History, Space and Place

Susanne Rau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367660307
• eBook ISBN: 9780429509278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Spaces, too, have a history. And history always takes place in spaces. But what do historians mean when they use the word "spaces"? And how can spaces be historically investigated?

Susanne Rau provides a survey of the history of Western concepts of space, opens up interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of space in fields ranging from physics and geography to philosophy and sociology, and explains how historical spatial analysis can be methodologically and conceptually conceived and carried out in practice. The case studies presented in the book come from the fields of urban history, the history of trade, and global history including the history of cartography, but its analysis is equally relevant to other fields of inquiry.

This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the theory and methodology of historical spatial analysis.

Supported by Open Access funds of the University of Erfurt

1 Historical and systematic approach

In order to understand and evaluate the arguments advanced by spatial theories current in today’s discussions, as well as the theoretical basis of spatially oriented historical studies, we are well advised to look at the history of spatial concepts and theories. In the following section, “Prehistory,” I very briefly address the most important Western spatial theories since antiquity, as subsequent discourses constantly referred to them and continue to do so. Moreover, it is important to cast light on the problematic history of some notions of space—especially biological and deterministic concepts that were instrumentalized politically and have thus become discredited. Since these concepts occasionally return and reappear in current discourse in new garb, we should develop a sensitivity for recognizing them. The spatial theories that have been formulated in the course of history are so diverse and varied that it makes sense to order them into groups. Names for some of these groups were suggested by the historical theoreticians of space themselves (Section 1.1). How can scholarly and everyday spatial concepts be reconciled? And what exactly is meant by an absolute, relative, or relational concept of space (Section 1.2)? This first chapter aims to answer these questions. The perspective I have chosen means that I will mainly engage with philosophical and physical theories. Premodern geographies or cartographies—with their understanding of world and space—deserve to be considered on their own (on this point, see Brodersen 1995; Dueck 2012; Harley and Woodward 1987–2007; Lestringant 1994; Besse 2003a; Schleicher 2014).

1.1 Prehistory

On the history of Western concepts of space

The diversity of spatial notions in antiquity, which ranges from mythical conceptions to attempts to define space and sophisticated theoretical approaches, is immediately apparent alone from the relatively large number of terms that ancient Greek offers for place and space. The Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical dictionary of philosophy), for example, lists six different words. Focusing on Plato (427–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) as Greek philosophers of space is thus a radical reduction that is nevertheless justified, inasmuch as these authors were the most often-cited theoreticians until the conception took hold in the course of the early modern period that the cosmos is infinite and that physical space is perhaps not quite as homogeneous and uniform as had long been assumed. In antiquity, too, there were many who spoke and wrote about space, but only a few of them developed a consistent theory. According to Aristotle, Plato was the first to produce a clear definition of the concept (Zekl et al. 1992, 68). Considerations of space from antiquity are usually embedded within more general reflections about the cosmos or models for explaining the world.

Aristotle, who mainly expounded his thoughts about space in his doctrine of the categories and his Physics, engaged with Plato’s understanding of space as presented in Timaeus, which itself built upon the considerations of Pythagoras and Democritus. Space, moreover, received a place of its own in Plato’s doctrine of ideas: as the “third kind” between what is ideal and empirical, space (χώρα) mediates between these two fields.

According to Plato, space is the “midwife of becoming.” It is what makes transformation possible at all. Aristotle, furthermore, shared some of Plato’s opinions—for example, that space must be a category, that there could be no such thing as empty space, and that the heavens must be shaped like a sphere since this represented the most perfect form. ¹ Aristotle brought the question of whether the world is finite or infinite back to the level of physical reality, because it was here that he thought it would be possible to answer the question. Since he believed that the attempt to think of bodies as infinitely extendible encountered limits, he concluded that space in the physical world must be finite. By contrast, space in the atomistic physics propounded by Leucippus and Democritus could certainly be infinite (Zekl et al. 1992, 72–75). As these thinkers saw it, the universe consisted of the very tiniest particles in motion in infinite space.

Strictly speaking, Aristotle’s theory of space is a theory of place, for his question is aimed at the “natural places” of bodies and their movements. This belief assumed that only living beings move of their own accord and that a moving force—or resistance against it—is necessary for movement (Gosztonyi 1976, vol. 1: 90–110). Ulrich Beuttler’s theology has recently taken a position against this ­unequivocal definition, arguing that Aristotle presented no closed doctrinal system of a spatial theory (Beuttler 2010, 74–82, especially 76). Regardless of which view one takes, Aristotle performed several differentiating categorizations that were influential in determining subsequent debates and that, with a certain amount of abstraction from their original context, continue to be useful today:

1 Aristotle distinguished between place and bodies. (This implies that bodies can change their position, and that the same position can—adjacently or successively—be occupied by different things.)

2 He distinguished between space and place. (Whereas place stands for the ability of things or bodies to be localized, space is constituted by the movement of these bodies from one place to another. If space were identical with bodies, it would move together with their motion. The continuity of space is guaranteed by the continuity of bodies, since, according to Aristotle, there can be no empty space.)

But the concept of the infinite expansion of space, which certainly also existed in antiquity (for example, with the atomists Leucippus and Democritus), collided with the biblical account of creation. Considering this fact, Augustine (354–430 BCE) held that there could be no space outside the world, meaning there could be no other world. Even if philosophers from both the Christian and Arab worlds introduced further distinctions, and medieval theology reflected on many different questions (for example, the relationship of space to things, its changeability and movability, its geometric structure, or its ability to be perceived or to effect other things), the impossibility of space’s infinite expansion largely remained the cutting edge of medieval conceptions of space. Christian thought was further buttressed by the late-medieval reception of Aristotle’s theories, which accorded no extension to space and considered a vacuum in nature to be logically impossible (Zekl et al. 1992, 82–88; Breidert 1995).

This situation only changed gradually with several critics of Aristotle who no longer saw empty space as a logical impossibility. One of these was Hasdai Crescas (ca. 1340–ca. 1410), a Spanish Jew who pointed to the role and necessity of a vacuum, defined its physical space according to its volume (and not according to the limitation of a body), and was even able to think of space as infinite because of the possibility of extending it. That it was specifically a Jewish scholar who formulated the connection between god and infinite space appears to be no accident. The Hebrew word for place (makôm) is also one of the many designations for god; it is thus no longer a great leap to the thought that the omnipresence of god can also be expressed in space. Another pathbreaking critic was Nicole Oresme (ca. 1325–1382), who justified the existence of an extracosmic, extended space with the omnipotence of god, which would be limited by the conception of a closed space (as in Aristotelian theory) (Jammer 1980; Breidert 1985; Wertheim 2000, 102–125). Yet these and other critics were not immediately received. Much time passed before the idea was superseded that the universe is filled, immovable, and limited, and a three-dimensional void was recognized. The Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) also encountered difficulties because of his opinions that the movement of bodies in space could be determined only in relation to other bodies, and his view of physical space as a formless three-dimensional void did not garner much approval, either.

According to Margaret Wertheim, however, the theological physicists weren’t at all the ones able to sufficiently justify and bring about the revolution in thinking about space (Wertheim 2000, 110, 122–123). Rather, she argues, that path went through painting and the discovery of linear perspective (see also Edgerton 2009; Belting 2008). Renaissance painters did not develop a theory of space, but some of them who were theoretically ambitious (such as Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca, or Leonardi da Vinci) developed theories of representation based, among other things, on optics and geometry. These considerations enabled a spatial depth that had never before been seen in images, which were now painted from the point of view of a specific place, namely, the standpoint of the observer. In their practice, these painters thus found a way to give sense and meaning to the idea of an extended physical void and so made an important contribution to the further development of the physical concept of space in the early modern period. For the cultural-studies scholar Annette Vowinckel, the construction of pictorial spaces must be seen as closely connected to relational individuality in the Renaissance (Vowinckel 2011).

While Plato’s notion of space was received by the Cambridge Platonists, and the atomic view of space (of Democritus and Leucippus) was still being read by theologians in the early seventeenth century, it was Aristotle’s theory of place that proved influential for Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and it was through Newton that this theory was introduced into classical mechanics. For the foundation of classical mechanics was a law of motion in space that presupposed an absolute spatial system of reference. This means a physical space that is independent from both the observer and the movements of bodies or objects that occur within it. As a scientist teaching in Cambridge who was favorably disposed toward Arianism, which combined the cosmological insights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a grand synthesis, Newton did not attempt to understand space outside of a theological system. Rather, for him it precisely represented the intersection of theology and natural science. Being imperceptible through observation, space for Newton took on the role of an ontologically necessary condition of the possibility for the first law of motion. In his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, often referred to simply as the Principia, Newton formulated three fundamental laws of motion. The first says that a body can change its condition of rest or motion only through the influence of forces (Zekl et al. 1992, 87; Gosztonyi 1976, vol. 1: 329–354). Newton conceived of absolute space—which he also always called “true space” because he considered it to be unchangeable and an attribute of God—as infinite, homogeneous, and absolute in the sense of existing independently from bodies.

These theories of Newton not only meant that the conception of infinite empty space prevailed, but also that the entire cosmos was unified: wherever the force of gravity exists, matter rules—which means everywhere in the cosmos, on earth and in the heavens (on the consequences of this conception, see Wertheim 2000, 162–163). Yet one inconsistency in this conception—and something his contemporaries already criticized—was that Newton allowed this absolute space to have movable parts, in other words, that he had thus recognized the relativity of spatial systems of reference without allowing for their validity.

Among those arguing against the Newtonian conception of (absolute) space was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). ² Leibniz, like Aristotle, was concerned with exactly determining (geometric) locations, the mutual connections of which he used to define space. For Leibniz, space ultimately reduces to an order of relation. Leibniz was not interested in a more precise determination of the nature of space but rather considered the concept of relation—the positions of different bodies standing in relation to each other—to be a sufficient characterization. In its essential points, Leibniz’s concept can be deduced from his exchange of letters with the theologian Samuel Clarke, who advocated for the Newtonian position. The correspondence, which was published in 1717, is furthermore a historically interesting document inasmuch as it allows us to see just how controversial discussions about concepts of space were at the time and the specific opposition characterizing theologians and natural scientists or philosophers. Here is an excerpt from the last letter that Leibniz wrote to Clarke on August 18, 1716 (Fifth Exchange, Section 47).

Leibniz’s relational concept of space

That which comprehends all those places, is called space. Which shows, that in order to have an idea of place, and consequently of space, it is sufficient to consider these relations, and the rules of their changes, without needing to fancy any absolute reality out of the things whose situation we consider. … It may be said also … that place is that, which is the same in different moments to different existent things, when their relations of co-existence with certain other existents, which are supposed to continue fixed from one of those moments to the other, agree entirely together. … space is that which results from places taken together.

(Alexander 1956, 69–70)

The positions that can be reconstructed from the correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz (space/time as absolute or relational values) are fundamental for current debates about basic principles. Leibniz has become a new focus of interest in history as well as the natural sciences (Linhard 2008) and for art historians who work on concepts of space from the baroque period (Leonard 2006).

Another modern conception of space that is no longer physical but rather epistemological is that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). With space (as well as time), Kant distinguishes between empirical reality and transcendental ideality. From a transcendental perspective, space is not something perceived by the senses but a necessary precondition, given a priori, for sensual perception—in Kant’s own words, a form of intuition of the cognizing subject (Gosztonyi 1976, vol. 1: 400–456). Kant’s conception of space is frequently rejected by contemporary discussions in cultural studies, but the fact remains that the transcendental-philosophical method influenced nineteenth-century idealist philosophy and psychology of perception. ³ And these, in turn, were the foundation for the subject-based, constructivist methods of the twentieth century, which assume that the spatiality of reality is dependent upon the experiencing subject. These subject-based methods were formulated in philosophy (chiefly in phenomenology and existential philosophy) since the beginning of the twentieth century. But anthropology, social or human geography, and environmental psychology did not let much time pass, either, before conceding a higher priority to perceptions and interpretations of space over mathematical or objective space. These concepts can be recognized in terms such as space of perception, space of imagination (Vorstellungsraum), experienced space, and space of action.

Another interesting position was that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who formulated a concept of space in the context of natural law. According to this position, space is fundamentally defined through a human being’s sphere of action. This begins in the body of each and every reasoning being who acts in the world. The sphere of action is thus a product of this action, the extension of which is determined by “drawing lines,” or making differentiations. “In just this manner the sphere we are discussing here is produced in lines and thereby becomes something extended” (Fichte 1991, 58; translation Bauer 2000, 55). Furthermore, a limit to the space of action is set where the space of action—and with it, the freedom—of another person is limited. This is where the claims of one’s own actions are no longer legitimate. This view leaves unclear where to draw the boundary in cases of conflict. But the absolute boundary is the body of the other: I may not extend my freedom onto it (Fichte 1991, 123–124).

Despite Newton’s criticism on the one hand, and the mathematician Bernhard Riemann’s nineteenth-century work on higher-dimensional geometry on the other, it wasn’t until Albert Einstein (1879–1955) formulated his theory of relativity that physics and cosmology finally rejected the absolute concept of space. Through the integration of the concept of space into a concept of space–time–­matter, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What is historical research into space?
• 1 Historical and systematic approach
• 2 Disciplinary approaches
• 3 Spatial analysis
• 4 Conclusion and outlook
• 5 Appendix of sources for the historical study of space
• Selected bibliography
• Glossary
• Afterword to the second edition
• Index