesis’ (actually, this discovery – the historical value of concepts – is an implicit fact that goes along with the entire structure of Casey’s book). And given that we are living in an ‘epoch of space’, Foucault supports his genealogical thesis by presenting a thorough genealogy of modern spaces, which are embedded in various forms of real places – or ‘heterotopias‘ – such as schools, hospitals, prisons, cemeteries, or even theatres, cinemas, museums, and libraries. Casey notes, however, that one problem with Foucault’s inquiry into space and place is the lack of critical distinction between space and place, or even between other spatial and placial concepts, like location and site. In the end, his promising heterotopoanalysis remains flawed, and I completely agree with Casey.
The co-presence of place and space in the mundane world is also a characteristic trait in the work of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992); such co-presence manifests in the form of the famous dyadic relation between smooth and striated spaces; one – smooth space – more bodily in character, and offering a different perspective with respect the more static form of placial dwelling indicated by Heidegger: this is a form of nomadic space, or place, where dwelling is accomplished through walking or traveling from place to place, rather than residing in a settled form (dwelling in place). The other – striated space – is more abstract and geometrical, linked to logos, and, as Casey suggests at the end of his analysis, echoes a differentiation between the spatial and placial aspects of reality that dates back to Plato.
With the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), we uncover the possibility of viewing place as the scene of writing or the scene where a text takes its form – a previously unseen form of implacement![120] And since when architects make projects they are just performing a peculiar form of writing – architecture is ‘a writing of space, a mode of spacing which makes a place for the event’ Derrida says – we can see why Derrida chose to collaborate with architects like Bernard Tschumi (b. 1944) and Peter Eisenman (b. 1932) to explore how the act of spacing relates to real places. As in the previous example of smooth and striated spaces, deconstruction in architecture reveals a distinct sense of place, particularly a different way of inhabiting a place, contrasting with Heidegger’s modes of dwelling, building, and thinking; ultimately, we see an attempt to break free from the confinement and containment inherent in the traditional concept of place..
To rethink space as place – and not the reverse as in the early modern era – is the urgent task…
‘To rethink space as place – and not the reverse as in the early modern era – is the urgent task of everyone under consideration in this final chapter’ Casey says;[121] and when Derrida urges contemporary architects ‘to construct a new space and a new form, to shape a new way of building in which those [traditional] motifs or values [e.g., of habitation] are re-inscribed’ Casey notes that ‘given the problematic status of space in Western thought, it would be better to say that it is a matter of constructing a new place with a new form – a new way of building not just at or on a place but building place itself, building it anew and otherwise’.[122] I take Casey’s apt remark as a symptomatic fact concerning the ongoing ambiguity between the concepts of place and space, as if more than two thousand years of discussions on place and space were not enough to achieve a clear grasp and a shared understanding of their connections and differences.
Casey’s final considerations involve the unprecedented question of how place and gender intersect in Western thinking. The Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) was the first to address this question, arguing that not only are places sexually differentiated, but bodies, particularly the mother’s body, are also places in themselves. This nurturing model of place surpasses the strict model of containment offered by Aristotle’s place (contrary to Aristotle’s enveloping model of place, a feminine body-as-place is at the same time enveloping and enveloped, that is it has a dual envelope and dual extension: extended within – genitalia womb – and extended without – the skin as envelope of the flesh of the body) and also surpasses Plato’s nurturing envelope (yet single envelope, differently from Irigaray’s more spacious model): the receptacle-as-chōra. What’s also hopeful about Irigaray’s notion of sexually-differentiated place-as-body is that, being inherently sexual, implacement may also hold political and religious significance, as Casey observes.
Ultimately, I think this final chapter should be seen as Casey’s exploration of the diverse possibilities that emerge from the rediscovery of place, as pioneered by thinkers like Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, rather than a comprehensive critique of current trends in understanding place and space. As architects, geographers, philosophers, physicists, politicians, ecologists, sociologists, and scientists, we are all contributing to the histories of place and/or space, every day; for the case, we must acknowledge the groundbreaking contribution of Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place, which has greatly enhanced our understanding of meaning of spatiality.
I close this article with a final remark regarding my present work as an architect interested in the theoretical and practical exploration of the concepts of place and space. Like others who preceded me, I’m just trying ‘to give a face to place in the present’, to use an expression from Casey’s text. Then, ‘rethinking space and place’ – the fil rouge of my current work – builds upon a two-millennia legacy of debates about these concepts and contributes to the contemporary research effort to revalorize place and redefine space as place, as Casey suggests. Specifically, I aim to demonstrate that both place and space can be maintained as working concepts to explain complex phenomena, highlighting their differences and complementarities, particularly in a historical period when the constant appeal to hybrid domains (i.e., digital and/or virtual domains) demands a clarification, or reformulation, of the traditional meaning of spatial and/or placial concepts. Furthermore, I also draw on Casey’s argumentation in the Postface of his book to define place as a complex system of processes ranging from actual to ideal, complemented by the concept of space as a pure abstract entity (see my previous article What Is Place? What Is Space?). My goal is to integrate the ancient understanding of place, encompassing physical, metaphysical, and cosmological aspects, with the modern and contemporary understanding of place as a multifaceted phenomenon, including extensive and dimensional characteristics that are traditionally associated with space and time as autonomous concepts with respect to place, which is contrary to my (and to Casey’s) fundamental hypothesis concerning the primacy of place.
Notes
[1] Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place can be considered the first text to have systematically explored the history of the concept of place from a philosophical perspective, much like Max Jammer’s Concepts of Space, which pioneered the historico-scientific analysis of space concepts. Then, historically, we must give Casey credit for uncovering the hidden history of place, as he himself noted in his book’s preface that ‘the history of this continuing concern with place is virtually unknown’. His work filled a significant historico-philosophical gap, with far-reaching consequences for the concept of place and space. Meanwhile, Julian Barbour’s text, which will be discussed in a forthcoming article, is less well-known outside scientific circles but deserves consideration as a modern reference on space and place, comparable to Casey’s book. Although Barbour approaches space and place indirectly, analyzing the historical paths that led to ‘The Discovery of Dynamics,’ his work touches on the long-standing absolute/relative debate, which is also a central theme in Casey’s book, as it raises questions about where motion takes place (Where does motion take place? How can we discern motion?). By comparing space and place from different perspectives – philosophical, scientific, and historical – we can better understand these concepts.
[2] I borrowed the phrase ‘unclarified notions‘ from Edward Casey, who originally used it to describe the concept of place, which has sparked widespread interest in fields like architecture, anthropology, and ecology, yet remains unclear. I believe the same applies to space, particularly in my area of expertise, architecture, which is why I’ve adopted the plural form ‘unclarified notions‘. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. xii.
[3] Ibid., 340.
[4] Ibid., xi.
[5] Ibid., ix.
[6] Ibid., 118; this is the quotation in full: ‘the finally triumphant beast of Renaissance cosmology and theology is, indisputably, infinite space’.
[7] Ibid., ix, 4, 17, 32, 35, 58, 71, 90, 102, 204 (‘to be – to be sensible – is to be in place’), 248, 289 (‘to be psychical is to be in place’), 336 (‘to be is -still, or once again – to in place’), 340 (‘to be is to be in place – bodily’).
[8] Ibid., 336.
[9] Ibid., 337.
[10] ‘In all of these instances, place presents itself… as… the material or spiritual medium of the eternal or evolving topocosm’, Ibid., 5. By the term ‘topocosm’ is intended the prominent role that place has in the generation of a well-ordered and concrete world, while Casey’s reference to place as ‘spiritual medium’ for creation is exclusively referred to a specific gnostic doctrine (see note 6 page 344); indeed, in many narratives of creation the idea of concreteness associated to place prevails: at this regards, the intimate kinship between ‘solid body’ and place is a central and explicit theme in the Babylonian narrative of creation, the Enuma Elish, where places – to begin with, the earth and the sky – are created from the killed body of Tiamat.
[11] Ibid., 7.
[12] Ibid., 7.
[13] Ibid., 51. The phrase is taken from Aristotle (Physics, 208b35).
[14] Ibid., 55: ‘That is what place is: the first unchangeable limit (peras) of that which surrounds’ (Physics, 212a20-12).
[15] Ibid., 71.
[16] The question concerning the massive translation of Greek texts into Latin in the medieval period, including the challenge of accurately translating key spatial terms like kenon, chōra, and topos into Latin, is briefly discussed on page 107.
[17] In my view, it’s no coincidence that as our modes of thinking became more abstract, we shifted from mythical and religious creation narratives focused on concrete places to a monotheism that equated God with the infinite, intangible universe as a whole.
[18] Ibid., 83. See also note 16.
[19] Ibid., 84-85, 333.
[20] Ibid., 87.
[21] Ibid., 333.
[22] Ibid., 90.
[23] Ibid., 90.
[24] Ibid., 90.
[25] Ibid., 93.
[26] Ibid., 89.
[27] ‘The two thinkers who pursued this particular theme furthest were Damascius and Proclus’ Casey affirms (p. 91). However, as also Casey points out, with respect to Proclus ‘the matter is more complicated’ since, according to Casey, for Proclus place is both material and immaterial.
[28] Ibid., 90.
[29] Ibid., 94.
[30] I have used the double conjunction – ‘and/or’ – because there is a fundamental ambiguity in choosing the appropriate term to translate the original Greek terms topos and chōra used by some Neoplatonic authors. With respect to Philoponus, Casey says: ‘he proposes a theory of place or space – the ambiguity is inescapable…’ (p. 94); with respect to Simplicius, and regarding the relative-absolute issue, Casey says that ‘Simplicius’s response is that place/space is both absolute and relative’ (p.100). Furthermore, Casey’s translation of Theophrastus’s term chōra differs from Sambursky’s in the book The Concept of Place in Late Neoplatonism: Casey translates it as space, while Sambursky translates it as place. I interpret the fundamental ambiguity in the interpretation of space and place as a sign of the intrinsic kinship between spatial and placial notions or concepts, where the original Greek terms, topos and chōra, used by ancient authors, can be translated invariantly as place and/or space, with interpretations varying according to context, as well as the authors’ or commentators’ sensibility and philological sensitivity and knowledge.
[31] Ibid., 96.
[32] The question regarding the absolute or relative nature of place and/or space was taken into consideration by Proclus – ‘the supracelestial sphere “forms a kind of absolute place against which the cosmos can rotate and other things move”’ (p. 92) – by Theophrastus – he was the first to have theorized the essential relativity of place: ‘Perhaps place is not a substance in itself, but is predicated in relation to the order and position of bodies’ (p. 96), see note above -, by Philoponus – ‘it is not through desire for a surface that things move each to its proper place, but through the desire for that station in the order which they have been given by the Creator’ (p. 96) -, by Damascius – ‘the order and position of…parts is relative to the whole being’ or ‘even among incorporeal things there will be position according to their order’ (p. 97) – and by Simplicius as well– ‘place is a certain arrangement and measure of demarcation of position’ (p. 98). Conversely, the question related to the place of the cosmos and the consequent inquiry into the relation between the finite nature of place and the infinite, was especially pursued by Simplicius.
[33] Ibid., 102.
[34] According to Pierre Duhem, the series of 219 condemnations proclaimed by the Bishop of Paris in the year 1277 against the doctrines that denied or limited the power of God marked ‘the birthdate of modern science’. According to Casey himself, ‘one of the most fateful things condemned by the Condemnations was the primacy of place, thereby making room for the apotheosis of space that occurred in the seventeenth century’. Ibid., p. 107; see also note 12, page 382.
[35] Ibid., 111.
[36] Ibid., 107.
[37] These two tendencies result in what Casey calls ‘a divinized-imaginified space’. Ibid., 111.
[38] Ibid., 114.
[39] Ibid., 115.
[40] Ibid., 127.
[41] Ibid., 116
[42] Ibid., 117.
[43] Casey speaks literally of ‘the indeterminacy of space and place’ by taking as reference some statements of authors looking for a compromise between space and place (Pico Della Mirandola: ‘place is space vacant assuredly of any body…’; Tommaso Campanella: ‘space is the place of all things…’). ‘Compromise is a close cousin of confusion’, Casey explicitly says. Ibid., pp. 127-128. However, later in the book, Casey reads such confusion ‘positively’, as ‘the persistence of the high regard for place surviving through millennia’ (Ibid., page 135).
[44] Ibid., 127.
[45] As I mentioned in the Preliminary Notes, I think we’re currently in a historical phase where knowledge is being redefined, which will ultimately lead to a third grand systematization once our current scientific and philosophical theories converge into a unified understanding of reality. Just as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton did in the past, I believe that science, particularly in its pursuit of unifying the laws governing the physical universe, can catalyze a global effort to systematize knowledge. The interpretation of the concepts of space and place will change accordingly so will our interpretation of the diverse phenomena of reality, encompassing not only physical but also biological, sociocultural, and symbolic aspects. Casey, in the final pages of his historico-philosophical journey, specifically talked about a ‘third peripeteia’ with respect to the concepts of place and space: in a certain sense, I consider the observation that Casey made with respect to place and space as the specific outcome of a more global trend that regards our progressively changing modes of knowing the different aspects of reality in which we live – among them, reality as physical realm is certainly one of the primary concerns since man started philosophizing. How the physical realm correlates with the mental realm to define a unique system (a chōra-l system), or reality, governed by coherent systemic laws, and how concepts of place and space express this correlation, is the major theme of the on-going systematization of knowledge and concepts.
[46] Ibid., 133.
[47] William Gilbert in the book ‘De Mundo Nostro Sublunari Philosophia Nova’, which came out posthumously in 1655. Ibid., 135.
[48] Ibid., 139.
[49] Ibid., 141.
[50] Ibid., 144.
[51] Ibid., 150.
[52] Ibid., 150.
[53] At this regard, see Einstein’s article ‘The Problem of Space, Ether, and the Field in Physics’ where he said: ‘space as a continuum does not figure in the conceptual system (of Greek geometry – brackets are mine). This concept was first introduced by Descartes when he described the point-in-space by its coordinates. Here, for the first, time geometrical figures appear, in a way, as parts of infinite space, which is conceived as a three-dimensional continuum’. In Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc, 1954), p. 279.
[54] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place, 153.
[55] Ibid., 154-155.
[56] Ibid., 160.
[57] Ibid., 161. My judgement about Descartes’ treatment of place, space and matter, is less negative than Casey: I read Descartes’s ambiguous philosophy – on this issue – as a possibility left open for the redemption of the concept of place with respect to concepts of space and, to a lesser extent, matter.
[58] Ibid., 163.
[59] Ibid., 163.
[60] Ibid., 163.
[61] Ibid., 163-164.
[62] Ibid., 165.
[63] Ibid., 165.
[64] Ibid., 165.
[65] Ibid., 168.
[66] Ibid., 168.
[67] Ibid., 172, 173. In the same direction – the rehabilitation of the concept of place far beyond its non-exhaustive power of location or position – goes the possibility to interpret the Leibnizian monadology as a point of view (the point of view of the monad) in relation to the entire universe; ‘this view-point, belonging properly to the body, is indeed concretely placed’: Ibid., 179.
[68] Ibid., 173-174.
[69] Ibid., 178.
[70] Ibid., 179.
[71] Ibid., 183.
[72] Ibid., 183.
[73] Ibid., 189.
[74] Ibid., 191.
[75] I believe there is a continuous thread of thought from Aristotle to Newton, Kant, and later thinkers, regarding our understanding of reality’s fundamental spatial structure; after all, I believe the placial model of Aristotle – a container/containing model –, even if it had the (ontological) power to locate things, it also had within itself the (epistemological) limits that took Newton, and many others with him and after him, to make con-fusion between space and place and, finally, took Kant to identify space as an a-priori ideal structure. The redefinition of the concepts of space and place that I speak of in this website began soon after Newton, and passed through Kant as well as through many other later thinkers – most of all philosophers and physicists –, but it hasn’t been formalized yet. This is no surprise: in fact, more than two millennia passed from Aristotle to Newton and Kant, while only a few centuries separate the two latter thinkers from us. The philosophical and scientific journey to understand the fundamental structure of reality, particularly through the concepts of space and place, has been a convoluted and ongoing process; this ‘long continuous thread‘ has relentlessly evolved over the centuries, with epochs of systematization and redefinition, from Aristotle’s formalization of pre-scientific thought to Newton’s refinement of the concepts after the previous systematization. The periods of redefinition of knowledge, from Aristotle to Newton, then from Newton to Leibniz, Kant, Whitehead, Einstein, and the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, have reshaped our understanding of placial and spatial concepts and meanings. Currently, we are awaiting the third systematization of knowledge, which I believe will be achieved after the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics; if Aristotle’s systematization hinged around the concept of place (topos) and Newton’s systematization regarded absolute space, though very I tentatively, I would say that the next systematization will regard the mutuality between the two concepts, or, better, it will regard the mutuality between concrete and abstract placial/spatial aspects of reality (I think that what I often refer to as the ‘third systematization’ of knowledge, which is related to the way we interpret concepts of place and space, has a certain correspondence with what Casey calls ‘third peripeteia’ with respect to the alternate fate of those concepts projected into a future that we are still writing– ibid., p. 340). From the perspective of the physicist, the field concept seems to be the notion that will substitute the traditional concepts of place and space. Yet, I believe the field concept, may still be understood as a place – I used to say that fields are nothing other than physical states of place – provided that place is not understood according to the tradition, or, to put it another way, provided it is not merely understood as simple location for entities, position, site or point.
[76] Ibid., 204.
[77] Ibid., 204.
[78] Ibid., 205.
[79] Ibid., 210.
[80] Ibid., 211.
[81] Ibid., 212.
[82] Ibid., 212.
[83] Ibid., 213.
[84] Ibid., 213.
[85] Casey deals with the Whiteheadian notion of ‘withness’ at pages 214, 215: ‘Just as we are always with a body, so, being bodily, we are always within a place as well. Thanks to our body, we are in that place and part of it’ Casey explains.
[86] Ibid., 219.
[87] Ibid., 219.
[88] The very notions of body and place converge in the expression ‘field of localization’ : Husserl, in his ‘Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy’ explicitly speaks of the ‘the distinctive feature of the Body as a field of localization’ and of the subject as ‘an Ego to which a body belongs as field of localization of its sensation’. Casey too points out the intimate alliance between body and place with respect to Husserl’s argumentation (p. 227). Then, my body is nothing other than the field of localization – that is, a real place as I use to say – where my sensations and kinesthesis occur and where my movements and actions in relation to other bodies/places/fields of localization occur.
[89] Ibid., 219.
[90] Ibid., 219-220.
[91] Ibid., 224.
[92] Ibid., 220.
[93] Ibid., 238.
[94] Ibid., 229.
[95] Ibid., 230.
[96] Ibid., 231.
[97] Ibid., 232.
[98] Ibid., 235.
[99] Entities ‘ready-to-hand’ are objects of everyday life experience considered in their immediate functional relation with Dasein – e.g., a hammer that is at disposal to beat a nail, or the fork we need when we eat spaghetti, etc. They are the counterpart of entities ‘present-at-hand’ for which there is not a direct or immediate involvement – see note 97.
[100] Ibid., 250.
[101] Ibid., 250.
[102] Ibid., 251. Entities ‘present-at-hand’ are those entities that fall in the realm of perception but which have no direct engagement/involvement with Dasein concerning their immediate functionality and use (contrary to the entities ‘ready-to-hand’).
[103] Ibid., 252.
[104] Ibid., 260.
[105] Ibid., 261.
[106] Ibid., 274.
[107] Ibid., 283.
[108] By the term ‘fourfold’ Heidegger means ‘Earth and Sky, Mortals and Divinities’. With respect to the act of construction, I understand the fourfold as the necessary component of a sincere way of building. In this context ‘sincere’ regards the traditional way of building, a timeless way of building, which is, first and foremost, a historic, almost mythic modality of construction, where the immediate concern for functionality (at this regards, Heidegger’s choice of the bridge is self-explaining) joins spirituality. Then, the Earth and the Sky are at the same time a reference for the functionality and the spirituality that the tradition usually accords to the act of building. On the one hand, we have a call for sensitivity in regard to the immediate environment, to the type of ground, to the materials offered by Nature, to the exposure towards the sun and winds, or to weather conditions, etc., which are all conditions intrinsic to the functional role of a building; on the other hand, we have the tributes that were offered to the Gods before building in ancient times, the choice of particular places of spiritual value, the search for good omens before building, etc. In the very term ‘tradition’ the presence of those who are not here anymore, and who taught us how to build is actualized in any present act of building: this is what ‘mortals’ mean with respect to the term tradition, ultimately. Moreover, since tradition goes far back to a distant past in which man honoured divinities before building a city or a temple, in the tradition the relationship between Mortals and Gods is always renovated in the present. The Earth is the place of the Mortals, while the Sky is the place of Gods. This is the sense of a building that gathers the fourfold: the building – built according to the tradition – becomes the place where Mortals and Gods, Earth and Sky reside. A building is (becomes) a place whenever these conditions are verified.
Analogously, concerning my model of place, I say that architecture fulfils its function as object/place whenever it explicitly – and not incidentally! – deals with (or ‘gathers’, to use a Heideggerian terminology) physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and symbolic processes. I have substituted the Heideggerian fourfold with a seemingly more pragmatic fourfold; actually, the historical character of place that is intrinsic to my definition of place and the inclusion of symbolic processes as a constitutive moment of place (see the article What Is Place? What Is Space?), render the character of architecture-as-place I speak of no less functional and no less spiritual then Heidegger’s bridge. In fact, concerning the relation between architecture (building) and place, I believe my concept of place includes Heidegger’s treatment of the same argument even if the results – in terms of built architecture – may be very different.
[109] Ibid., 274.
[110] Ibid., 275.
[111] Ibid., 277.
[112] Ibid., 278.
[113] Ibid., p. 278. As far as I understand the notion of Ereignis, I see similarities between the working structure behind that notion and my model of place, which has the fundamental character of an event that derives from the constitutive processuality in which and out of which the where, the when and the what of reality become actualized in place-as-things (processuality regards the how and the why behind the actualization of things-as-place).
[114] Ibid., 279.
[115] Ibid., 283.
[116] Ibid., 283.
[117] Ibid., 286.
[118] Ibid., 289.
[119] Ibid., 295.
[120] This is what I call a symbolic form of place, or, to adhere to my definition of place (see the articles What Is Place? What Is Space? and The Place of a Thing) a text – or any form of writing – is a place emerging from symbolic – or intellectual – processes. Then, I cannot help but subscribing every single word when Casey says that ‘all writing, prosaic or poetic, is seen to be subtended by place as a precondition’; ibid., 311.
[121] Ibid., 309.
[122] Ibid., 319-320.
Works Cited
Barbour, Julian B. The Discovery of Dynamics. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2001.
Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
—. Imagining; A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
—. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
—. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc, 1954.
Jammer, Max. Concepts of Space – The History of Theories of Space in Physics. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.
Image Credits
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Image 07 by Friman.
3 Comments
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