The Fate of Place - Edward Casey

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true that “everything is in the world” (212b17) and that there is nothing outside the world—no external void—the world-whole encompasses any particular place of any given changeable body and must be a global Place for that place-cum-body. (That the total world is a Place follows from the fact that it contains and surrounds all more particular places within it.) A place is not only a place for a body but a place in the larger world-Place.82 In addition, only such a cosmic Place can make sense of Aristotle’s insistence on the irreducibility of the up/down dimension. Construed as cosmic, this dimension signifies that the earth is at the center of the universe and the heavens at its outer limit.83 But to make this latter claim—to say that the earth is always and only at the center of the universe—is to call for a sense of space as absolute or global that is not allowed, strictly speaking, by the container model in its constrictive, localizing character. (3) The full determination of the “first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds” remains moot. In the case of the floating vessel, is this limit the immediately surrounding water regarded as an ideal perimeter (yet as flowing water, it is constantly changing, with the result that the place of a stationary boat will be continually changing), or is it the river’s bed-and-banks or even the river itself as a whole (in both of these last cases, two boats equidistant from two banks but heading in opposite directions will occupy the same place)?84 This seemingly trivial but in fact momentous question was to engage over two thousand years of debate in Western philosophy: it is still a live issue for Descartes in the seventeenth century A.D. (4) Finally, we must inquire as to what it means to contain something. Is it merely a matter of “holding,” as is implied by the verb periechein—in which case, the emphasis is on the act of delimitation, that is, of surrounding? Or is it a question of establishing a boundary—which stresses the surrounder? Where the former interpretation directs us to what is surrounded, the latter points to what is other than, and beyond, the surrounded object (and perhaps even beyond the surrounder itself). How are we to choose between these two interpretations—one of which stresses the container as limit, the other the container as boundary? And if we cannot choose effectively, are we not confronted with an essentially undecidable phenomenon?

      Despite these perplexities and still others,85 we need to retain what is most original—and most lasting—in Aristotle’s mature vision of place. This is the acknowledgment of place as a unique and nonreducible feature of the physical world, something with its own inherent powers, a pre–metric phenomenon (thus both historically and conceptually pre-Euclidean in its specification), and above all something that reflects the situation of being in, and moving between, places. It is just this accommodating and yet polyvalent model of place that became lost in Euclidean and post-Euclidean theories of strictly measurable space.86 Aristotle was able to resist this mensurational view even as he was drawn to it early in his career: he came to realize that, regarded as extension or interval, place becomes merely an item of exact quantitative determination. For what matters most is not the measurement of objects in empty space but the presence of sensible things in their appropriate and fitting places.

      In effecting this tour de force—whereby a focused, forceful description yields what may well be the most astute assessment of place to be found in Western philosophy—Aristotle proceeds with a phenomenologist’s deft sensibilities.87 This is most evident in his resolute refusal to restrict the phenomenon of place to atomistic or formal properties. Just as he rejects Plato’s attempt to regularize sensible bodies by the imposition of elementary geometric figures (he takes such bodies to be straightforwardly “what is extended in three dimensions”),88 so he approaches place on its own terms. His preoccupation with the propriety of place is evident in his telling remark that “each thing moves to its own place” (Physics 212b29), that is to say, to its proper natural place. That each such place is encompassed by the common place of the firmament—and that this latter is conceived as having constant circular curvature—does not mean that Aristotle has “spatialized” place in the manner of the spatialization of time decried by Bergson and Heidegger alike.89 Problematic as we have just seen it to be, the very nesting of special topoi within an overarching Topos has the virtue of conceiving the cosmos not as an empty and endless Space but as an embracing Place, filled to the brim with snugly fitting proper places. The firmament that encircles the world-whole is at once a paradigm for all lesser places and filled with these very same places. Everything, or almost everything, is in place. To be an existing sensible thing is never not to be in some place. Place prevails. Archytas stands vindicated.

      Aristotle surpasses Archytas, however, in his eagerness to show just how “it is obvious that one has to grant priority to place” and just why “it is the first of all things.”90 He does so by demonstrating that place, beyond providing mere position, gives bountiful aegis—active protective support—to what it locates. Defined as a bounding container, place in Aristotle’s sure hands takes on a quite dynamic role in the determination of the physical universe. Place indeed “has some power.” It has the power to make things be somewhere and to hold and guard them once they are there. 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 and not only cosmological: it would be a loss in a kind of being and not merely in the number of beings that exists.

      Part Two

      From Place to Space

      Interlude

      In Part I we witnessed a development—or, more in keeping with Aristotle’s thinking, an “envelopment”—of remarkable scope. The scope is impressive not just in terms of time (a period of approximately two thousand years) but also in terms of theme: all the way from muthos to logos. Yet Plato’s Timaeus combines both of these latter extremes in a single text: hence its position in the middle of Part I, flanked on one side by imaginative mythicoreligious accounts of creation and on the other side by Aristotle’s sober descriptions. Nevertheless, this progression in time and theme is no simple matter of progress. Anticipations and retroactions abound: Aristotle’s closely containing topos is foreshadowed in the final stage of Plato’s tale, while the Stagirite’s concern with the importance of the point rejoins the stress in the Enuma Elish on the deadly edges of weapons of war. Nor can it be said that Plato “improves upon” myth, given that the language of his dialogue is so deeply indebted to earlier mythical traditions. Indeed, Aristotle himself, “the Master of Those Who Know,” is by no means free from mythical borrowings and infusions. We have seen that Hesiod is an important source in his opening, “exoteric” discussion of place in the Physics (Hesiod is reinvoked in the first book of the Metaphysics).1 More crucially, Aristotle illuminates the role of place in the concreta of everyday life—a life that, despite historical and social vicissitudes, is recognizably similar across the centuries that separate Aristotle from the anonymous authors of the Sumerian epic. Instead of progression, in his case we are better advised to speak of a regression into the immanent structures of daily life: the same structures that characterized the experience of earlier generations of people in the Mediterranean world.

      Another continuity that binds together an otherwise disparate and far-flung picture is that of the relation between cosmogenesis and topogenesis. We have seen that this relation is two-way in its directionality. Cosmogenesis, that is, the generation of the (or a) world, entails topogenesis, the production of particular places with which the world—in becoming a place-world—is to be populated. Places punctuate a world and serve to specify it. On the other hand, the proliferation of places requires a world, a coherent and capacious cosmos, in which and in order to occur. But cosmos and topos hardly exhaust the question of place. Neither term does justice to the middle realm of chōra, which is not well ordered enough to be a world yet is too extensive to be a single place or set of places. No wonder that Aristotle, threatened by the prospect of such an incommodious middle term, could not admit it into his Physics: if not absurd (he takes it too seriously for this to be the case), it is surd (i.e., it does not fit into his scheme of things). Consequently, he restricts the range of chōra severely, attempting to identify it with his own notion of matter. Yet, as we have seen, he cannot do without the idea of the universe at large, “all that is” (to pan), and in this way one basic property of choric space (i.e., its indefinite expansiveness) is reimported into his physical theory. Becoming

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