The Sense of Space

PREFACE

PREFACE THE SENSE OF SPACE is the basis of all social experience and of perceptual experience in general. Without it we would have no sense of a world beyond us. But what is the basis of spatial experience, and what does our sense of space tell us about us and our social being? The concern here is not the space that would be measured by the surveyor, geometer, or scientist, but perceived space as we experience it before objectifying it, what I shall call lived space. The answer demands a study of perception in terms of the moving body. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception placed the body at the center of philosophy. Contemporary and previous thinkers had discussed the body: one can think of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Bergson, the body as haunting Husserl’s Nachlass, the curious peripheral glimpses of the body in Heidegger, the current of bodily discussion that runs through Nietzsche, the discussion in Dewey and James, even the focus on the body that we find in Spinoza and Aristotle—and there are others to be mentioned as well. But no one had put as deep an emphasis on beginning philosophy with the lived body—the body of experience; no one had taken the study of the lived body into such great depth. Since the Phenomenology, the philosophy of the body has been transformed . Post-structuralism enjoins suspicion of a body that would be granted positive primacy, and detects in what we call “body” the shaping or constitutive forces of outside powers. Feminist philosophy draws attention to the body as the site of sexual difference neglected by phenomenology. Critics of phenomenological method urge that the phenomenology of the body repeats the prejudices of the philosophy of consciousness that it aims to avoid, merely cloaking the Cartesian ego in corporeal disguise. All of these movements question and complicate the concept of the body to be found in MerleauPonty . When it comes to the Phenomenology, however, the most important critic is Merleau-Ponty himself: his posthumous The Visible and the Invisible appears to throw the earlier work into question, as being caught up in phenomenological presuppositions insufficient to the ontology of the body. A VII viii PREFACE survey would show that the literature and discussion of Merleau-Ponty after the publication of The Visible and the Invisible increasingly focuses on that work rather than the earlier Phenomenology or The Structure of Behaviour. Merleau-Ponty, though, repeatedly urges that a book is never something complete and that the thinker never quite fully grasps his or her work. In short, a thinker can never close the book on her or his work. This book tries to reopen the Phenomenology, to rethink its concept of the body in a way that critically engages dominant traditions and current results of philosophy and science. Specifically, it rethinks what MerleauPonty calls the body schema—rethinks it in terms of movement in a way that draws on the philosophy of Bergson (an underplayed thread in the weave of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy) and the contemporary scientific program called dynamic systems theory (an offshoot of J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology). The book shows how the moving body is inherently open to the world, how the schema and meaning of perception are not possessions of a closed body-subject, but are rooted in an inherently developmental body, a body that contracts perceptual meaning through learning that is both social and constrained by the body’s own topology and relation to place. Securing this point about perception and the topology of the moving body is the task of part one, “The Moving Sense of the Body.” Part two, “The Spatial Sense of the Moving Body,” shows how our sense of depth and orientation emerge from such a topology in relation to place, and how this sense is rooted in movement and development in a social place. Previous works by Elisabeth Ströker (1987), Sue Cataldi (1993), Patrick Heelan (1983), and Edward Casey (1993, 1997) present studies of spatial perception in relation to phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and place. (Also see Hatfield 1990; Plomer 1991.) Part one of this book adds to this literature by approaching perception through the expressive topology of the moving, developmental body. Part two adds to the literature by giving a detailed study of the way that our sense of space points back to a moving body that envelops and is enveloped by things, that resides on earth and...