The hero's place: medieval literary traditions of space and belonging

Conclusions

285 Conclusions Place’s Fate Revisited: A New Interpretation As we have seen, in western thinking since Kant, human subjectivity and its categories of understanding are seen as ineluctable filters for all perception, including that of space. Epistemologically speaking, we have no guarantee that our perceptions of the world are identical with the world. This centrality of the human subject in perception has become incontrovertible in our time. Historically speaking, however, this was not always true. When we study literature of other time periods, especially those far removed from our own, we must not forget that people of other times may have understood themselves and their world very differently. Indeed, the works of eleventh- and twelfth-century France that we have studied suggest a human experience and understanding of place that diverge significantly from our own. In order to better grasp this difference, I would like to return briefly to the conceptualization of space and place by recent thinkers and make a few observations. Most of the scholars of place studies that we have examined posit a fundamental difference between the past and the present in terms of the human experience of place. They point to moments of rupture when, ac- 286 Conclusions cording to them, the human relationship to space underwent radical change. Interestingly, when we examine closely the core of their arguments, we realize that their respective views on this rupture are incompatible. According to Edward Casey, place was given primary importance in antiquity. Even though important studies of geometrical space existed (such as Euclid’s Geometry), space was widely conceptualized in relationship to human perception and the finite world. The rise of the Christian belief that Christianity’s message pertained equally to all peoples and places gradually led to the dominance of a more universal outlook. Accordingly, space came to be regarded as universally homogeneous. The qualitatively varied, earthbound, human-related conception of space—in other words place—was disregarded.1 The nadir of place coincided with Newton’s concept of absolute space. Beginning with Kant, however, and continuing with the phenomenologists, the centrality of human perception brought place back into philosophical consideration where it now thrives. On the other hand, Tuan and Relph appear to share the opinion that the end of the Middle Ages saw a fundamental change in the human experience of place.2 Around this time, Ptolemy’s maps were rediscovered, the “New World” was discovered, and the heliocentric system of Copernicus was elaborated. These and many other developments helped to propagate a more scientific view of space. Before then, as Tuan explains, the world was “richly symbolical.”3 Since then, place has become less meaningful for human beings, gradually reaching the modern state of placelessness that Relph so deplores. Neither perspective takes fully into account the historical ramifications for place studies of the epistemological issue of the neces1 . The development of Christian pilgrimage in the centuries following Jesus’ life would seem to belie Casey’s correlation of Christian universalism and the decline of place. 2. Tuan situates this change “from 1500 onward” (Topophilia, 247); Relph states that “authentic Place-making, even by elite groups, has become increasingly unlikely since the Renaissance” (Place and Placelessness, 75). 3. Topophilia, 247. Conclusions 287 sary subjectivity of all perception. If, as Kant argues, “Man himself is the original maker of all his representations and concepts,”4 then I cannot be certain that my experience of the world is identical with a universal truth that exists independently of me. At best, all of my experiences , including those of space, involve a certain amount of creative sense-making. At worst, we live in complete ignorance and delusion . Over a century before Kant, René Descartes’program of radical doubt led him to this same epistemological divide when he imagined that he was deceived in all of his perceptions by a “malin génie” (“evil genius/spirit”). His famous “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) offered a first step away from this troubling prospect by assuring him that he must, at least, exist as a thinking being. He reassured himself that the rest of the world must exist too, as he perceived it, with the following reasoning: as a thinking being, he had the idea of a perfect God; that he himself, not being perfect, could not have been the source of this idea; that only a perfect God could be its source; and that therefore...