Place and Phenomenology

Janet Donohoe

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786600318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Fenomenologia in filosofia

This cross-disciplinary book uses phenomenological method and description to explore questions of place, underscoring the significance of phenomenology for place and place for phenomenology. The book brings together prominent scholars in phenomenology of place. Covering a range of issues from sacred places to embodiment and identity and from environmental art and architecture to limit places, the contributors explore theoretical foundations through thinkers such as Heidegger, Marion-Young, Husserl, and Leopold among others. Phenomenological method and description are brought to bear on concrete places such as rivers, the Himalayas, modern transit, sacred architecture and more. The book is accessible and pertinent to on-going discussions in human geography, architectural theory, environmental studies, and philosophy of place. Provocative and imaginative, the essays provide a much-needed look at the contributions of phenomenology to, as well as the role of place in, contemporary philosophical and environmental discussions.

Part I

Place and the Existential

Chapter One

The Openness of Places

Edward Relph

For some inexplicable reason, whenever I read about Aristotle’s theory of place, which isn’t very often because I don’t find it a very exciting theory, an image of a snow globe comes to mind. A little glass half-sphere with a thick bottom that you turn over quickly to give the impression of snow falling on the pretty scene hermetically sealed inside. “The place of a thing is the innermost motionless boundary of what contains it,” Aristotle wrote in his Physics.¹ I think that means that every place is a container with a fixed boundary, and so my snow globe image multiplies into a world of glassy domes, each one sealed off from all the others.

This is not helpful for understanding the sorts of geographical places—neighborhoods, downtowns, suburbs, wilderness parks with huge Douglas fir trees, towns, and so on—in which I am interested and which I encounter in some form almost every day. The apparent boundaries of these, let’s say the walls of my house, the lines on a map that define the neighborhood where I live in Victoria, Canada, the mountain ranges and coastlines of Cascadia that I can see from the end of my street, are all porous, regularly crossed by me, storms, news, cars, viruses, goods in container ships, and e-mails. This is obvious. Nevertheless, Aristotelian assumptions about containers and motionless boundaries do infect thinking about place. Christian Norberg-Schulz, for example, in his account of architecture and genius loci defined a place as “a gathering of experienced meanings” that has stability and enclosure.² And he believed these qualities were being undermined by modern architecture that “mainly told us the modern world is ‘open’… Openness cannot be gathered. Openness means departure, gathering means return.”³ Indeed, openness for him meant what he referred to as “loss of place.” I don’t disagree that there can be problems with placeless modern architecture, but these are problems of design. Openness is not an enemy of places; it is a fundamental and increasingly significant condition of how places are experienced.

Conversely, and from the very different perspective of political economy, Doreen Massey challenged the idea that places are bounded and timeless sites.⁴ She never identified who holds these ideas, though she may have been thinking generally of humanist geographers such as me (none of whom, to my knowledge, ever claimed that places are bounded and timeless). Instead, she proposed that places are “open and porous moments in networks of social relations.”⁵ This is fine, but limited. Even a cursory consideration of the range of experiences that transcend the confines of place includes memory, imagination, watching television shows, skyping with children or grandchildren in distant cities, visits to the doctor, reading the news, and so on, only a few of which can be considered social relations or economic processes.

The View from Nowhere Is Always from Somewhere

In The View from Nowhere, which is a paean to objectivity, philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that when we reason we use arguments that “are not limited by our particular location, by the places we occupy.”⁶ In other words, the actual place where Nagel formulated and wrote his ideas, possibly somewhere in New York City where he was a professor, was so open to thought that it could actually be assumed away because objective reason takes us beyond place and transcends self.

That this is a difficult position to hold is revealed by Nagel’s own remarks in his book. For instance, “My reasoning is an attempt to turn myself into a local representative of the truth”⁷; “the world is a strange place”⁸; in objectivity “we place ourselves in the world that is to be understood”⁹; and “[i]‌n the conduct of life, of all places, the rivalry between the view from within and the view from without must be taken seriously.”¹⁰ Even the view from nowhere cannot escape the language and pull of place.

René Descartes had similar confusions when, several centuries earlier, he described his invention of the objective method that Nagel advocates. Descartes’s account of how and where he first developed his thought experiments about reason effectively begins with part II of his Discourse on Method: “I was then in Germany, attracted thither by the wars in that country, which have not yet been brought to a termination … the setting in of winter arrested me in a locality where … I remained the whole day in seclusion, with full opportunity to occupy my attention with my own thoughts.”¹¹ Descartes subsequently lived for several years in France and in due course decided to leave “all those places” where he had acquaintances and went to live where, “in the midst of a great crowd … more careful of their own affairs than curious about those of others,” he could live a remote and solitary life of thought.¹² That lonely crowd was in Amsterdam. This fact that he had deliberately sought out somewhere where he could meditate about thinking and reason is quite inconsistent with his pretense in Discourse on Method that: “there was no world nor any place in which I might be,” and his conclusion that: “I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place.”¹³

Even for thought experiments that attempt to assume places away, places are necessary foundations that provide openings to the world they treat as placeless.

Hereness, Thereness, and Openness

Between the extremes of being trapped inside a bounded container and the assumption that places are irrelevant for our existence, actual place experiences combine what is substantial and local with openness to the world. This combination is how I understand Heidegger’s metaphor of the fourfold of earth, mortals, sky, and gods.¹⁴ Earth and mortals are what are close to hand, and they both implicate and are implicated in the ineffability and openness of sky and gods. To put this into a more conventional geographical context, I will borrow the terms “hereness” and “thereness” from The Concise Townscape by Gordon Cullen.¹⁵ These words he used to capture the omnipresent tension in townscapes, especially those of medieval towns, between the material particularity of what is right here, for instance, the partially enclosed space of an urban square, and what is seen in the distance or otherwise anticipated, such as a glimpse of a church tower that attracts us to move toward it.

Hereness, as I interpret it, is a succinct way to refer to the distinctive identities of places that are familiar to us, where we have roots and follow routines, where we know the buildings and streetscapes, and where we are known by others. Hereness refers to all those aspects of places that give them what Jeff Malpas refers to as “singularity.”¹⁶ It is always accompanied by thereness, or experiences that involve connections with other places. Thereness, as a metaphor for the openness of place, has several distinct aspects. One reaches out from here to other places through belief and imagination; another consists of those experiences of elsewhere we carry with us in our memories; a third involves travel and encounters with many different places; a fourth, especially important in the present age, includes the extensions into and receptions from elsewhere associated with telecommunications; and a fifth is cosmopolitanism.

While we need the sense of stability that comes with knowing and being known somewhere in order to make some sense of what is happening elsewhere, where we are is always open to things and ideas that come from outside. No place is a snow globe.

Belief and Imagination

Yi-Fu Tuan recently suggested that “all widely practiced forms of religion are, in the final analysis, attempts at establishing places that answer human needs.”¹⁷ A headline in a Canadian newspaper a few years ago got to the heart of these attempts by posing the question: “What sort of place is heaven?”¹⁸ Unfortunately, the article was a synopsis of arguments in an e-book about the idea of heaven as it occurs in religion, popular music, and novels, and did not give the definitive answer for which I was hoping. Nevertheless, belief in a heavenly paradise has long answered the need for people to imagine somewhere better that lies beyond their mostly brutish, mean, and short lives in the places where they happen to be. That need cannot be overestimated for those periods of history (or the poorest regions of the current world) when most children died before they walked, when villages and towns were repeatedly threatened by pestilence or war, and daily life was about constantly coping with hardship.

Pyramids, temples, abbeys, shrines, and churches, large and small, are, for those who truly believe, symbolic portals to a far better place that lies in another reality. They give material substance to transcendental experiences of place. William James in a chapter titled “The Reality of the Unseen” in The Varieties of Religious Experience cites several examples of such experiences. One of his sources declared: “I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened up, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.”¹⁹ In the more secular ambience of the present age, the way in which belief reaches beyond hereness seems to have shifted from transcendence to engagement with the divine as an extension of everyday experience. David Brown in God and the Enchantment of Place expresses it this way: “The excitement of place … is of a God valuing more than the simply human, and instead using the material, even where decisively shaped by human being, to tell us something of himself and thereby draw us more deeply into his presence.”²⁰

Like faith and belief, imagination may be firmly based in a place, but is not confined by it. Here is Thoreau in Walden, in the chapter titled “What I Lived For”: “Though the view from my door was … contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination. … Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and those eras in history which had most attracted me.”²¹ He r...