Abstract
This paper explores the difference between the notions of place and placedness. This difference relates to an important point of differentiation between genuinely a topographical approach and those other approaches that tend to dominate in the existing literature, including approaches associated with ‘situated cognition’. If place is taken as the primary concept, as I argue it should be taken, then that means that being-placed, as it might be viewed as determinative of experience and cognition, has first to be understood in relation to place.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Topographical’ and ‘topological’ are here used, as I have deployed them elsewhere, more or less as synonyms – as I would see it, one emphasises the ‘writing’ of place and the other its ‘saying’.
- 2.
- 3.
This is an example to which I also make reference to in Place and Experience – see Malpas (2018), pp. 135–136. There my concern is with the nature of spatial understanding and the interdependence of a conceptual grasp of space with a grasp of objects.
- 4.
For more on triangulation and topology see my “Self, Other, Thing: Triangulation and Topography in Post-Kantian Philosophy” (Malpas 2015a).
- 5.
A more recent edition appeared as What Computers Still Can’t Do (Dreyfus 1992).
- 6.
See my discussion in Heidegger’s Topology (Malpas 2006), pp. 140–141.
- 7.
See Malpas (2006), Heidegger’s Topology, Chapt. 5.
- 8.
See, for instance, Heidegger’s comment in Contributions that “In Being and Time Da-sein still has an appearance that is ‘anthropological,’ ‘subjectivistic,’ ‘individualist,’ etc.” (Heidegger 2012, p. 233). Heidegger makes this comment still emphasising that Being and Time itself aimed to take issue with such anthropologism and subjectivism, and yet part of the difficulty is this remains an issue as Heidegger’s own focus on the matter here and elsewhere itself suggests.
- 9.
Richard Schacht (2013, pp. 1–24) focuses on what he terms the ‘topology’ of Heidegger’s early work, and especially Being and Time, and briefly takes issue with my own emphasis (which he takes to be characteristic of most commentaries) on the topology that becomes explicit in the later thinking (Schacht 2013, p. 21, n.19). I do not disagree with the claim that topology runs through all of Heidegger’s work, and this is a key claim in Heidegger’s Topology, but what I think Schacht overlooks here is precisely the way Being and Time effectively neglects place in favour of placedness at the same time as it also favours place (inasmuch as it is addressed) as indeed a ‘projection’ rather than as projecting.
- 10.
- 11.
This point is very clear in Heidegger – see my “Heidegger, Space and World” (Malpas 2012), pp. 311–312 – although it also means that he is often treated as neglectful of the body (especially in his treatment in Being and Time). It is worth noting that our being-in-place is not a function of our being-embodied, but rather, our being-embodied is itself derivative of our being-in-place – in exactly the same way that, as Heidegger points out in his 1929 Kantbuch, our dependence on the senses is a function of our finitude rather than our finitude being a consequence of our dependence on the senses – see Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger 1997 , pp. 18–19).
- 12.
This is essentially the line of approach I adopt in Place and Experience. There I argue that “place is not to be viewed as a purely ‘objective’ concept … [that is] a concept to be explicated by reference to objects existing in a physical space … [and] neither is it a purely ‘subjective’ notion … both subject and object are … ‘placed’ within the same structure, rather than one or the other being the underlying ground for that structure” (Malpas 2018, pp. 33 & 35).
- 13.
See “Self, Other, Thing: Triangulation and Topography in Post-Kantian Philosophy” (Malpas a).
- 14.
See my “Placing Understanding/Understanding Place” (Malpas 2016).
- 15.
On the singularity of place see my “Place and Singularity” (Malpas 2015b).
- 16.
The way the hermeneutical appears here draws attention to another important feature of the topographic – one evident in the work of just those thinkers I have already invoked, especially Davidson and Heidegger – namely the connection between place and language. This may be thought somewhat odd given my emphasis on the distinction of place from being-placed and so the insistence on place as a structure that comes before the subjective. Yet as place is not to be understood as primarily subjective, neither, I would argue, is language, though this point depends on distinguishing the specificity of speech and script form the very articulation of the world that these make salient and express.
- 17.
On the assumption that situatedness is understood as distinct from situation, then the notion of situatedness will present a similar equivocity.
- 18.
For more on constructionist construals of place see my “Thinking topographically: place, space, and geography” (Malpas 2017).
- 19.
Aristotle, Physics IV, 208a30.
- 20.
See Heidegger “Seminar in Le Thor 1969” (Heidegger 2004, p. 41 & p. 47).
- 21.
On place and limit, see, for instance, the discussion in “Thinking topographically: place, space, and geography” (Malpas 2017). The topic also arises in Heidegger’s Topology and elsewhere. Heidegger famously emphasises that a limit or boundary is “not that at which something stops but… that from which something begins its presencing” (Heidegger 1971, p. 154).
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Malpas, J. (2018). Place and Placedness. In: Hünefeldt, T., Schlitte, A. (eds) Situatedness and Place. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 95. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92937-8_3
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