The Sense of Space

CONCLUSION SPACE, PLACE, AND ETHICS

CONCLUSION SPACE, PLACE, AND ETHICS OUR BODIES CROSS with the world, cross the earth, cross with our development and with our social world. Our sense of space refers to and makes sense of this crossing, it is not the reconstruction of an already constituted spatial order or container into which we have been dropped. Against our conceptual tendency to root experience in a subjectivity or consciousness closed on itself, or in a closed and solidified body, our sense of space testifies to the fact that experience is a movement open to the world. What are the implications for ethics, space, and place? Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting on his bench in the park. An other walks by. What does this mean? Cartesian philosophy closes consciousness and thereby runs aground on what Sartre calls the reef of solipsism. Sartre tacks around this reef by miring consciousness (nothingness) in being. In our relation to others this miring is manifest in the look and lived space: as we saw in the introduction, according to Sartre, the other appears as a hole in being who makes her or his space with my space. Merleau-Ponty agrees that consciousness is bogged down in the world (see, for example, PP 275/238), but is critical of Sartre’s tactics. In the look, the relation between being and nothingness unfolds as an alternation between being a subject who objectifies the other, and an object objectified by the other. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty detects something metaphysically significant in our sexual being: to be sexual is to be a mix of subjectivity and objectivity, and the other’s look would never affect one if one’s body and the body of the other did not already appear as such a mix. (PP, part 1, chapter five) Nonetheless, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty agree that if the other were constituted on the terms of one’s own consciousness or subjectivity, then the other would not be an other. One’s relation to the other is thus an openness to something that exceeds oneself. In this respect Sartre and Merleau-Ponty 175 176 THE SENSE OF SPACE belong to a stream of philosophy (I return to it below) that argues that ethics cannot be rooted in the transcendental subject (as in Kantianism) or in the calculations of self-enclosed individuals (as in liberal or utilitarian philosophy ). Ethics is rooted in a responsibility to something that exceeds us, a responsibility already implied in our being before we even reflect on it. Far from an ethics derived from the transcendental or practical imperatives of a closed subjectivity, what we call subjectivity instead arises in face of imperatives , imperatives that we inherently face because we are open to something that exceeds us. Sartre thinks such openness is a complex wrench in freedom ; Merleau-Ponty thinks it is the very condition of freedom. But they agree that the ethical would be founded on such an openness and their dispute is about its precise texture. Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of ethics open us to our situation in the world, and thus presuppose spatial perception. To face or not face others, one already has to be oriented in depth. But as we have seen, otherorientation and depth perception go back into a developing body that is already socially and ethically involved with others. The ethical and the spatial cannot be pried apart: our sense of space develops in a social relation that will have ethical implications; our sense of others and thence of the ethical presupposes our sense of space, for this gives us our initial sense of a responsibility to something beyond us. The ethical and the spatial encircle one another, and if we trace the workings of this circle we find ourselves going back into development, the social, social history, and nature, at each point finding movements that exceed us by crossing us with larger places and developments that we cannot subsume into ourselves. So the ethical relation is textured as a doubled openness: it is an openness to the other through an openness to movement, place, the social, nature. This theoretical result can be put in terms of a larger debate. Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s point about openness echoes in philosophers as various as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Irigaray, Cornell, Butler. Within their highly complex disagreements, these philosophers share the conviction that our experience of otherness—and thence our ethical relation to...