I return to one of the arguments that interested me the most since I entered the spatial debate: the realism of space. This question inevitably connects to the spatial language we use to describe phenomena between concrete and abstract aspects of reality. But, most of all — I will especially argue in the final part of the text — this question is connected to a specific modern mindset, which, instead of the concrete experience of particular situations, favours a more abstract approach to reality, so that the whole of reality is lost in one of its representative aspects (extension, in the case of space): this is what we should intend by the expression ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, a threat to human life and knowledge according to the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead, who first used that expression in Science and the Modern World (1925).[1]
How many times we have heard artists describing their sculptures or installations extending into real space, or permeating the space around the work of art when such space is actually meant to be the name for the real ambience or atmosphere of a street, a public square, a park, the actual indoor environment of a museum, or even the room of an art gallery, which have many physical and emotional characters that qualify that environment in addition to its ‘extension’, which is the ultimate and residual meaning of space? Similarly, how many times we have heard architects illustrating the real architectures that they have designed and that they are presenting to clients, the public, interviewers, etc. by appealing to the term ‘space’ to describe the hall of the building they are in at that moment, the rooms in it, or whatever physical environment or locale belonging to that building, either indoor or outdoor, independently of its extension or ‘spaciousness’? Again: how many times, in common speech, do we use the abstract term space to define a real situation, an actual and particular physical environment or place, instead of the concrete names and the associated images that such names suggest — e.g., an office, a barber shop, the classroom of a school, the living-room of a house, or even a beautiful natural landscape such as the one pictured in Image 1, below?[2] (On the human bias of describing physical places or specific locales using the abstract and neutral term ‘space’, see the article Spatiophilia).
Image 1: Spazio Amato (i.e., ‘Loved Space’), a neon installation by the Italian artist Massimo Uberti, Capalbio (GR), Italy, 2020 (Info: Hypermaremma.com).
Here, I do not want to call your attention to the ways of describing different environments, whether physical or ideal/mental, with supposedly appropriate spatial terminology, which, at the moment, seems to me a quixotic enterprise because of the lack of a precise and variegated spatial vocabulary accepted by all, and because of the loose boundaries of spatial figurative expressions.[3] Then, we should be content with and believe any spatial description is appropriate or acceptable insofar as the message is received and understood, which is very often the case with the conventional sense of the term ‘space’, independently of the fact that the term is used by artists, architects, philosophers, geographers, scientists and social scientists, mathematicians, or politicians. An initial and viable strategy to discern between the different values of fundamental spatial terms or concepts such as ‘space’ and ‘place’ is — I suggest — to call one’s attention to those aspects of reality that are veiled behind that spatial, or placial, terminology, and especially behind the term ‘space’, which is the term for an abstract conceptualization that suggests an approach to reality primarily based on extension. By analogy with a famous passage in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, I believe experiencing the world as ‘extensio’, (i.e., extension, the essential and residual meaning of space) deprives reality of equally constitutive material and temporal values, that is, it deprives reality of its intrinsic and complex sensuous, temporally extended and located characters.[4] Because, fundamentally, this is what we are unconsciously or accidentally doing when we use the term space as a metaphor to define the concrete reality of a physical environment: we describe such environment implying extension is its characteristic mark. The fact that the complexity of reality can be reduced to extension alone, is simply not true — I am sure we all agree with that (with the possible exception of Descartes). The use of the term ‘space’ as a qualification for the background qualities or the containing qualities of whatever physical environment is — I believe, more often than not — an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, a fallacy we commit when we accidentally mistake the abstract for the concrete. The frequent appeal to the use of the term space as a metaphor may be not enough to avert the danger of being trapped into such metaphors losing sight of the difference between the concrete and the abstract.
… all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Fundamentally, apart from ‘extension’, space is not the most appropriate term to evoke those other equally important characteristic aspects of reality that accompany extension to the fullness of an environing situation, which is also characterized by temporality and materiality (to which we should ultimately trace back the movements of air, temperature, humidity, odours, sounds, colours, etc.), both equally important and determinative of our experience, the same way of extension. Therefore, by using space as a name for the overarching horizon of the physical environment or some parts of it, we accidentally cover many important characteristic aspects that any physical environment certainly has in addition to its extension. This is the sense of the spatial abstraction behind the concept of space.
When, in certain circumstances, I suggest the use of the term ‘place’ (a reformed notion, in the systemic or organic sense that I am arguing for through the pages at RSaP – Rethinking Space and Place , e.g., What Is Place? What Is Space? or Places Everywhere, From Space to Place) instead of ‘space’ to go one step further towards the flesh of reality, a step closer to the concrete experience of the physical world, I’m still aware of the difficulties to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between what we say or write and what we see, touch, and feel. Concerning this fact, I believe architecture, in many aspects, is a bit closer to the flesh of reality than poetry or literature, or certain forms of art. However, both architecture and poetry, literature, art, or even mathematics belong to reality, which is one and indivisible, and — I am maintaining at RSaP — resulting from the correlation of complementary aspects, such as the physical and the ideal or the concrete and the abstract, the actual and the potential, being and becoming, etc. (concerning the unity and opposition of correlative aspects of reality, or the general principle of polarity upon which reality discloses as one, see the article Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part Two, especially). My intent through the use of language, either architectural (by means of projects) or literary (by means of written texts) has always been that of reducing the gap between the opposites, as far as possible, and — I believe — in a more radical and analytical way than spatial metaphors or similes can do. Metaphors, and especially spatial metaphors, by blurring real boundaries with ideal domains, where limits or boundaries are absent, have the power to let us forget the real existence of such boundaries or limits. One thing is to forget boundaries and act as if there are no boundaries at all, in nature; another thing is to be conscious of the presence of boundaries, either epistemological or ontological, and see how boundaries function, see continuities and differences and imagine possibilities and consequences of crossing such boundaries, even in a direction from the concrete to the abstract. We cannot forget that boundaries or limits are, at the same time, situations of separation and union: to forget that, to forget the ultimate value of boundaries and limits, and behave as if there are no boundaries and limits at all in nature can have fatal consequences — this is the risk behind recurrent spatial metaphors. With the concepts of space and place, we are exactly at the core of the question regarding the presence/absence, continuity/discontinuity of boundaries and limits.
This is the fundamental thesis I am maintaining through the pages at RSaP: it is because of the intrinsic human tendency to overcome existing boundaries that mankind has lost the grip on the nature of reality believing the space of plans and projects (a potential, abstract, ideal and hypothetical domain of reality — a field of possibilities — and, as such, an unlimited domain) coincides with the place where such plans or projects become actual (the concrete and actual domain of reality, i.e., the limited domain of nature). Between the two conditions, there is the same difference that exists between a map and its territory or between reality and its model. It is this human condition, exacerbated in the modern era, which favoured certain daring or irresponsible behaviours in the attempt to overcome — or accidentally neglecting? — the limits of nature; those irresponsible behaviours have rapidly brought mankind to the current ecological crisis, more rapidly than expected natural events or climate oscillations can do.[5] As I showed in some recent articles, there is a direct connection between our understanding of nature (physis, the physical), our understanding of the concepts of space, place and matter, and our behaviours.[6]
Image 2: Ceci n’est pas une pipe, René Magritte, 1929.
In 1929 the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte made a famous painting: he drew a pipe on a yellow-cream uniform background, writing a note under the pipe, saying: ‘Ceci n’ est pas une pipe /This is not a pipe’ (Image 2, above), which is also the alternative title of the painting to ‘The Treachery of Images’. Almost forty years later, in 1966, Magritte came back to the same argument proposing another version of that painting, more elaborated and, henceforth, with even more different and ambiguous levels of interpretation that suggested a play of transference between linguistic and pictorial domains and the domain of reality :[7] in ‘Les Deux Mystere’ — this is the title of the later painting, see Image 3, below — two pipes are present: one, existing within a sort of school blackboard mounted on an easel; again, underneath the pipe, the same note of the 1929 painting, saying: ‘This is not a pipe’. The other pipe, bigger than the one on the blackboard, seems to float in an almost undifferentiated space, even if, apparently, less abstract than the yellow-cream background of the 1929 painting. Is this bigger pipe a pipe drawn on the background wall? Is this big pipe a reference to a real pipe and the other on the blackboard the representation of a pipe? Is the big pipe a mere illusion? Or what else?
Image 3: Les Deux Mystere,René Magritte, 1966.
In 1968 the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote a brief essay, which was later expanded and published in book form with the title ‘This Is Not a Pipe’ (1973); in his essay, Foucault analyzed the two paintings, offering a detailed, very personal and debated interpretation;[8] in the edition of the book I refer to for the present article (edition of 1983), a couple of letters written by Magritte himself to Foucault in 1966 were also included as a reply to some interpretations on the question concerning the relationship between words and things, which Foucault worked out in his famous ‘Les Mots et les Choses’ (in English ‘The Order of Things’). Here, I will just consider Magritte’s thought provocation and Foucault’s fundamental message: there are no pipes, here… I mean, there are no real pipes.
I believe there are some analogies between the question of the realism of Magritte’s pipes — ‘This is not a pipe’, Magritte says referring to the pipe he has drawn — and the realism of space — ‘This is not a space’ I say with respect to the use of the term space in the specific description of real experiences,phenomena or events, such as the beautiful installation of the Italian artist Carlo Bernardini, which is the subject of the header image above. Obviously, both situations, are grounded on linguistic conventions.
Foucault, by referring to the interpretation of the first painting and the text that accompanies the painting, says: ‘who would seriously contend that the collection of intersecting lines above the text [i.e., the drawing of the pipe] is a pipe?’,[9] that is a real pipe… Of course, it is a convention to say that what is represented is a pipe, and, in the very end, we all understand that what is represented in the drawing is not, or is different from, the real, corporeal, physical pipe. That’s the reason why Foucault immediately after that question, says: ‘My God, how simpleminded!’… must be the person who believes a drawing really corresponds to the real thing drawn, I add.[10] The two entities, the pipe and the drawing of the pipe, are evidently different entities. There is only a principle of resemblance between the two: the image resembles the real entity, but it is not the real entity. That’s why Magritte reminds us that what he has drawn on the canvas — a pipe — ‘is not a pipe’, actually. Here, the entire play of words is based on linguistic and pictorial or plastic conventions: on the one hand, the precise sequence of letters that compose the word ‘pipe’, immediately suggests to us the concept of the pipe, which we have learned to associate to a specific class of real objects; on the other hand, we have the image — the image of a pipe —, which primarily engages with our visual system to determine the nature of what we see, according to the acquired knowledge we have of the ensemble of lines and colours we have seen. Both forms of knowledge, the linguistic and the pictorial or plastic are based on conventions after which we can find a correspondence, more direct in the case of the image, less direct in the case of written words, between the image or words, and the real object. What disconcerts us is that in this specific case — the first painting of 1929, especially — the two conventions are, at the same time, convincing and contrasting, right and wrong, at the same time: then, the pipe — a pipe — is and is not a pipe, at the same time. Foucault, in his interpretation, goes even further proposing the image of the ‘calligram’ — an ensemble of words arranged to compose a form or image which is related to the sense of those words (a linguistic device used by Apollinaire in some of his poems) — to speak about the double sense that things defined through words or images can have, and the irreducibility of the two languages to each other — the written and the pictorial — and to reality.[11]
With a calligram, Foucault argues, it is as if the pictorial image composed by words prevails over the linguistic sequence and the sense of such words; it is as if the contemporaneous presence of the sense evoked by words, on the one side, and what the image evokes, on the other side, is impossible; as soon as we have grasped the sense of such words, their presence and meaning vanish to leave room to the image and to what it evokes. This fundamental incompatibility or irreducibility between different languages and their irreducibility to reality takes us back to Magritte’s painting where words contradict the image and the image contrasts reality. This is not a pipe. The image of a pipe is not a pipe, that is, a real pipe.
Images 4-5: A calligram is an ensemble of words presented in the form of an image.
Foucault also considers analytically the other painting by Magritte, Les Deux Mystere (Image 3, above), which is the reiteration of the same message, in between words, images and reality. Here, the play between images and words is still more complex and messages are even more ambiguous and contrasting. There is a riddle of interpretations or a play of transferences, as Foucault says. Yet, at the end of the analyses of the two paintings, concerning the nature of the pipe, Foucault concludes: ‘Nowhere is there a pipe.’[12] Fundamentally, this is a position I agree with since neither a text nor an image can completely fill the distance between the convention and the physical entity subject of that convention (the two conventions are: the text — that is, the sequence of letters than compose the word ‘pipe’, and the image – that is, the ensemble of lines and colours in the form of a pipe). The physical entity is the real subject of that convention, that is a real pipe.
As Magritte and Foucault have shown in the works we are considering, and as far as the question of the interpretation of words, images, and things is ambiguous and at risk of misunderstanding, the question concerning the nature of space and spatial language is no less ambiguous and no less prone to misunderstanding. The presuppositions on which the spatial debate rests (which are the result of millenary discussions) are the main obstacle we have to face to have a clear understanding of the problems at issue, problems which may mislead our inquiry into the analysis of phenomena. I have dedicated a few articles to this specific question — the presuppositions behind our understanding of spatial concepts (Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence, Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature, and Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature). To begin with, this is my position expressed through the pages at RSaP, I’m showing that there is no accessibility to the quagmire of spatial language and concepts, and particularly to space, without a thorough examination and knowledge of the histories of spatial concepts from both physical and philosophical perspectives, which are the basic perspectives that determined their meanings in other fields of human knowledge (the two perspectives, the philosophical and the physical obviously coincided before the modern era, since there was no real separation between philosophy and physics).
‘real’ space — a very incomplete and vague conception in all minds.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Principles of Psychology.[13]
Video 1: Ceci n’est pas un espace, video by Alessandro Calvi Rollino. In the background Il Punto dell’ Infinito, an installation by Carlo Bernardini, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano, IT, 2023.
Bernardini uses optical fiber in order to create mental drawings that rise in a dark space, that dominate and transform the space itself changing the observer’s perceptive coordinates… art based on the space-light elements, creating optical fiber installations and sculptures. They are luminous geometric shapes that, according to the point of view, change, giving spectators the impression of looking at different installations. The abstract shape aims at transforming the perception of the place, incorporating the air space in the architectural structure. The visual shapes, because of their continuous change, seem to determine a reconfiguration of the space in a new architecture of light, whether the observation point is internal or external… His visual research focuses on the concept of perceptive transformation where the light creates a drawing in the space, a drawing that changes depending on the points of view and according to the movement of the viewer, who physically enters the artwork.
IL PUNTO DELL’ INFINITO, Carlo Bernardini.[14]
To clear out some legitimate ambiguities that may arise after Foucault’s interpretation of Magritte’s paintings, when I have added the text ‘Ceci n’est pas un espace’ — ‘This is not a space’ — on the header image above, I did not want to refer that quotation to the image itself, or to any other image that can be used to represent the artist’s installation, e.g., Image 6, below, or even any possible re-interpretation of it, just like the Image 8, below, where I used a long time exposure for my camera and some post-production effects (in addition to the original black and white filter) to evoke the sense of an imaginary environment or space. An image — any image — is not a ‘first-hand’ reality: it is something abstract, such as space is; so, within the limits of a descriptive image, it could be appropriate to speak in terms of space, even if such an image is the reproduction of a real place (it could be appropriate does not mean that it is appropriate: the free linguistic choice concerning the spatial term used is anyway subjected to different connotations). As in the case of Magritte’s 1966 painting, there are many layers of interpretation, possibilities and ambiguities between that which is concrete and that which is abstract, including texts and images.
Image 6: Il Punto dell’Infinito, an installation by Carlo Bernardini, La Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano, IT, 2023.
Image 7: ‘This space is part of the work of art…” the sign says. The abstract, space, taken (or mistaken) for the concrete — place.
Image 8: Imaginary space, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino.
So, I need to be more explicit to avoid as many ambiguities as possible and say that with that text on that image, that is, when I say ‘Ceci n’est pas un espace /This is not a space’ on the header image above, I want to refer to the real specific situation, i.e., the first-hand reality, the real experience that a real observer, like me when I was there, could have of that work of art — an installation within the courtyard of the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milano, a place, where, many years ago, before a recent conversion of the entire area and buildings, an industrial district existed (there was a factory producing equipment for railways and tramways). Today, those buildings are used to host events, exhibitions, creative laboratories, etc. Here, all we have, as a matter of fact, is really concrete places, specific places, and/or objects: the buildings, the courtyard, the ground made of cement bricks, benches, trees, the park behind the main building, the adjacent streets, etc., not ‘a space’, or ‘spaces’, as the website of The Fabbrica del Vapore immediately suggests in its homepage, transforming (abstracting) real places and objects into space or spaces.[15] Therefore, this means that when I was there, walking around and within the art installation made of optical-fiber cables, I did not perceive ‘space’, and ‘space’ did not change while I was moving: what I saw and perceived was the sum of different perspectival configurations of physical objects or places, such as optical-fiber cables, the ground, the facades of buildings, the courtyard, the moon, the air or the atmosphere in-between them which allowed the transmission of light, sounds (groups of people speaking, cars and trams passing in the nearby streets etc.), odours…
Analogously, that quotation — ‘This Is Not a Space’ — is not referred to Video 1, above, which, again, just like any video, could be arguably seen as a second-hand reality, a reconstruction of reality, and as such, an abstract domain for which the use of the term space, an abstract term, could be appropriate, even if ambiguous, certainly more ambiguous than in the case of the image accompanied by the text (we tend to believe videos are more real than images because of the temporal dimension, which is excluded by still images). Even in this case, the situation reminds us of the difference between the first and the second painting made by Magritte, where there are many different layers of abstractions or a play of transferences that runs from one context to another; here, in addition to a text and an image, we have a video. Therefore, even in this second case, where the medium I have used is different from a static image, the text I have used — This Is Not a Space — explicitly refers to the real experience of a real observer and the real place that hosted that installation. In that real experience, in that place, there was no ‘space’, actually.
Even if an art installation, conceived by the creative mind of an artist, naturally belongs to a symbolic domain, which is also a mental domain (and which is also the domain of space), when the installation is built, realized or installed into a real environment, a specific environment, that symbolic domain inevitably merges with other domains, which are concrete: physical, chemical, biological, and social domains or realms. The same holds when any project, in whatever domain of human knowledge and experience, is translated into reality: here, space (the ‘potential’ arena where that project has been conceived or imagined) should leave room to place, or to other more concrete spatial (or placial’) terms, e.g., environment, atmosphere, ambience, locale, setting, courtyard, park, etc., which suggest that much other information is conveyed, in addition to extension – the residual meaning of space. To put it bluntly, in many specific situations, I believe we ought to resist the temptation to describe a real physical environment or any part of it, simply as ‘a space’, even if we have this linguistic possibility: the same way there is and there is not a pipe in the painting, there is and there is not ‘a space’ in the description of a real environment, situation or event. There is space since it is a linguistic possibility (a symbolic entity), and we may imagine a real place or environment as a space, symbolically reducing that place or environment to its extensive and supposedly neutral containing essence. There is no space, since a physical environment cannot be reduced to a mere extensive aspect detached from the many characters and values (physical, chemical, biological, ecological, social…) that are naturally present in any actual environment. Therefore, we could accept space as a descriptive term (and this is what we do when we appeal to the role of space as a metaphor), but we should be aware that in reality – I mean ‘reality’ as a concrete fact or realm – there is no ‘space’. Then, fundamentally, the physical environment, or any part of it, is not a space. To justify the use of space in metaphorical or descriptive circumstances as a linguistic possibility that we have at our disposal, does not change the basic issue I want to point out: space connotes characters (space is an extension, fundamentally) that are reductive with respect to the complexity of the characters and aspects that a real situation, environment or experience convey (temporal, material, and local characters of which extension is an attached aspect).
At RSaP, I am arguing that space is often the misnomer for something else when it is used to describe real environments, events or circumstances. But, as I said in a passage before, it is not the linguistic choice of terms that should interest us, here (call it place, call it space, call it the aether, call it chōra, if you think your message is complete and received without misunderstanding): the real issue is that behind space, and therefore behind the metaphor of space used to describe real situations, events, or environments, there is something hidden that we tend to forget or neglect. This is what we should focus our attention on: What do we miss in our descriptions and analyses of real phenomena when we use the term space?
What do we miss in our descriptions and analyses of real phenomena when we use the term space?
In the pages of this website, I’ve always maintained space belongs to abstract domains (e.g., mental, ideal, cognitive, descriptive, potential, etc.), so that the relation between space and the physical environment is equal to the relation between a map (space) and the territory (place); every time we use space as a physical term or a metaphor for the real arena of things and happenings (that is, every time we pass the limits of the abstract existence of space, as, for example, in some spatial descriptions used in the quotation or Image above which describes the suggestive work of the Italian artist Carlo Bernardini) we are at risk of misleading an abstract entity (space) for a concrete entity — the physical environment or any of its physical characters or components. If, from a linguistic and epistemological perspective, I agree that an artist (or an architect) can imagine spaces, draw spaces, design or project spaces, from a physical perspective, it is debatable, not to say fallacious, to affirm that such spaces may condition the perception of a real observer since space, like any other abstract entity, cannot be viewed, sensed or perceived, just imagined. Concerning the inapplicability of the concept of space to the concrete realm of facts and perceptions I always refer to the pioneering work of the American psychologist James J. Gibson — see James J. Gibson on the Concept of Space. So, expressions like ‘physical space’, or expressions that combine space with physical entities, whether physical fields, the light or the air, as in the quotation above that explains the work of art, if, on the one hand, contribute to our imagination and descriptive abilities, on the other hand, imply the serious risk that we mistake an imagination or a description for reality. Imagination or descriptions are parts of reality; they are not reality (that is, they do not exhaust the complexity of reality).
The physical environment, just like any of its components, either microscopic or macroscopic, hasn’t extension alone as its characteristic mark; and most of all, an extension cannot be severed from the material, temporal and local characters of things; any extension intrinsically belongs to the situated material and temporal character of things. When Heidegger says that the ancient Greeks did not experience the world according to ‘extensio’ — which, on the contrary, is what we, modern men, tend to do — he is saying that what counted for them was the appearance and presence of physical entities in a certain situation, for a determined amount of time; materiality, locality and temporality, together, to connote the processuality intrinsic to any real event or situation, in a determinate circumstance (a conflation of materiality – matter is extended… -, temporality, or duration, and locality: matter, time and place). Modern men by adding many abstract levels to the experience of reality have traded such original and complex qualitative and quantitative entanglement of sensuous materially extended, local and temporal aspects for spatial extension alone, abstracting quantitative aspects, and removing the other aspects. An abstraction (such as a pure extension) has no time or place contingencies; as such, it is valid everywhere and every time (it is universal). However, in nature, there is no real extension severed from the material, temporal and located characters of things that sustain that extension. This means that there are no such real things as a simple location or a simple extension in nature; these are two instances of the fallacy known as the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Similarly, there is no real thing such as a simple duration. To understand space as a physical aspect of reality, which is what the abuse of spatial metaphors seems to imply, is to fall into such a fallacy; a consequence of the abuse of spatial metaphors (i.e., the use of the term space as the arena of concrete facts, events or phenomena) is that we lose our grasp on reality, forgetting the difference between its abstract and the concrete sides, or focusing on quantitative aspects at the expense of equally important qualitative aspects.
Behind fallacies of thought errors result, either ‘grave or light’; fatal errors can happen when our thoughts are entangled in metaphors, and space is one of the most powerful and obsessing of metaphors.[16] The risk is that we are not able (or we forget) to discern between reality and its model. This is a question we often overlook: the abuse of the term space took us to generalizations or inappropriate abstractions that are turning against ourselves, making plans, which are abstract and have space as their natural arena, without realizing the limits of reality, which is a place, a limited physical domain (so, infinity belongs to potentiality, to ideality, to the mathematical, while finitude belongs to actuality, to the physical). Alfred N. Whitehead intuited this fact, this danger, before others by explicitly saying that mistaking the abstract for the concrete is a typical issue of modernity, which ‘threatens our very civilization and quality of life.’[17] Now, as I also showed through a series of articles dedicated to the work of the American philosopher Ivor Leclerc, an interpreter of Whitehead, many years after that illuminating and frightening prophecy, I am directly associating that critical warning with the contingencies of spatial concepts, our understanding of them, and the present time of ecological (or climatic) crisis. I repeat what I have said in an opening passage: ‘it is because of the intrinsic human tendency to overcome existing boundaries that mankind has lost the grip on the nature of reality believing the space of plans and projects (an abstract and hypothetical domain of reality, which is infinite or unlimited) coincides with the place where such plans or projects become actual (the concrete and actual domain of reality, i.e., the limited domain of nature)’; this fact determined the adoption of social and economic behaviours, related to unlimited models of growth within the finite horizon of our bio-physical world, that are taking us to the catastrophe, as the German-born American Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas clearly said more than thirty years ago.[18]
Mistaking space for a physical entity or attributing space an improper domain of existence as when we use expressions such as ‘physical space’, ‘corporeal space’ or, in more specific contexts which regard my profession, ‘urban space’ or ‘public space’ with reference to the actual physical territory where people behave socially, are some of those cases in which the threat evoked by Whitehead may materialize in different guises, because we may mistake reality for its model. As I said elsewhere (e.g., in Beyond Architectural Realities: Place, Space, and the In-Between) space, being a representative term for reality and not reality, abstracts and shows some characters of reality, leaving behind and veiling other characters that are equally important; this means that instead of reasoning on all the characters that determine the nature of reality as a whole (an organic whole or system), we select some characters of it making partial representations, believing they are exhaustive.
There are at least two important questions hidden behind the conception of space taken for the arena of all events (the ‘where’ of real things, phenomena, or events) — i.e., the abstract mistaken for the concrete:[19] the first regards what is left behind in the inquiry into reality, which is the biggest concern we have considered so far. The second is a more philosophical consideration and regards two competing modes of thinking about reality: one more abstract, which is the one that considers space the ‘where’ of all existing things, phenomena or events. This spatially-based and abstracting conception of reality is an explicit legacy of modernism. It is this abstract model (of which ‘space’ is one characteristic aspect), I’ve argued, that has taken us to the current critical situation for mankind, a criticality which is resumed by the current ecological crisis — this is what I am holding at RSaP, corroborated by some basic argumentation from Whitehead’s organic vision of nature. The other mode of thinking about reality, more faithful to our concrete experience, which is the modality I am promoting through the pages of this website, is based on a placial conception of reality, where place is considered a more appropriate concept than space to account for both events and the scene where events happen (events are the place of processes), so that place is, at the same time, figure and ground, object and background, an aspect that unveils the solidarity of all things (every-thing is place). This second hypothesis, which I am pursuing here and is very close to Whitehead’s philosophy, is a possible antidote against the reductionist, mechanic and deterministic vision of modernity. Reality, Whitehead holds, is a nested chain of processes: processes, within processes, within processes… Similarly, the systemic conception of reality I call for considers reality as a nested chain of places – the place where processes become actual so that reality can also be seen as a constellation of places: places within places, within places, within places… Given that places are, fundamentally, the specific places of processes (it is the actualization of processes that creates finite entities; such finite entities we know as physical objects — therefore there is almost an identification between objects and places, the two being united in an indissoluble relationship), we arrive at the systemic or organic, placially-based structure of reality I’ve talked about in different occasions, e.g., in From Space to Place, Places Everywhere, What Is Place? What Is Space? and On the Structure of Reality. This is what reality, or nature is, concretely: a place of processes.
This important difference between the two concurrent modes of thinking about reality, one more abstract — which considers reality as a spatial domain (a legacy of modern rational thought moving on the background of a mechanical, deterministic and reductivist mindset), the other more concrete — which considers reality as a placial domain — I am proposing — and which is the bearer of a systemic or organic mindset, of which the mathematician and philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead was one of the first promotors, was especially considered in the past two articles Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature and Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature.
It is important to point out that abstraction, in whatever form, is a grandiose cognitive possibility that human beings have to draw a coherent image of reality out of the whole mess of real processes in nature. As Edward Thompson III correctly observed in a paper dedicated to the elucidation of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, it is not abstraction per se a risk for human inquiry, ‘it is the misuse of abstraction which misplaces concreteness. Consequently, we inquire and live with inadequate abstractions and insufficient concreteness.’[20] I believe the frequent abuse of spatial metaphors can be one of those cases, that is: the obsessing use of the term space to characterize actual happenings or situations can be one of those cases of inadequate abstraction that leads to insufficient concreteness (again I redirect you to the article Spatiophilia to see how often actual environments and specific situations are characterized as ‘spaces’). After having associated space with an abstract, quantitatively-based conception of nature derived from a modern, rationalistic, mechanistic and deterministic mindset that tends to the oblivion of qualitative aspects, and after having realized that ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness poses a significant challenge to our modern civilization and culture’ and that ‘our concrete experience of real particular situations is not respected by analyses that narrowly abstract from that situation and build pictures of reality based upon only certain restricted fields of experience’, I join Professor Thompson’s conclusion in saying that, in order to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and do better inquiry, we should ‘let our theorizing be responsible to ALL of our concrete experience, pay patient and direct aesthetic attention to its concrete qualities, and we will find that organismic rather than mechanistic theories will emerge and fairly win the ongoing warrant of experience.’[21] The reconsideration of the concepts of place and space that I propose at RSaP, is in agreement with this organismic or systemic vision of nature, as also the past articles on the presentation of Leclerc’s work showed. [22]
Conclusions
We have considered the spatial concepts we inherited from modernism, and, specifically, the generic concept of space (without excluding more recent abstract variations from physics, e.g., spacetime, or without excluding the social meanings of space, including a cognate ‘non-entity’ concept such as ‘non-places’) as possible instances of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, an accidental fallacy of thought described by Alfred N. Whitehead. We have seen how the fallacy of misplaced concreteness may negatively condition our understanding of reality by selectively abstracting certain properties without considering that other properties or characters of reality we have left back with abstraction are as fundamental as the property abstracted in order to have a more accurate cognizance and experience of the physical world (concerning space, the selected property is ‘extension’, which is the ultimate or residual meaning of space, a property which favoured the affirmation of a cognate conceptualization: ‘simple location’). Years before Whitehead, the same type of fallacy of thought and the same worries were also expressed by the American philosopher and psychologist William James with the expression ‘vicious abstractionism’. [23]
Let me give the name of ‘vicious abstractionism’ to a way of using concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privately; we reduce the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of ‘nothing but’ that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and finds impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of the universe may, I am convinced, be traced to this relatively simple source. The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Meaning of Truth.
Notes
[1] The fallacy of misplaced concreteness — i.e., ‘the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete’ — is a notion introduced by Alfred North Whitehead, in the book Science and the Modern World (New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1925), 52, 54, 59. See also Note [17], below.
[2] Names are abstract entities, inventions of the human mind; however, there are names that directly refer to concrete things or entities such as ‘chairs’, ‘rocks’, ‘pens’, ‘roses’, etc. — Heidegger would say, ‘things present-at-hand’ — and names that refer to more abstract entities (e.g., number, God, faith, dream, space, etc.). Here, by the term ‘concrete name’ I refer to the first class of things or entities, that is concrete physical things directly evoked by a certain name (I also include the physical environment, or even place, as the collective name of concrete things or entities). See the introduction of the article Place Kicks Us Back, Space… and What Is a Thing? which are based on Heidegger’s essay What Is a Thing? See the section ‘Various Ways of Questioning About the Thing’ in Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (South Bend: Gateway Editions Ltd., 1967), 1.
[3] It seems to me we still have to develop and formalize an appropriate and rich spatial vocabulary, accepted by any culture or people, to describe physical and ideal domains or environments (for instance, I would not qualify as ‘space’ the Kantian notion of the a-priori structure that informs and gives an order to our perception and knowledge of the physical world… Similarly, I would not speak of ‘perception of space’ if space is a non-entity, as also Kant observed, something which cannot be perceived but only imagined or conceived of by reason). Without such a definite spatial and placial vocabulary any hypothesis of discernment between appropriate or inappropriate spatial terminology or any difference between spatial and placial terminology is doomed to incomprehension and, eventually, to failure. In this regard, it comes to my mind the (debated) question concerning the rich Eskimo vocabulary for the word snow: they have different words for falling snow, the snow on the ground, drifting snow, snowdrift, etc. when in English there is just the word ‘snow’. Similarly, it seems to me, the term ‘space’ is over-abused in many specific situations where other terms (e.g., place, location, locale, setting, room, territory, region, atmosphere, ambience, mood, park, shop, etc.) could be more appropriate to the concreteness of a situation or of its description.
[4] In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger explained that, contrarily to modern habits, the ancient Greeks did not experience the world ‘according to “extensio” but instead according to place (topos) as “chōra”, which means neither place nor space but what is taken up and occupied by what stands there.’ In Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 69
[5] It is the entire crisis of a model of society, therefore a social and an economic crisis other than ecological or climatic.
[6] The reference is to the articles I dedicated to the presentation of Ivor Leclerc’s work: Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence; Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature, and, finally, Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature.
[7] We can consider ‘linguistic and pictorial domains’ abstract domains.
[8] Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 3.
[9] Ibid., 19.
[10] Ibid., 19.
[11] Ibid., 20, 73 (plate 7), 74 (plate 8).
[12] Ibid., 29.
[13] William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. II (London: McMillan and Co, Ltd., 1938), 269.
[14] Il Punto dell’ Infinito, an installation by Carlo Bernardini (curated by Gisella Gellini and Gaetano Corica), Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano, IT, 2023.
[15] ‘The Fabbrica del Vapore is a space of the Municipality of Milan, managed by the Culture Department – Special Projects Unit and Fabbrica del Vapore as a place for the promotion of youthful creativity, entertainment and aggregation. The Municipality of Milan coordinates the “Creative Workshops” project and takes care of the planning of the activities and events that take place in the spaces subject to temporary concession’. The Fabbrica del Vapore: Space or Place? Two different names for the same thing suggest to me that something is ill-defined: place, space or the Fabbrica del Vapore?
Image 9: Home-page, description of: ‘The Fabbrica del Vapore, a space of the Municipality of Milan…’. Here, space and place, which I pointed out in red/blue dots, are used indifferently.
Image 10: Again, the abstract taken for the concrete (‘space/spazio’ instead of ‘building/edificio’) at the Fabbrica del Vapore.
[16] The reference is to a passage in the novel ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (see Entangled in Space) and to a passage in the essay ‘The Language of Space’ by Michel Foucault, where the Franch author characterizes space as ‘the most obsessing of metaphors in today’s languages’; in Michel Foucault, ‘The Language of Space’, in Geography, History and Social Sciences edited by Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer (The GeoJournal Library, vol 27. Dordrecht: Springer, 1995), 51.
[17] ‘Whitehead is concerned that the actual historical development of science has contributed to a modern world view in which misunderstanding this basic issue [the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete] threatens our very civilization and quality of life’, in Edward H. Thompson III, ‘The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Its Importance for Critical and Creative Inquiry’, in Interchange, vol. 28/2 & 3, 1997, 220.
[18] H. Jonas, Dem bösen ende näher , Der Spiegel n°20, 1992. I have read the Italian version of the interview in Jonas, Sull’ Orlo dell’ Abisso: Conversazioni sul Rapporto tra Uomo e Natura, edited by Paolo Becchi (Torino: Einaudi, 2000).
[19] I am making these observations by analogy with Edward H. Thompson’s above-mentioned essay; see page 220.
[20] Ibid., 221.
[21] Ibid., 229.
[22] I especially refer to Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature and Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature.
Concerning the originary closeness between ‘systema’ and ‘organism’ (hence, between ‘systemic’ and ‘organic conceptions’) see Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature. I recall, here, a meaningful passage in that article:
‘I would like to remark on the contiguity between the notion of “organism” and that of “system”: Leclerc defines those emergent integral compound entities as “organisms”, properly, since the concept of an “organism” is that of an entity in which parts function with reference to the whole; that is, the parts or constituents are “organs” (in the original Greek meaning of the term as “instruments”) of the whole. An organism — Leclerc concludes — in other words is an entity in which the whole determines the functioning, i.e., acting, of the parts or constituents’, whose combined acting is not reducible to their simple aggregation, as constituents.
I observe that the term “system”, is a derivation of the Latin “systema”, which, in turn, is a translation for the Greek “sustema”, σύστημα, which means “a whole compounded of several parts or members, a system”, derived from the combination of the prefix “sun-”, or “syn-” (meaning “with”, “together”, “in company with”) and the verb “hístēmi”, ἵστημι, which means “to stand, make to stand, set, place…” (the Indo European root “ste-” or “sta-” is the basic root on which notions of place, localization, or position, are constructed — see the article Back to the Origins of Space and Place) hence the meaning “to set together, combine, associate, unite, put together, bring together as friends, etc.” It is now evident the origin of the contiguity between the term “organism” and the term “system”, for which, analogously to an organism, the whole is “greater” than its constituent parts.’
[23] William James, The Meaning of Truth (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 249-50.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
—. ‘The Language of Space’, in Geography, History and Social Sciences edited by Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, The GeoJournal Library, vol 27. Dordrecht: Springer, 1995.
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
—. What is a Thing? South Bend: Gateway Editions Ltd., 1976.
James, William. The Meaning of Truth. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909.
—. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. II. London: MacMillan and Co, Ltd., 1938.
Jonas, Hans. Sull’ Orlo dell’Abisso: Conversazioni sul Rapporto tra Uomo e Natura, edited by Paolo Becchi. Torino: Einaudi, Torino, 2000.
Thompson, H. Edward III. ‘The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Its Importance for Critical and Creative Inquiry’, in Interchange, vol. 28/2 & 3, 1997.
Whitehead, Alfred N. Science and the Modern World. New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1925.
Image and Video Credits
Featured Image, Ceci n’est pas un espace, image by Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC BY-NC-SA. In the background, Il Punto dell’Infinito, an installation by Carlo Bernardini, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano, IT, 2023.
Image 1 (source) ‘Spazio Amato’, on insideart.eu
Video 1 by Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC BY-NC-SA.
Images 4-8 by Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC BY-NC-SA.
Image 9 Homepage lafabbricadelvapore.org
Image 10 by Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC BY-NC-SA.
