The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History

Transition

Transition [Aristotle] therefore desired that space, prematurely liberated by Leucippus and Democritus, be led back to bodies in such a way that place was substituted for space and the inclusion of finite things in finite things for the infinite theater of movement. This artifice allowed him to bury space in bodies. -Henri Bergson, "L'Idee de Lieu chez Aristote" Where have all the places gone? In the long wide wake ofAristotle, the answer has become increasingly evident: submerged in space. Aristotle's ingenious effort to "bury space in bodies"-to foreclose it in the tightly fitting places tailored for physical bodies as their most intimately containing surface structures -was foredoomed. The yawning emptiness of the void, the "gap" (chaos) lampooned by Aristophanes and first examined systematically by the Atomists, proved irresistible to Aristotle's successors, beginning with Strato in the third century B.C. Eight hundred years later, Philoponus launched an outright attack on place's putative power, above all the idea that the world comes equipped with preestablished "natural" places such as the "up" and the "down." Philoponus conceived of space as "pure dimensionality void of all corporeality," 1 a formula that continues to haunt the early modern period. Once space is dissociated from the particular bodies that occupy it, it is bound to be emptied of the peculiarities and properties that these same bodies (beginning with their outer surfaces) lend to the places they inhabit-or that they take away from places by internalization or reflection. The inward partitioning of space, its incareration in bodies-in-places, gives way to space as "the infinite theater of movement": an essentially empty theater. Indeed, in Parts II and III we have witnessed the revenge of the void, its forcible reentry into philosophical and scientific discourse. No longer 197 198 The Reappearance of Place "prematurely liberated," it came to possess an enormously reinvigorated status in the two millennia after Aristotle's death in the early fourth century B.C. For Philoponus in particular, it had sufficient "force" (in his own word) to become the very name of space itself: "space and the void are essentially the same thing." 2 This Philoponean equation had a powerfully alleviating effect on all those who concerned themselves thereafter with space. Throughout the Middle Ages and especially the Renaissance-when Philoponus, rediscovered in the original Greek, was very much a person to contend with-his bold equation served to inspire thinkers preoccupied with the infinity of the universe, despite the continuing allegiance to Aristotle's finitism and plenarism on the part of other thinkers. The strongest challenge to the Philoponean equation, however, came not from the Aristotelians but from Descartes's counterequation of space and matter. Nevertheless, we must not assume that the Philoponean move "Contra Aristotelem" reinstated anything like a strict void or utter vacuum. Philoponus emptied space of body, but he did not rid it of structure. By characterizing the void as dimensional, he gave assurance that it is not merely boundless or chaotic, thereby obviating any metaphysical anxiety one might feel in the face of something utterly inchoate. Philoponus even allowed that space is always de facto filled-"it is never without body"3-so long as one appreciates the fact that one can think it as "extension empty of body."4 This latter formula is repeated almost verbatim by Kant, who affirms that "we can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects."s Others who shared Philoponus's vision felt free to give various contents to the void, such as light or ether,6 or to designate it the "Empyrean." But what matters is less the exact character (or even the fact) of the content of the void than the voidlike character of space, however space itself is conceived . As vacuous, even if not a perfect vacuum, space lacks those specific attributes or qualities that would tie it to place as the specific setting of material bodies. But its very dimensionality allows space to be conceived in accordance with a multitude of alternative models, including those of Descartes and Kant. In making extension the essence of matter and space alike, Descartes, despite his effort to contest the void, is in effect continuing Philoponus 's stress on the cubic or volumetric character of space in general, a character inherent in both space and void. Kant's early effort to derive dimensionality from the mathematics at work in the universal law of...