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6 Modern Space as Absolute Gassendiand Ne~on The universe is infinite, immobile, immutable. -Pierre Gassendi, Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii The celestial spaces are void of resistances. -Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica I don't live in the infinite because in the infinite one is not at home. -Gaston Bachelard, L'Intuition de ['instant To turn to the seventeenth century is to plunge into a turbulent world in which alchemy vied with physics, theology with philosophy, politics with religion, nations with each other, individuals with their anguished souls. No single treatment can do justice to this multifarious period of human history. We can, however, pick our way through it by attending to an assortment of figures who occupied themselves expressly with questions of place and space: Gassendi, Newton, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. Each of these thinkers-with the exception of Locke-was also a prominent scientist, and this double identity is no accident. To assess place and space in the first century of modernity is perforce to take into account scientific as well as philosophical thinking. Such double-barreled thinking does not just continue the ancient debate over void space-favored by Gassendi and Newton, reviled by Descartes and Lockebut also engages the renascent atomism evident in Bacon and Boyle as well as Gassendi and Newton. The much-derided mechanical view of nature so emblematic of the epoch raises issues of place and space, given that early modern mechanism has two ultimate terms: extension and motion.1 These terms, through their mathematization by Galileo and Descartes, entail specific theses about space and place-to start with, their sheer quantifiability. Even on more particular issues such as the circularity of the heavens, of special 137 138 The Supremacy of Space concern to Bacon and Kepler, implications for place/space 100m large. The dramatic confrontation between the new science and Aristotelian physics proliferates , rather than represses, these implications. Pondering the putatively perfect circularity of the heavens-an article of faith for Aristotelians-Bacon had this to say: The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them conjugates and parallels and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles.2 Everywhere we look in the seventeenth century, then, we find science and philosophy colluding on problems that bear on place and space alike. (We also find an increasing preoccupation with questions of time, but that is another story.) 3 What underlies the collusion, and makes the century coherent in the end, is the common premise of "simple location" in Whitehead's semitechnical sense of the term.4 Simple location, says Whitehead in Science and the Modern World, "is the very foundation of the seventeenth-century scheme of nature."s It consists in the belief that any bit of matter "can be said to be here in space and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time."6 As an "absolute presupposition" in R. G. Collingwood's sense, simple location is sufficiently general and tenacious to support both absolutist and relativist paradigms of place or space.7 For our purposes, we need only note that simple location entails the reduction of place to position-to a pinpointed spot in a massive matrix of relations-and the expansion of space to an infinite universe that makes this matrix possible. This becomes evident in another expression of the doctrine: "As soon as you have settled, however you do settle, what you mean by a definite place in space-time, you can adequately state the relation of a particular material body to space-time by saying that it is just there, in that place; and, so far as simple location is concerned, there is nothing more to be said on the subject."8 But in fact there is a great deal more to be said by anyone who, like Whitehead himself, objects to the doctrine as a disastrous legacy that deeply distorts living and lived experience, thereby committing what he calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." This fallacy consists in "mistaking the abstract for the concrete."9 In the case of simple location, this means taking abstracta such as "position" or "universe" as...

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