Space | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

To the question, "Where are you in this moment?" a pilot would answer, "At longitude x, latitude y, altitude z." But if one asks, "Where do you live?", the answer may instead evoke neighborly relations weaved through the years, a climate, old stones, the freshness of water. Depending on who is asked about what, the where question can be answered by space determinations or by the memories of a concrete place. Space and place are two different ways of conceiving the "where" or, using the Latin word for "where" as a terminus technicus, two answers to the ubi question.

Place is an order of beings vis-à-vis the body. This order (kosmos in Greek) always mirrors the great cosmos. This vis-à-vis or mirroring is the essence of what has been called proportionality (Illich and Rieger 1996). According to Albert Einstein, the concept of space disembedded itself from the "simpler concept of place" and "achieve[d] a meaning which is freed from any connection with a particular material object" (Einstein 1993, p. xv). Yet Einstein insisted that space is a free creation of imagination, a "means devised for easier comprehension of our sense experience" (Einstein 1993, p. xv). In pure space, however, the body would be out of place and in a state of perceptual deprivation.

The focus here is on the radical monopoly that space determinations exert on the ubi question. Wheels and motors seem to belong to space as feet do to places. And just as the radical monopoly of motorized transportation on human mobility leaves some freedom to walk, space determinations leave remnants of placeness to linger in perception and memory. Ethics, then, can only be rebuilt by a recovery of placeness.

A general conception of space is conspicuously absent from ancient mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The Greek language, so rich in locational terms, had no word for space (Bochner 1998). Topos meant place, and when Plato in the Timaeus (360 B.C.E.) located the demiurge in an uncreated ubi in which one can have no perception because it does not exist, he called it chôra, fallow land, the temporary void between the fullness of the wild and cultivation. According to Plato, the demiurge's chôra could only be conceived "by a kind of spurious reason," "as in a dream," in a state in which "we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about it" (passage Timaeus 52). In hindsight, one may say that this was a first intuition of the antinomy between place and what is has come to be called "space." In the fourteenth century, Nicolas d'Oresme imagined an incorporeal void beyond the last heavenly sphere, but still insisted that, in contrast, all real places are full and material. Space, still only a pure logical possibility, became a possibile realis between the times of d'Oresme and Galileo (Funkenstein 1986, p. 62).

Following the canons of Antiquity and medieval cartography, a chart summarized bodily scouting and measuring gestures. Pilgrims followed itineraria; sailors, charts of ports; and surveyors consigned ritually performed acts of mensuration on marmor or brass plates. These were not maps in the modern sense, because they did not postulate a disembodied eye contemplating a land or a sea from above. The first maps in the modern sense were contemporary with early experimentations in central perspective and, like these, construed an abstract eye contemplating a distant grid in which particulars could be relatively situated. In 1574, Peter Ramus wrote a lytle booke in which he exposed a calculus of reality where all topics were divided in mental spaces that immobilized objects in their definitions precluding the understanding of knowledge as an act (Pickstock 1998). Cartesian coordinates and projective geometry gave the first mathematical justification to the idea of an immaterial vessel, unlimited in extent, in which all material objects are contained.

Had space been invented, as Einstein contended, or discovered? In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant announced that space was an a priori of perception. For him, Euclidean geometry and its axioms were the mathematical expression of an entity—space—that cannot be perceived, but, like time, underlies all perceptions. The first attempt to contradict Euclidean geometry was published in Russian in 1829 by Nicolay Lobachevsky (1792–1856), whose ideas were rooted in an opposition to Kant. For him, space was an a posteriori concept. He sought to prove this by demonstrating that axioms different from Euclid's can generate different spaces. In light of Lobachevsky's—and then Georg Riemann's (1826–1866)—non-Euclidean geometries, Euclidean geometry appears ex post facto as just another axiomatic construct. There is no a priori space experience, no natural, or universal space. Space is not an empirical fact but a construct, an arbitrary frame that carpenters the modern imagination (Heelan 1983).

Einstein occupies an axial and simultaneously ambiguous position in the history of this understanding. In order to express alterations of classical physics that seemed offensive to common sense, he adopted a mathematically constructed manifold (coordinate space) in which the space coordinates of one coordinate system depend on both the time and space coordinates of another relatively moving system. On the one hand, like Lobachevsky and Riemann (1854), Einstein insisted on the constructed character of space: Different axioms generate different spaces. On the other, he not only came to consider his construct as ruling the unreachable realms of the universe, but reduced earthly human experience to a particular case of it. In Einstein's space, time can become extension; mass, energy; gravity, a geometric curvature; and reality, a distant shore, indifferent to ethics. This view of space has reigned over the modern imagination for a century. Yet the idea that the realm of everyday experience is a particular case of this general construct has not raised fundamental ethical questions.

The subsumption of the neighborhood where one lives into the same category as distant galaxies transforms neighbors into disembodied particularities. This loss of the sense of immediate reality invites a moral suicide. Hence, ethics in the early-twenty-first century requires an epistemological distinction that evokes that of d'Oresme in the fourteenth: Contrary to outer space, the perceptual milieu is a place of fullness. According to its oldest etymology, ethos means a place's gait. Space recognizes no gait, no body, no concreteness, and, accordingly, no ethics. The ubi question must thus be ethically restated.

Body historians and phenomenologists provide tracks toward an ethical recovery of placeness in the space age. Barbara Duden (1996) argues that one can only raise fundamental ethical questions related to pregnancy by relocating the body in its historical places. For their part, phenomenologists, those philosophers who cling to the primacy of perception in spite of tantalizing science-borne and technogenic certainties, restore some proportionality between body and place. For Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), for instance, there is no individual body immersed in the apathetic void of space, but an experience of mutual seizure of the body and its natural ubi. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1964) further articulates the complementarity of these two sides of reality. These can be steps toward a recovery of the sense of the vis-à-vis without which there is no immediate reality, and hence no ethics.

Cyberspace;; Einstein, Albert;; Foucault, Michel.

Bachelard, Gaston. (1983). Water and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. ed. and trans. Edith R. Farrell. Dallas: Dallas Institute of the Humanities and Culture. Originally published in French in 1956.

Bochner, Salomon. "Space." (1998). In Raum und Geschichte, Kurseinheit 4, comp. Ludolf Kuchenbuch and Uta Kleine. Hagen: Fernuniversität.

Coxeter, H. S. (1965). Non-Euclidean Geometry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Duden, Barbara. (1996). The Woman Beneath the Skin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Originally published in 1991.

Einstein, Albert. (1993). "Foreword." In Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, by Max Jammer. New York: Dover. Einstein's text was originally published in 1954.

Funkenstein, Amos. (1986). Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heelan, Patrick A. (1983). Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Illich, Ivan, and Rieger, Matthias. (1996). "The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr." In Fourteenth Yearly E. F. Schumacher Conference. New Haven, Connecticut, October 1994. Reprinted in French as "La sagesse de Leopold Kohr," in Ivan Illich, La Perte des sens, trans. Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat. Paris: Fayard. The French version is the most recent authorized version; the English version is not generally available.

Lobachevsky, Nikolay Ivanovich. (1886). Geometrische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Parallellinien. Kasan, Russia: Kasan University. Originally published in Berlin in 1840.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964). The Primacy of Perception. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

Pickstock, Catherine. (1998). After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Ramus, Peter. (1966). Logike. Leeds: The Scholar Press. Originally published in 1574.

Riemann, Bernhard. (1876). "Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen" [On the hypotheses that are the base of geometry.]. In Gesammelte mathematische Werke und wissenschaftlicher Nachlaß [Collected mathematical works and legacy], ed. Richard Dedekind and Heinrich Weber. Leipzig, Germany: Teubner. Originally published in 1854.

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