Back Issue East of Berlin Number 13, Winter/Spring 2001

print version (pdf)
download Adobe Acrobat Reader

Letters

The Fate of Place

I find Robert A. Beauregard’s recent review of my book, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, to be helpful in certain ways but misleading in others. The review should help alert the reader to my search for a middle ground between place and space, whether this be conceived as “region” or “room” (as I propose in this book) or as what I call “interplaces” (e.g., gardens, lawns, porches) in my earlier book, Getting Back into Place. Beauregard is right to maintain that one of the main concerns of my writing on place is to avoid the false dilemma
of an exclusive choice between place and space. I try to show that it is this choice, nevertheless, which the history of philosophical thought most often foists upon us—until we notice nuances usually overlooked in conventional accounts of this history.

I will leave aside minor misunderstandings in the review, e.g., that 17th-century philosophy is not considered “Renaissance” but “early
modern.” More serious is the reviewer’s neglect of the pivotal roles of Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world and of Leibniz in the early modern era: it was the latter’s relational model of space which, more than any other single factor, led to the demise of respect for place after 1750—and which anticipated the dissolution of place in communicational and electronic networking paradigms in more recent times. Thus Beauregard’s assertion that I hold that “space is equivalent to globalization” is only true of a purely relationalist model of space—in contrast with absolutist models that make of space an enormous volumetric whole.

Still more serious is the claim that my book follows “two trajectories” in the rise, fall, and resurrection of place in Western thought: one
of myth, phenomenology, and metaphysics; the other of cosmology, mind, and body. These paths do not adequately reflect my strategy in The Fate of Place. My view is this: whereas in myth and early cosmology, as well as in ancient physics and metaphysics, place prevailed, it
was the rise of neo-Platonism and its marriage with medieval Christianity that led to the supremacy of space, the apogee of which was reached in 17th-century physics, in a concept of absolute space in Newton, and of relationist space in Locke and Leibniz. It was not because place had “too much reality,” as Beauregard says, but because it was seen as merely a part of space that it came to be suppressed. The slow reemergence of place as a viable and productive notion occurred only with the recognition of the importance of the body in spatial orientation
and in ordinary perception, for instance, in Kant, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Whitehead. This recognition in turn set the stage for the more recent postmodern appreciation of place in the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Irigaray.

Beauregard complains that I only “rarely . . . consider applications.” But I did not set out to do anything of the kind: as I make clear in
my preface, I am only offering an essay in the history of ideas about place and space, without concerning myself with their extensions or
realizations. This does not mean that my work is not relevant to applications in various fields. Beauregard admits as much when he notes that
I take up Derrida’s pertinence to architecture—but then he regrets that I privilege architectural building per se over urbanism as (in his words) “a more appropriate way to think about the relationship of space and place.” Yet my use of “architecture” was not meant to favor individual buildings over urban placescapes; indeed, I would welcome such placescapes to the extent that they help us overcome the dichotomous choice between place and space. But this overcoming should not be achieved by means of still other dichotomies, for instance, New Urbanism vs. modernism. The problem is not that simple. What matters is that creative human habitation, whether modernist or New Urbanist, involves innovative commixtures of “place” and “space.” What matters is the creation of urban settings that are not only intimate and confining but also open and undelimited—urban settings that never become absolutist or relationist space.

Nor do I believe that human nature “always pursues the path of least resistance,” as Beauregard claims. If nothing else, my book establishes that human beings revel in complexity—if not in outright contradiction. The history of philosophical thought on the topic of space and
place shows precisely this. It was to convey the burgeoning complexity of such thought that I undertook to write The Fate of Place. Although Beauregard suspects as much by lamenting my “abstruse and elusive” treatment, I think that I have rendered philosophical complexity in a manner lucid enough to be understood by non-philosophers—by anyone interested in issues of place and space in our time. I am sorry that my reviewer did not convey more of this complexity by articulating a more comprehensive sense of what I accomplished vis-à-vis what I set out to do in The Fate of Place.

—Edward S. Casey
Department of Philosophy
State University of New York at Stony Brook