Space and Culture

Imagining space and perceiving space play into and through one another, beyond the initial condition of space that Kant posits as an a priori framework for all thinking. We go from there, into space as well as in space. “If imagination projects us out beyond ourselves while memory takes us back behind ourselves, place subtends and enfolds us, lying perpetually under and around us.” ¹

Space is perceived from the body outward, and in that perception the physical and the mental are fused. The space of various geometries, as Otto Bollnow has pointed out, projects a homogeneity that differs from our body-bound perceptions of space: in mathematical space no point is distinguished from another and there is no natural middle point for its coordinates. Directions are not indicated, and so theoretically that neutral space extends in all directions to infinity. ² In perceived space, on the other hand, there is a central point, that of the human figure in space, with all the flow of qualitative discriminations that phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edward Casey have delineated, a space that is delimited, without any large opening to infinity, even given its horizons. When various versions of mathematical space are enlisted to depict human space in painting, or to plot it out in architecture, the mathematical space then comes into service of the human space; it is humanized and takes on character.³ Perspective is an art of illusion as well as of precision, Jurgis Baltrusaitis claims: “Its history is the history of a dream.” ⁴

And the apprehension of the body itself involves a complex of mental operations, as John Campbell has plotted them:

How are the spatial relations between the parts of the body given in the body image? One possibility is that they are given in egocentric terms: one foot is represented as to the right of another, below the rest of the body, and so on. But then it can hardly be held that the subject uses the natural axes of his body to set up the egocentric axes; rather, he already has to use the egocentric frame to grasp the spatial relations between the parts of his body. Alternatively, suppose that the spatial relations between the parts of one’s body are given in nonegocentric terms. Then there is no prospect of using the axes of one’s body to set up an egocentric frame; one is in no better a position to do this with respect to the body of which one has inner perception than one would be with respect to a body of which one has outer perception. In both cases the problem is the same. One’s grasp of egocentric spatial axes, with their immediate connections to moving and acting, cannot be generated from a grasp of spatial relations that are nonegocentrically given. Grasp of egocentric spatial axes must be taken as primitive.

This means that a certain kind of reductive ambition for the definition of an egocentric frame as a body-centered frame has to be abandoned. ⁵

These complexities are reflected in the spatial indications built into language, where the physical and the mental, and further the natural and the cultural, are fused. Indications of space in speech vary from one cultural group to another, as Cassirer explains, basing his argument on Humboldt. ⁶ Cassirer cites the particularities of spatial indications in Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, and Eskimo languages. And these examples could be amplified by William Hanks’s careful analyses of space indications in Maya speech: “The special contribution of deixis to an anthropology of the body turns on the unusual way it incorporates bodily space: not only do speakers make reference to the body with deictics, but, more interestingly, they make reference to the world relative to the body.” ⁷ There are in this Mayan language “two patterns of use, an action-relative one in which the cardinal terms designate directions relative to a speaker-addressee ground, and an absolute usage in which they designate fixed cosmological places.” ⁸

All such questions are schematized by Aristotle’s Physics in his sixfold definition of space, implicitly based on...