Contemporary Kantian Metaphysics: New Essays on Space and Time by

Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

7.2 Place and space

Our being in place is not some merely accidental feature of our empirical situation. On Kant’s view, the experience of which finite beings such as ourselves are capable is always based on the deliverances of sensibility – on our receptivity – and so can be said always to be dependent on the place in which we are empirically located, although the point is not one to which Kant himself draws attention. Moreover, the locatedness at issue here is both our own locatedness and the locatedness of the sensible entities that we encounter. As Edward Casey points out in his account of the philosophical history of place, ‘Kant insists that sensible things must occupy particular places: we cannot perceive them, much less know them, except in such places ... bodiless beings are unimplaced, sensible bodies (i.e., bodies perceivable by our own bodies) are inherently implaced entities’.7 Place and the very possibility of sensibility are thus bound closely together.

Now, in order for human beings and other beings to be in one place or another, there has to be a place or places to be in – in the first place, as it were. But, according to Kant, this in turn presupposes the prior presence and original involvement of the very being that is to be or find itself in place. Only because place is basically, originally or, as Kant’s terminology has it, ‘transcendentally’ in us (human beings), can we (human beings) find ourselves subsequently, derivatively and contingently, or ‘empirically’, in one place or another. Empirical placement presupposes transcendental placing. On Kant’s account, then, we are as much in place (empirically) as place is in us (transcendentally). We can thus understand the Kantian project as already taking its primary orientation from the focus on the placed character of experience, and thus also from the way that place is essentially constituted in relation to the human subject, just as the human subject, in virtue of being a finite sensing being, is itself constituted in relation to place.

Although it might seem a somewhat tendentious contrast, this approach, when read in the topographical fashion suggested here, bears comparison with Heidegger’s much later emphasis on the notion of being-in-the-world as the basic characterization of the essence of human being that is Dasein. While it is usual to view Kant’s more ‘subjectivist’ orientation as marking his position off from that of Heidegger (and being viewed so by Heidegger himself), this may be to prejudge the way subjectivity figures in Kant’s thought, and to neglect the way in which the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world is already to some extent prefigured in Kant’s topographical orientation – albeit understood as based in what can now be thought of as the topographical structure of subjectivity. Indeed, the topographical reading of Kant’s project may suggest a greater continuity between the Kantian position (and perhaps also that of German idealism) and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology than might ordinarily be assumed.

The account of space (Raum) that underpins the way of understanding place sketched out here is one of Kant’s most important and innovative ideas.

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