References
- See in this regard Frodeman (1992), Dreyfus (1991, Ch. 7), Olafson (1994), Arisaka (1995), Arisaka (1996), Casey (1997). In the 1980s there was a highly original reception and implantation of Heidegger's doctrine of existential spatiality in cultural geography. See Pickles 1985, 161–8.
- See, in particular, Neumann 1999.
- Another monographic investigation that to a certain extent also contrasts the decline of interest in Heidegger's existential spatiality is Malpas 2006. Of primary importance in this regard is the search for recasting Heidegger's idea of a “topology of being” by analyzing the nexus of place and situatedness. (Malpas 2006, 39–63) Yet in this highly promising program at issue is not so much existential spatiality but rather the replacement of the spatial structure of transcendence (as it is spelled out in the existential analytic) with the topological structure of Ereignis (as it is thematized in the analysis of the gathering of the fourfold) after the “turn”.
- Arisaka (1996, 34–9), in particular, makes the case that the relationship between temporality and spatiality has to be spelled out as an equiprimordial and not as a foundational one. The equiprimordiality of both existentiales implies interdependence between temporality and spatiality.
- It is another issue that after the Kehre in the new context of post-metaphysical philosophizing several valuable issues of the original concept of existential spatiality got lost.
- At the same time, one might speak of the “spatiality of understanding”, “attuned spatiality”, “spatiality of discourse”, and “spatiality of falling”, all of them being distinguished by concomitant kinds of temporalizing of temporality. What gets temporalized are the ways of making room for a meaningful articulation of the world.
- Schatzki (2007, 53) argues that the analyses of the two types overlap: the analysis of readiness-to-hand's spatiality repeats, with different emphases, the analysis of the spatiality of being-in-the-world, and “to distinguish between the two is only to emphasize different aspects of a single spatiality.” Though this statement is formally correct I will try to expose several reasons for disagreeing with it. Generally speaking, the dynamic unity of the two types does not preclude one from searching for essential differences. Schatzki overlooks these differences. To a great extent, his failure to address in an appropriate manner the two types of existential spatiality is due to a tendentious interpretation of Dasein that he carries out when holding that the existential analytic admits a monadic view of human existence—“it is an analysis of the existence of an individual (functional) human being.” (Schatzki 2007, 50) He ignores the trans-subjective-horizonal dimensions of Dasein's existence. Since the transcendence of the world cannot be separated from Dasein's existence, the latter is irreducible to the existential totality of an individual human life. It is precisely this irreducibility that prompts Heidegger to differentiate between the two types of existential spatiality.
- Remoteness and closeness are qualitative features of Dasein's circumspective thrownness in everyday practices. To this thrownness belong the “relativity effects” of spatiality. In this regard, Heidegger provides the following illustration, When a man wears a pair of spectacles which are so close to him distantially that they are ‘sitting on his nose’, they are environmentally more remote from him than the picture on the opposite wall. Such equipment has so little closeness that often it is proximally quite impossible to find. Equipment for seeing—and likewise for hearing, such as the telephone receiver—has what we have designated as the inconspicuousness of the proximally ready-to-hand. (1962, 141; GA 2, 107).
- Generally speaking, the relativity effects are due to the discordance between contextualizing a utensil for reaching a purpose and grasping the outcome of that contextualization as an actualized possibility.
- By privileging the lived body as an absolute point of spatializing, Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, eliminates the need for distinguishing between the spatiality of readiness-to-hand and the spatiality of being-in-the-world. Since bodily experience unites man's transcendence of the things within-the-world and the modes of spatializing and constructing images of space, there is only one source of spatializing. Accordingly, primary spatiality (the “lived space” of man's directedness to things) gets specified in connection with the typical grasp on man's body in various “anthropological spaces”.
- In Being and Time, the notion of “environmental region” occupies an intermediate status between the notions of spatiality and space. An environmental region is the directionality of the de-severance in articulating contexts of equipment within-the-world. It is a particular “whither” of encountering “things” that are ready-to-hand. Thus considered, the environmental region is the spatial unit of the worldhood of the world.
- For a detailed analysis of de-severance and directionality, see Frodeman (1992).
- Jeff Malpas makes an essential use of the distinction between topography and topology when investigating Heidegger's approach to place and spatiality before and after the Kehre. This distinction is to be elucidated in terms of complementarity rather than of contradiction. The “topographical method” of early Heidegger is what essentially underlies his later development of the idea of “topology of being”. The “topological orientation” of Heidegger's thought persists in the shift away from the transcendental as an abandonment of the preoccupation with transcendence. (See Malpas 2007, 126–30).
- See in this regard Feist (2002) and Ryckman's (2005) illuminating studies.
- Here I am using the notion of involvement in the sense of section 18 of Being and Time.
- From the viewpoint of the transcendental approach of Being and Time, the possibility of (having a concept of) metric space has much to do with the possibility of having a theoretical attitude guided be epistemological norms. Metric space is a cognitive structure that becomes possible when ecstatic unity is replaced by an epistemic distance between knowing subject and objective reality.
- In scrutinizing Heidegger's existential-analytic thesis that Dasein's specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality, Edward Casey explains the failure in Being and Time to advocate this thesis. He makes the case that there is no demonstration of any grounds for this “must” in the existential analytic. More specifically, there is no specific deduction of the dependence of spatiality on temporality. In analyzing section 70, Casey stresses that it remains unclear what the treatment of the modes of the regional directionality gains by being described as an “ecstatically retentive awaiting” (1997, 257).
- Roughly speaking, Klein's celebrated program is an attempt at characterizing geometries on the basis of projective transformations and group theory. On the basic assumption of this program, the more one progressively restricts the range of transformations, the greater is the enrichment with regard to specific spatial objects. In another formulation, the less of the properties remain invariant under the respective group, the greater is the number of particular geometrical objects whose existence is allowed by the algebraic transformations.
- The “series of stages in laying bare pure homogeneous space” Heidegger refers to is to be continued by another series distinguished by moves from one formally codified space to another, i.e., from one group of transformations to another, each of which determines a class of possible spatial objects one can construct in the framework of a certain geometry. Accordingly, such a group defines criteria of existence of spatial objects as characterized by invariant properties (with respect to the algebraic transformations). Thus, only some very general properties (such as sidedness, insideness, outsideness, and all “connectivity properties”) can be identified as invariant under the most extended group of topological transformations. If one is in need of a stronger idealization (formalization) of the concept of space, one has to restrict the topological transformations (as defining the morphology of spatial shapes), specifying thereby the group of projective transformations. The latter do not preserve sizes or angles. Yet the relations of incidence and cross-ratio remain invariant under this group. In a next move one arrives at the transformations of affine geometry which in contrast to projective transformations preserve the property of parallelism. Under this new group the properties of the homographic spatial objects are invariant.
- See in this regard Ginev 2011.
- Heidegger also introduces the concept of the world-space which is an analogue to the concept of the world-time as a sequence of “nows” which are what get counted.
Bibliography
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- Arisaka, Y., “Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time”, Philosophy Today, 40/1: 1996, 36–46.
- Casey, E., The Fate of Place, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997.
- Dreyfus, H., Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991.
- Feist, R., “Weyl's Appropriation of Husserl's and Poincaré's Thought“, Synthese 132(3): 2002, 273–301.
- Frodeman, R., “Being and Space: A Re-Reading of Existential Spatiality in Being and Time”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 23/1: 1992, 33–41.
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- Ryckman, T. The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915–1925. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.