The Sense of Space

NOTES

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Casey 1991a. On the ways in which we should not interchange depth with height and width, see Casey 1993 and Casey 1997. 2. Casey 1991a distinguishes between depth and distance: distance objectifies depth, whereas depth is the proper dimension of what Casey calls volume. To simplify discussion, I use the term distance to speak of the spread between oneself and things, but distance in this sense is not to be taken as an already objectified and measured dimension. 3. See Casey 1993, part 2, for a detailed study of these elements of space in relation to the body. 4. Someone adopting the point of view of scientific reductionism might argue that the difference between ordinary and extra-ordinary depth is nominal, a difference in name only. Thus our omission of ‘here-there’ orderings, etc., when speaking of bodily experience is simply an expedient shorthand. The underlying referent remains something ordered in space like any other thing, but the simplification confers an evolutionary advantage, say. But evolutionary adaptations must do something if they are to be an advantage. So we would have to ask: Why is it an evolutionary advantage to perceive one’s body as a unified thing without an internal depth ordering ? Presumably it is because the body stands in its environment as a thing that is to have its own unity. From this beginning we could argue, against the reductionist, that the distinction between extra-ordinary and ordinary depth is not merely nominal , but has an ecological reality, in J. J. Gibson’s sense, because a being that feels itself and acts as an indivisible whole is better able to live in its environment. 5. Various philosophers remark on the error of thinking that fixed divisions entrenched in our language and concepts apply to phenomena themselves. Cf., e.g., Dewey 1929, chap. 1; Bergson 1991, 1998; Merleau-Ponty 1942, 1945; and Hegel 1969. 6. On this point, cf. Heidegger’s (1977) analysis of the bridge in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Note that architectural and other conventions reverse this relation: once conventional markers such as doorsills and borders are established, placing them demarcates regions to be crossed. 183 7. See Merleau-Ponty 1968, but also OE. Evans and Lawlor 2000 is a helpful collection on the issue; the editor’s introduction, Renaud Barbaras’s “Perception and Movement,” and Bernhard Waldenfels’s “The Paradox of Expression” are especially helpful at contextualizing these concepts across Merleau-Ponty’s work. Also see Dillon 1988. 8. See PP, esp. introduction, chap. 1; James 1950, esp. 1: chap. 5–7; Dewey 1929, esp. chap. 1. 9. Kant 1929, A22/B37–A30/B45; James 1950, 2: chap. 20, esp. 134–144. 10. On this presumption about sensations, see PP, esp. the introduction, and Dillon 1988. 11. The point will be made in the case of depth perception, but it is worth putting it in more general terms, which will also help clarify the claim being made. Consider the experience of looking at an abandoned mirror lying on the grass. Crucially , a single array of sensations gives perceptual experience of two different things: the mirror with its silvery surface, and what it reflects, say the blue of the sky. Is it the case (a) that the mirror together with the sky, etc., specifies an underlying order that causes an array of sensations that we subsequently decode as being caused by two things, mirror and sky? Or is it the case (b) that the internal web of sensation has tensions within it that first of all drive us to notice that there are two things at play in our perceptual experience, silvery mirror and sky? In other words, (a) are two different causes producing one array of sensations in us, or (b) is a tension within an already cohesive web of perception prompting a meaningful order in which we first of all notice two different things, mirror and sky? The latter (b) is suggested by the fact that prereflective experience knows so little about the actual component causes of arrays of sensations. (In this case, is it a mirror, water in a clean-cut hole, some artist’s installation with a painting of the sky or a mirror-pond installed in a field?) Eleanor Gibson’s famous experiments with infants on the ‘visual cliff’ (infants refuse to venture onto a solid sheet of glass suspended over a staircase that can be seen through the glass) suggest that...