The Fate of Place, a Philosophical History.

Massie, Pascal

Casey, Edward S. Berkeley University of California Press, 1997. xviii + 488 pp. Cloth, $45-00--The subtitle of Casey's work, A Philosophical History, does not denote a merely historiographic enterprise. Although the account of the conceptions of place and space follows a chronological format, from ancient mythological cosmogonies to recent work in continental philosophy, Casey questions primordially the silences, neglects, and absences of this history Such work takes into focus not only what is gained by successive conceptualizations or what is preserved by a tradition but also, and more importantly, what is lost or forgotten.

Taking as a guiding indication a claim from Archytas of Tantrum: "to be (at all) is to be in (some) place," Casey investigates the ontological sense of place and the topological sense of Being. Place appears initially as the capacity to hold and situate things. Giving them a local habitation, it provides room for things. Places are manifold, differentiated, and qualitative; by contrast the concept of space indicates a homogeneous and unlimited extension. Once space is dissociated from the particular bodies that occupy it, it is bound to be emptied of the peculiarities and properties that these bodies lend to the places they inhabit.

In part one, Casey offers detailed analyses of place in the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian story of creation), Plato's Timaeus, and Aristotle's Physics, underlining the transformation from cosmogony to cosmology and finally to physics in the account of the creation and differentiation of places. In recognizing place as a "power" which differs from sheer position and cannot be accounted for in terms of form and matter, Aristotle reaches a definition of place as "the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds." Holding together motion and delimitation, place is both for a body and in the world. Geometrical points are denied identification with places. This, for Casey, is not simply explainable by the nonphysical nature of points, since points are attributed a valid role in the physical world. Yet they do not possess place stricto sensu, but mere "position"; a necessary but not sufficient condition, for places call for boundaries rather than limits, that is "horizons" in the active sense of that from which something begins its presencing.

The progressive substitution of place by space reached an apogee in seventeenth-century physics. Place came to be considered as a "site." a mere modification of space. While place solicits questions of boundary, thus indicating what lies in, space is concerned with the infinite and open-ended and reveals a centrifugal tendency to "space out." Concomitantly, the universe came to replace the cosmos.

Parts two and three are concerned with the ascent of infinite space from Hellenistic philosophy to the modem era. Space is contrasted with places as emptied of body in principle. Places are but momentary subdivisions of a quantitatively determined space, understood as a neutral, universal, homogeneous, void-like, and passive medium. Descartes identified space with physical bodies possessing magnitude and shape, and recognized only a conceptual distinction between these term. Extension, the core concept in Descartes' view, is the common essence of matter and space and the determination of the nature of quantity and dimension. Leibniz's definition of space as "order of coexistence" leads to the separation of body and space and the assimilation of place to the invariancy and indifference of position, that is to quantifiable external relations, purely extrinsic denominations deprived of real subsistence. In his challenging reading of Descartes and Leibniz, Casey shows however, that a positive concept of place always remains implicitly presupposed. The reappearance of place is the object of the last section. This reappearance operates in part by way of bodies. Embodiment calls for an implacement of lived places irreducible to homogeneous and isotropic space. In Heidegger's later work place becomes the scene of Being's disclosure and of the openness of the Open in which truth is unconcealed. Yet, this reappearance of place is not to be understood as a return to a Greek conception; rather it puts any definitive difference between finite place and infinite universe into question. The significance of place is now reasserted on a new basis, in term of bodies, psyche, architecture, institution, and sexuality. Every place is everywhere, it possesses an inclusiveness that does not exclude anything but reaches out to everything, a continual inclusion in ever more expansive envelopments. "What is at stake is a polyvalent primacy--an equiprimordiality of primary terms" (p. 337). Such primacy designates the eventmental character of emplacement and the omnilocality of places.

Casey's exemplary rigor and clarity should have an impact on the rediscovery of the problem of place and space and the recognition of the importance of place for contemporary philosophy.