Body’s Constitution of Space

Helga Wild

Ich widme diesen Aufsatz Helgi-Jon Schweizer zu seinem 70en Geburtstag inAnerkennung der Arbeit die ich ihm gekostet habe (not to speak of the bottles of wine!)und in Dankbarkeit dafuer dass er mich vor langer Zeit auf den Pfad gesetzt hat, den ichseitdem – moeglicherweise nicht immer in seinem Sinne – weitergegangen bin. Er istdamit an dem Raum, den ich mir geschaffen habe, massgeblich mitbeteiligt und wird eshoffentlich auch weiterhin sein.

This paper originates in a presentation given at the Symposium onHeidegger and Space at Stanford University in spring of 2007. Thepaper hopes to convince the reader that there is a structuring ofspace that can be derived from the organization of the humanbody. To the extent that all humans have this organization incommon (spatial experience would be different for someone withsensory or motor impediments), this structuring of space or, moreappropriately, making of space – since we can not presume thatthere is a space that precedes it – is an immanent universal inDeleuze’s sense.1 The claim sounds grand, but it will becomeabundantly, almost trivially, clear over the course of the essay.The argument relies strongly on a thoroughly phenomenologicalconceptual toolkit to be found in the work of Heidegger, Husserl,Merleau-Ponty and Ströker.2 I am introducing a number of conceptsfrom phenomenology right below that will help the readerunfamiliar with phenomenology to get started. All others pleaseskip the next section.Constitution — is the term Husserl uses to indicate that all realityis jointly “constituted” (there is no substitute for the term) bysubject and world. Constitution acknowledges the active role ofthe subject in the “having” of experiences and at the same timeadmits to the genuine participation of the world. Experiencedreality is then neither an illusion, a projection of the subjectonto formless matter, nor is it pure objectivity impinging on apassive subject. He emphasizes the dependence of phenomena on theexperiencing subject like Kant, but refuses the Kantian split1 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1995.2 See for instance E. Husserl, Ideas and Crisis, M. Heidegger. Being and Time, M. Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception, E. Ströker. Investigations into the Phenomenology of Space.

between appearances (where things look a certain way) and therealm of the Ding-an-sich (where they are that way!).Constitution, according to Husserl, enables one to get at whatreally is, but not independent of one’s specific mode of beingand experiencing. Intentionality — can be loosely understood as the quality that givesa mental act direction and purpose. Intentionality characterizesevery mental act, says Husserl following Brentano. Even thoughthere are the different acts – e.g. perceiving, remembering,dreaming, willing – all these have in common that they aredirected outside themselves by virtue of having an inner objector content which guides the act and specifies the content orobject aimed at in the world. This distinction between an innerand an outer object may be translated loosely into the sense/reference distinction made by Frege [ref.]. The inner object ispresent in every act – according to Husserl, and accounts for thedirectionality and selectivity of the mental act withoutguaranteeing its success in the world. It is not to be confusedwith the external object, which might bring the act successfullyto completion, but need not! The fact that the act requiresfulfillment by an external object accounts for the possibility ofdisappointment – one may fail to find the external object.Body – is admittedly a dangerous term to use because it invokesinstantaneously the Cartesian dualism between body and mind. Thisis why phenomenologists often add the adjective “lived” to avoidmisunderstanding. What is meant is a combination of Cartesianmind and body, or rather a unified conception that precedes thesplit: the thinking, feeling, willing of the mind as well as thesituatedness, extendedness of the physical body. I will mark thedifference by using capital-B, i.e. Body, when I use it in theabove sense, and use lower-case b, when I use it in the normalsense after the Cartesian split.3

Being and Dasein – are terms in Heidegger’s ontology. They relateto one another across two levels: first as a unified singular to

3 The psychological literature makes the distinction between body image and bodyschema: the first term captures a person’s presentation of its body to itself inthe light of social and societal norms, the second is the composite of afferent and reafferent informational pathways that allow the body to relate imminent movements and actions to its present state. Both of these share the presuppositions of Cartesian dualism and are not synonymous with the Body as conceived by phenomenology. See D. Tiemersma, 1989.

a plural: Being (capital B), which encompasses the whole of whatis, is opposed to Dasein as the collective of human beings (lowercase b and plural); second, they relate as two singulars that“exist” one on the ontological, the other on an existentialplane. Being is the unchanging ground behind the changing sceneryof phenomena. Dasein stands for all the separate, individuatedentities placed contingently in the world. The meaning of Daseinis for the focus of this paper very close to the meaning of Bodymentioned above. This will become clear in the similarity inattributes of Dasein and Body with regard to their relation tospace.

Structure of the essay

I will discuss the role Body plays in making us experience spaceas we do. In that I take first Heidegger, then Elizabeth Strökeras my guides, with excursion into other phenomenologists such asMerleau-Ponty or Husserl, as needed. Heidegger relatesexperienced spatiality to the things in use by Dasein, whichopens up the space of the world in the sense of the “Mid-world”[ref. Miller], what Heidegger also calls ready-to-hand, but atthe same time his analysis removes Dasein from its own space.Ströker brackets the world of objects in order to demonstrate thespatiality inherent in the body’s organization. I want to add tothese two instructive descriptions a discussion on what is meantby constitution by the Body. In keeping with Husserl I draw onthe role of passivity (what he calls “passive synthesis”) to linkspatial experience to the pre-cognitive and pre-intentionalground which links Body and world.

Spatiality of Existence and World

In Being and Time Heidegger claims that it is of the utmostimportance to distinguish between space and time, and in doing soto reverse the metaphysical privileging of space over time:traditionally, he claims, time has been understood in terms ofspace, and specifically in terms of a line, whether circular(Ptolemy), rectilinear (Galileo) or curvilinear (Einstein). Thisspatialization of time is what has made the essence and nature oftime inaccessible to the tradition. This does not mean thatHeidegger has no place for space in his thinking, however. He

remains equally concerned with the spatiality of space, as he iswith the temporality of time, though one might fault him fortrying to keep them somewhat artificially separated! The space heis concerned with is, however, not to be understood in absolutegeometric terms as preexisting beings-in-space, but has to beseen first relationally – as determined by the relations amongentities, and then existentially and ontologically – as concernedwith the characteristic mode of being-in-the-world of human andmore generally living things. Heidegger insists that we experience the world first as anenvironment (an Umwelt), not as a world of objects that confrontsthe subject. As it unfolds originally in our everydayinteractions, the world is not objectively given and presented toan ordering scientific gaze. And yet, Heidegger argues, we manageto understand it. So, the first question about space is how comewe can successfully act in and with it, even though it escapesour cognitive and theoretic grasp? Heidegger answers this bydifferentiating understanding and knowing as two different modesof comportment (Note, that comportment already invokes a bodilyform of existence; so his chosen terminology already does some ofthe work for him.) Our world, he claims, is one that weunderstand intuitively and pre-theoretically. We navigate andcolonize it without adopting a theoretic-scientific stance. Whenwe choose to adopt such a stance, however, we change the statusof the world from something encountered as the extension andprosthesis of our being into objectively given individuatedentities at a remove and open to interrogation and representationby the inquiring subject. Paradoxically, and thanks to thesuccess of the modern scientific worldview, this objective worldhas come to be viewed as the real world, sometimes as thephilosophically only valid one. Heidegger does not dispute thatsomething of the world is captured by the methods of scienceinaugurated by Descartes and Galileo. His claim is that behindthis ‘objective’ world there is a deeper truth that we haveforgotten and we must learn to see again. In this mannerHeidegger radicalizes his teacher Husserl’s method of bracketingthe established and accepted attitude in order to make us seethings afresh. Phenomenology remains the method that is supposedto give us our eyes back in order to bring into focus a realityfrom which we have grown estranged.

The quarrel with Descartes

The nature of Heidegger’s quarrel with Cartesianism andKantianism bears on what he sees as the need to make philosophyconcrete again. He sees the dualism of Cartesian thought as aninevitable offshoot of a rather artificial separation of thebeing of the world from our own. It is only with phenomenologyand its call to return philosophy to the world in its immediatepresence that philosophy is able to break with formal, sterileabstraction and move beyond the sphere of representation. Withoutthe commitment to “return to the things themselves,” he claims,philosophy will share the destiny of modern science and itsproblems as well. How is one to characterize this attitude that Heidegger calls‘theoretic’ or ‘metaphysical’? For Descartes, the world is to beanalyzed in terms of substances. Substances are defined by thefact that they exist independently of anything other thanthemselves, so that one can see them as the basic building blocksof an ontology, which Descartes is trying to create. As is wellknown, he means to build his ontology from only two substances:mind and matter – or more correctly, since he is writing Latin:res cogitans and res extensa. Substances are different insofar aseach possesses a distinct essence. The essence of matter is onDescartes’ reading, extension; and the essence of the mind isthought. Res extensa and res cogitans, extension and thought orcognition, as it would be translated nowadays, thus exhaust theessential reality of the world.Rendered thus, space is completely restricted to matter andbecomes synonymous with extension. This conception produces thespace of Euclidean geometry and lies at the foundation of modernclassical physics. Thus understood, the (physical, material)world can indeed be reduced to the book written in geometricalcharacters, much admired by Galileo, and the thinking power ofthe cogito is the power to represent the world mathematically. Byclaiming for the subject the unique ability of representing theworld, Descartes sets philosophy on an entirely new course, onethat lays the transcendental foundations of modern mathematicalphysics. But his substances cut across the human being, whowhile material and extended, is defined only in terms of thought.Thought designates the essence of the substance ‘human being’.

The rest is relegated to the body that functions like a machineand can itself become an object of study.

Phenomenological conception of space

Heidegger’s idea of space and of human beings differs profoundlyfrom the Cartesian one. His choice of the term “Dasein” for humanbeing(s) marks this departure. The use of this term forces one toperform a substantial shift in attitude from the third-personperspective to a first-person perspective, which describes theworld from within one’s own existence and experience. This is thephenomenological stance. It tells us that Dasein’s position (i.e.ours!) in space and its relation to other entities cannot bedetermined as an absolute positioning within a coordinate systemas classical geometry would have it; nor can one describeDasein’s movement as a change in position (á la Zeno) against thebackground of static Euclidean space. So what does the spatialityof Dasein consist in then? According to Heidegger the character of the world lies in itsaroundness with respect to Dasein (he calls it “das Umhafte derUmwelt”), which mirrors Dasein’s being-in the world. Thisrelation Heidegger understands as a relation of dwelling. Daseinencounters entities and relates to them as embedded in the sameenvironment as itself. Yet Heidegger insists that these are notat all ‘in’ the world in the way in which Dasein is. He drawsthe difference between the purely immanent sense of ‘in-ness’characteristic of other things and the ‘in’ of Dasein, which istranscendent. The difference between the two senses of being ‘in’is precisely that between a relation of inclusion or enclosureand one of dwelling or in-habiting. The world to which Dasein relatesby inhabiting it is not an empty container waiting to be filledwith entities and events. Unlike a glass, which is indifferentwith respect to what it contains, Dasein and its world are notindifferent to one another. Rather, Dasein’s ex-sistence, thisstanding out of the world and standing outside of things, is thatof a being projected into a myriad of possibilities and relationswith the world. It is in this sense that Heidegger can say that Dasein is itsworld! And this must be understood transitively: Dasein’s beingis precisely its ‘worlding’. Between Dasein and the world is arelation of concern and care (Sorge): in the way in which Dasein

stands out from its own existence, its very being is at issue forit. (One is reminded of the Sartrian definition of the human:“[It] is what it is not and is not what it is!” which expressesprofoundly the decenteredness of the subject in its projects andits projection. To feel at home presupposes that one develops arelation of care for the things that surround one andintentionally surrounds oneself with the things one cares for.This marks the boundary between Dasein and world only dynamicallyand never in a permanent manner, yet it is only through suchrelations that Dasein forms a sense of familiarity with itsworld. This is the reason why Heidegger insists that weunderstand the ‘in’ of Dasein’s being-in on the basis of the oldGerman verb innan: to inhabit, to dwell.The distinction between the kind of insideness that characterizesthe water’s relation to the glass and the relation of dwellingthat characterizes Dasein’s connection to its world, is adistinction between two senses of space: the former draws onspace as the physical enclosure within which things areobjectively contained; the latter corresponds to a moreprimordial phenomenon and coincides with an ontologicalunderstanding of space. Objective, i.e. e. representational spacepresupposes a given and already individuated framework withinwhich things have positions and events take place. This leavesout of consideration the issue of the coming-to-be of spaceitself and the process whereby entities find places in space —or, as some would call it, the production of space,4 which forHeidegger is Dasein’s creative work of spacing! Space, Heideggerargues, presupposes the more basic phenomenon of the spatialityof existence, which engages in what he calls “Einraeumen” –making room for things, clearing a horizon within which thingscan manifest themselves with the closeness or distance, theurgency or familiarity, clarity or confusion, as befits theirnature. The DA (There) of Da-sein is itself the topological germ, whichgives rise to the horizon, establishes regions and neighborhoods.This proto-locus establishes the space with regard to whichthings find their proper place – proper in the sense ofappropriate to the relation between this entity and Dasein. Inthe everyday practical context such things are first and foremostpieces of equipment with which we carry out our everyday4 Henri Lefebvre, 1991.

projects. Their proper places have then nothing to do with theiractual position in space-time, but everything to do with theregion of use from which they emerge as they become relevant toour purposes. Our indicators, the ways in which we orient ourselves in theworld and encounter things within it, the sense of space that wehave is then not a function of our ability to calculatetrajectories in space-time. We orient ourselves through thosethings, and it is by keeping in touch and in contact with themthat a space is engendered. For the most part, as Heidegger says,we find ourselves in situations in which, “[a]ll ‘where’s arediscovered and circumspectively interpreted as we go our ways ineveryday dealings; they are not ascertained and catalogued by theobservational measurement of space.”The two significant aspects of Dasein’s spatiality are accordingto Heidegger Entfernung and Ausrichtung. Entfernung is not takenin its usual sense of ‘distance’, but by playing on the prefixEnt- as denoting something that abolishes or cancels distance orremoteness, Heidegger makes it mean instead the opposite: a de-distancing, a bringing things close. Thus, things are encounteredthrough the essentially de-distancing comportment of Dasein, andthis comportment makes things be far or close by, here or overthere. Far or close is not a function of objective distance, butalways the effect of the manner and the urgency with which Daseinrelates to them. Heidegger again: “The objective distances ofthings that are merely present do not coincide with theremoteness and closeness of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world.” [ref.] When we say about a place, for instance, that ‘itis a good walk’ or ‘a stone’s throw’ or even ‘half-hour’, weintend not an exact measure of time but a duration, a dimensionthat is imbued with the life and comportment of existence itself.For the most part, this comportment is practical and utilitarianand thus Dasein’s relation to things is driven by a desire tohave them nearby, to bring them closer.The second character that serves to define the spatiality ofexistence is that of directionality. It is reminiscent ofHusserlian intentionality but also differs from it. Bydirectionality Heidegger means that existence (notconsciousness!) is always oriented toward things in a particularmanner, always engaged in a zoom-like activity of ‘nearing’ or‘bringing close,’ even when things appear out of reach, far off

or unattainable. Existence brings out directionality as inheringin what it encounters: directions such as right, left, up, down,beneath, behind, or in front are discovered in the thing invirtue of Dasein’s purpose. These directions, which Dasein issaid to always take along with it, are due to Dasein’scorporeality, the lived body that it is. In an illuminating andunusual passage, which echoes Husserl’s [check] analyses of theconstitution of bodily beings (Leiblichkeit) and prefiguressubsequent developments in the phenomenology of body and flesh(see M-Ponty ref.), Heidegger alludes to the manner in whichdwelling amidst things and finding one’s way in the worldpresupposes the intrinsically bodily nature of Dasein. Hepostpones however (indefinitely) a detailed examination of thisquestion. To quote Heidegger himself: “Dasein’s spatialization inits ‘flesh’ is also marked out in accordance with directions.This ‘flesh’ hides a whole problematic of its own, though weshall not treat it here…” This investigation is taken up later byE. Ströker to be presented below.To sum up the key points of Heidegger’s treatment of space:

1. Critique and re-orientation of analysis of space

Heidegger has made a substantial breakthrough by providing anexhaustive critique of the theoretical and physical conceptionsof space and opening up an analysis of spatiality based on theliving existential conditions. His happy coinage of the terms“ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) and “present-at-hand” (dasVorhandene) embodies the crucial reorientation of analysis to thenatural, that is to say, engaged encounter with the world andentities in it, separating it once and for all from thescientific-theoretical approach that finds itself opposite theobject-of-study.

2. Spatiality of Dasein and World

Heidegger affirms that both Dasein and the world are inherentlyspatial. Both have spatiality, but not independent of one anther.It is only in the sense that they are co-constitutive of oneanother’s spatiality that they “have it,” and for Dasein to havea world is the necessary condition for discovering itself spatialsince “[…] spatiality is not discoverable at all except on the

basis of the world. [Heidegger, ref.]”and “…so zwar, dass derRaum die Welt mitkonstitutiert, entsprechend der wesenhaftenRaeumlichkeit des Daseins selbst hinsichtlich seinerGrundverfassung des in-der-Welt-seins.” [ref.]

3. Lived World (Lebenswelt)

Heidegger also affirms the pre-eminence of the world as the livedworld in its close entanglement with Dasein’s manner ofexistence. He claims, like Husserl, that it is a realm first as apre-cognitive ground and only later construed by cognition, wherethe first establishes the possible mode of interaction for thelatter. He criticizes Western philosophy for having skipped (-i.e. uebersprungen) this important fact so far. Spatialityreveals itself in a being’s encounter with other things-in-the-world. More on how this happens with Ströker later on.

4. Meaning as inherent in all encounters

Linking the world to Dasein in the above-described way inevitablymakes meaning an integral aspect of any encounter with entitiesand present from the get-go, not added-on or projected on to itafter the fact. Encounters with entities in the world arerevealed to Dasein as possessing meaning and value. Value andmeaning also cling to entities in virtue of Dasein’s historicity.In any case, meaning is at the heart and at the very start of theencounter with entities.

5. Focus on the ready-to-hand

Heidegger pays much attention to the way in which tool use andprojects determine the structure of lived space. This leads himto place much greater emphasis on spatiality as on the side ofthe world even though, of course, it is the spatiality of Daseinand its projects that also show up there. The result is thatDasein itself is left almost completely empty of spatialattributes: directionality gets embedded into the entities andregions of the world and the de-distancing though originatingfrom the “DA” of Dasein’s location in space is quickly absorbedinto the Umwelt, where entities carry Dasein’s relevance and linkthemselves to other entities in their region. Heidegger does not

like to claim extension or extendedness for Dasein, since – Iassume – it comes too close to the key attribute of one Cartesiansubstance and becomes subject to his critique of the physical-theoretical third-person perspective. But because of all thatDasein ends up almost devoid of the spatial attributes and onefinds it at times hard to resist thinking of Dasein as ratherlike a force that only shows itself in its effect on otherthings, but remains invisible itself.

The Body in its “Leiblichkeit”

“Bodily nature” is the translation for the German term“Leiblichkeit,” (which would be better suited to our purposebecause it avoids the reference to a nature and thus an impliedtranscendence.) Heidegger mentions the reliance of Dasein on thisbodily nature, but does not pursue its analysis himself. Thatthere is more to be found about space through exploring thebodily nature of Dasein, is proven in exemplary ways by the workof Elizabeth Ströker. Ströker does not use the term Body orbodily nature or Dasein. Her concern is – again – with overcomingthe Cartesian split and she chooses the term corporeal subject toalert the reader to the necessity of conceiving of the human asboth corporeal and subject. However, she follows in Merleau-Ponty’s footsteps and departs thereby from Heidegger by assigningan ontological status to the corporeal subject (Heidegger gave itontic status. [ref.]. This means that the features Heideggerdescribed are not due to the contingencies of embodiment, toDasein’s thrownness (Geworfenheit) or to put it more drasticallyin Neo-Platonic lingo, to the descent of the soul into a body,but rather precondition and the ontological ground of all humanaction and experience (which brings her closer to Kant). I thinkthat this stance is better represented by a single unified termand will use Merleau-Ponty’s term “Body” in the sense introducedabove instead. Apologies for the tedious shifts in terminology. The key characteristics of this Body are, pace Ströker, extensionand intention. The first term, extension, can be rescued fromDescartes while acknowledging the (yes, physical) character ofhaving a volume together with a surface that is characteristic ofany material body. Adding to that the quality of a sensuoussurface that experiences otherness at its boundary one arrives ata quality that unites physical extension with the lived Body.

Extension of the Body together with an ability and intention formovement makes for the shifting relations of this Body withregard to others: moments of contact, relative placing anddisplacing of entities in space. Intentions, again, stand for thepurposes with which the Body invests its environment and theentities within it. Based on one’s intentions one lines upobjects and tools with paths of established motions and actions,establishes practices by repeated use and sediments them intohabits. The specific investments of the Body colonize the environment; ittransforms things into tools and materials for projects, shelterfor dwelling, establishes regions of affordances in space: all ofwhich is the spatial entanglement that Heidegger so brilliantlydescribed. By holding back on these investment, by bracketing theattitude that sees objects as always already invested with theBody’s purpose, one can get back to a detailed phenomenologicalanalysis of the features that make for the specific character ofspace as derived from – i.e. constituted by – the Body. This isthe approach E. Ströker is taking. She is performing the epocheon Heidegger’s ‘natural’ attitude thereby putting in questionwhether the operational concern with the world is the only orindeed the most fundamental one. With this she reaches behindthe intention to the spatiality of the Body without letting theintentional force flow over into its objects. What she adds tothe Husserlian analysis of the same methodology is Leiblichkeit,the specific bodily nature of Body in order to investigate how itlives its space. What she discloses by this analysis is that there are more andother forms of space besides the space of action and purpose!According to Ströker, Body experiences space in a multitude offorms, but all these are part of one space, flow seamlessly intoone another or nest in one another. For the purpose of analysisshe is pulling them apart into a list of differentiation spaces.But it is important to keep in mind that this does not constitutean ontological or even existential claim. Based on her analysisStröker lists the Attuned Space, the Space of Action, the Spaceof Intuition (towards an abstract space of perceptual things) andthe Space of Movement, which leads according to her to theconception of an objective space.

Attuned Space

Attuned space is the space of the Body before it articulatesitself into specific intentions or projects. It is space thatsurrounds the Body without creating a preferred orientation, anisotropic space of equal density all around. The space isnaturally full and densely packed with world. It is only once theBody reaches towards something and through the intervening spacethat empty space is “created.” This is the space loosely invokedby the Situationists in their practice of “derive” (drifting)where they perambulate the urban landscape without goal or planand let themselves be led by marks and signs in the world. It isdescribed in de Certeau’s “Practice of Everyday Life” aspurposeless wandering, a doing without will or assumed mastery,in what Lingis calls a stance of “imperative incompetence.5” Itexpresses the Body’s passive yet receptive openness to the world.Objects are found or run into, not looked for or looked at. Theyleave no permanent impression after an encounter but rather fusewith the surrounding space into an atmospheric fullness, anoverall impression, more like a mood than a house. In this spaceobjects are experienced as expressive in their own right, haveunique voices and claims alongside the Body’s indicating a spaceof co-habitation in which no one is privileged. Body’s manner ofapproach is then one of respectful appreciation, of openness tothe voices that surround it. It is clear that this space appearsin pure form only seldom and for short moments. It is quicklyovertaken by the necessity to act and the search for determinateobjects that serve one’s purpose. But equally clear is that inevery culture there have been attempts to cultivate this space(of contemplation?), and those attempts have given rise tointeresting thoughts and practices on how to be without intentionand orientation and the sense of profound insights and possiblypower to be derived from it. Of course, as soon as power comesinto play, the attuned space gives way to the space of actionwith its built-in control and limits.

5 Alphonso Lingis. 1996.

Space of Action (Space of efficacy)

The space of action comes closest to what Heidegger describes inBeing and Time regarding the ready-to-hand. It is a space shapedand oriented by the Body’s purposefulness. It consists of thingsthat relate to that project (the ready-to-hand), that revealthemselves in just those aspects that pertain to, and to theextent that they pertain to, the Body’s projects. The space in-between these objects is then emptied out as the Body reachestowards tools and materials, and makes room for a region ofrelated places and relative placings, in which distances aremeasured by the Body’s functional use of space.Space is now obviously oriented by a purpose and rendered therebynon-homogeneous. The Body itself forms at times part of anassemblage together with tools and materials and becomesexecutive of its own intentions. The arrangements of limbs andtrunk, the function of the sense organs, posture and movementsall operate then within the bounds of the task at hand. Ergono-mics is the study of precisely this boundedness.Handiness is tied to the space of action in two ways: an object ishandy in the sense of being tailored to, or well equipped for,the purpose, and also by being conveniently placed and readilyaccessible to the acting body. Affordance6 captures the firstmeaning of handiness, proximity (and remoteness) expresses thesecond: the way space gets differentiated into regions based onthe availability of objects. (The experienced differentiationinto proximate and remote space may explain the psychologicalfatigue one gets when having to interrupt the flow of a task inorder to find the appropriate tool in a remote part of the world,the garage, say, or the filing cabinet across the room.)Sedimentation and habit. Even though this essay is on space, it isstill not possible to ignore the temporality inherent in Body’sprojects. Projects extend over time; they demand a sequence oftasks and subtasks. The objects that belong to each one of theseare equally temporary and transitory in their revealed nature: asthe project ends or the task changes, so do the things that areready-to-hand: they lose their handiness and disappear. At leastthat is what one would have to infer, if Body were not alsohistorical. But since Body rarely builds up and arranges its6 James Gibson. 1986.

tools every time from scratch, this is not completely true. Afterall it has memories of earlier engagements and earlierexperiences of flow (‘flow’ stands for ease of tool-mediatedperformance and the delight one experiences thereby!7) that guideit in recreating earlier arrangements and fitting them to thepresent purpose. Over time Body ends up with a number ofadaptable tool arrangements – and that includes conceptual toolsand processes – with which most situations can be addressed. Itsettles into those as into quasi-found, quasi-objective pathways,possibly retrieving or regenerating thereby a modified experienceof the attuned space. Only against such an established backgroundof familiarity can one find a tool absent or experiencevariations in outside condition. The pathways get sedimentedthrough repeated or continued usage, and gradually begin todetermine the Body as much as its fingerprint does. They becomehabits: recognizable to others as characteristic for this Body,but on the part of the Body itself hardly noticed, because almostmindlessly engaged in. (Recall Tristram Shandy’s apt remark aboutpeople: that once they have made for themselves those habits assmooth as garden paths, “the devil himself could not get them offit.”)8

Arrangements of tools in space always refer back to an equallyplaced, equally extended and structured being, one that lends ahand to the ready-to-hand, but this is inferred only logicallyand after the fact. At the moment of engagement in the space-of-action Body is not aware of itself. Thus space of action has acenter of sorts in the acting Body, and thus a basis for theanisotropy of space in that not all directions in space areequally well lived or enacted. But it expresses itself onlyindirectly in the resistance of objects, when they refuse toconform to the purpose or, worse, undermine this purpose. This isinterpreted as resistance, which makes the Body aware of itselfas vulnerable and dependent, and brings the object into focus asan in-itself. Heidegger described this as the breakdown of theobject, which goes hand in hand with a shift from ready-to-handto a present-at-hand (“das Vorhandene”). He interprets this asthe same as the scientific stance where an ob-ject stands overagainst the subject as objectively given. However, in the firstcase it is really the falling out with Body’s purposiveness that

7 Csikszentmihaily, M. 1990. 8 Laurence Sterne. 1967.

produces this awareness of objects outside their embedding in theproject and thus seemingly appearing in-themselves. One mightjust as well see this as an experience that is bound up with thespace of action and thus not necessarily equivalent to theexperience of a scientific objectivity, unless one feelsjustified in assuming that objectivity contains an element ofhostility already. Bracketing the objects and focusing instead on the Body, thespace of action is structured by elemental pairs of opposites:Above and below, left and right, front and back constitute amanifold of regions. In the temporal sequence of actions pathwayslead through these regions, but the space they pass through isnot a three-dimensional space, nor do the paths contain a metricfor distances. The greatest speed or the shortest path mean notspeed or distance in absolute terms, but only in terms of thepossible movement combinations coupled to an economy of movement.It is characterized by a concern with efficacy, comparable towhat Jullien described as characteristic of Chinese thought9.Economy is thus to be interpreted in a broad sense, in the sameway in which the efficacious running of a campaign and/ ororganization must be cognizant of social as well as physicalforces. What determines the economy is according to Ströker theembedding of the project in a situation that contains “me in mybeing here and now and the things to which I orient myself.” (Ströker p. 75)Above and below are connected to the “bodily nature” of Dasein;they are distinguished with regard to the Body’s upright posture,but also with regard to the world and thus are independent of anyspecific posture: Above remains above when one is lying down, andone is aware of having changed one’s posture with regard to theseorientations. Above and below are also established in connectionwith Body’s action on things via the experience of weight andresistance, which permanently and reliably establishes thedirections. Left and right are more tenuously distinguished. Manypeople have difficulties translating directions containing leftand right into the right kind of action, although they are alwaysaware that it involves a turning sideways. Ströker explains thisconfusion as an expression of the basic symmetry of the Body withrespect to its sides. One may be able to associate left and rightcorrectly with the help of some minor functional asymmetry: forinstance, if the left hand is weaker and right hand stronger, or9 Francois Jullian. 2004.

by the cultural asymmetry of having learned to write with onehand and not the other. The front and back differentiation is not asstrong as above and below, but stronger than left-right. Theasymmetry between the Body’s front and back establishesheterogeneous space by its tendency to move always in a forwarddirection, which is in major ways determined by the position ofthe eyes. The space of action is in major ways frontal space. Thespace in front is the region within which eye and hand canoptimally complement one another. Thus this is the space bestcultivated for work – and we do so cultivate them, think only ofthe desk, the kitchen counter, the work bench. Human Factors isreally the exploration of that frontal space constituted by thereach of the hand and arm, the area of greatest visual acuity,the angle of the joints, etc. together with a built-in economy ofeffort: how far can one conveniently reach without straining?What is the best angle for the wrist and forearm for long typing?And so on.Coupled to the movement and the possibility of movement in thisspace one can detect also a temporal element: actions are linedup into an “already” and a “not yet” – a not yet reached, butwithin reach, and possibly reached in the next moment. Allmovement goes from a here to a new here, but it never goes back!And never goes from a here to a there! Instead of DA-Sein(Being-there), it is a Being-Here-and-Now that engages in thespace of action. There is remoteness, but strictly speaking nodistance and thus no metric either. Topological space would comeclosest in representing this space in the sense that one locationfollows another in a continuous sequence, but without coordinatesystem that would allow one to recognize when on is changingdirections or doubling back onto oneself. (Generously interpretedthis can point one towards the shortcoming of the merely economicto guide long-term teleological action.)

Space of Intuition/ Space of Movement

The space of intuition might have been called the space of thesenses or perceptual space, were it not for the self-defeatingdeconstruction of perception within psychology that rendered somany atomic sensory qualities that the analysis never got back tothe presumed target, the thing perceived. Sensory Intuition(Anschauung) combines perception with the categorical achievement

that constitutes the perceptual object as self-identical entity.Key for the sensory intuition is according to Ströker thecombination of visual and tactile modalities. It gives rise toimportant qualities of space, primary among them depth andperspective. Depth of space reveals itself in the visual experienceof things covering one another. Perspective is related to theexperience that the thing is never given as a whole, not justbecause it is hidden by others, but also because it is alwaysonly revealed in aspects, from a specific side given by theviewer’s standpoint. Only through motion can one discover the thing in all its sides,either by moving oneself or by moving the thing around. A naturaltendency to complement perception with the shift in standpointlinks the space of intuition to the space of movement. For mostcases the link is to smooth and automatic that one is not awareof the interplay between the two. When a visual stimulus is justoutside one’s field of vision one gets an irresistible impulse tomove one’s head thereby bringing the eyes into a proper positionwith regard to the thing to be viewed. Psychological experimentsoccasionally manage to force them apart artificially – byrequesting a subject to remain still when the natural tendency isto follow up an incomplete and undecidable impression with acorrective motion and produces at times phenomena rarely foundoutside these conditions (e.g. Autokinetic movement).

Constitution revisited – Husserl’s Passive Synthesis

Having come to the end of this description of Body’s spatialityit is time to reflect on what has been accomplished thereby. Wehave related the spatiality of things to the bodily nature(Leiblichkeit) of the Body. The analysis hangs from a doubleconstitution: that of things and that of the Body and the twoseem to be interdependent and support one another. So we musthave at least one of these to get started. In Husserl’s earlywork the choice is clear: he assumes the subject and gets to thethings via constitution.“Constitution” is an act of intentional consciousness: that is,the subject constitutes the object by aggregating the content ofdifferent acts, aggregating, for instance, different visualexperiences of a thing with one another and with memories of

earlier encounters. Yet at the close of his phenomenologicalanalysis Husserl had to admit that the problem that this was toaddress, namely how a self-identical object would be formed inconsciousness, was still not answered. How could consciousnessarrive at one single object given the many different views thatit gathers in the sensory intuitive mode? Even if one adds to aprofusion of views confirmatory experience from other modalities,this does not secure the identity of the object: for how is oneto know that this memory or these expectations pertain to thesame object? Since the views themselves cannot suggest unity, they must besupported by a unifying intuition, which synthesizes them (I stayin the visual modality for simplicity’s sake; but take thesestatements to be expandable to the others) into one self-identical object that remains the same even as it moves around inspace. And this unity must be given to consciousness before theacts of the subject ever get off the ground. This cannot beaccomplished by perception alone nor by any other modality orconjunction of modalities, but is the work of another instancealtogether. Kant uses this insight to justify the higher-levelfunction of cognition. Husserl takes a very different course. Forhim this unification is not accomplished on a higher level ofconsciousness, not via a cognitive effort of the subject, butrather by what he calls passive synthesis, which lies beforeperception and long before cognition comes into play. Eventhough this synthesis seems to involve some part of the subject,he makes clear that passive synthesis works without recourse tointentionality. Quite the opposite: According to Husserl, it isthe thing in itself, as a primordial entity (= a “simple object”ref.) that directs and motivates the Body’s interaction andmovement relative to the thing. Sounds circular? So it does, butit is a spiraling downward, not upward as done by the idealistcamp. In reply to the transcendental problem of identity we findan appeal to the world, to the world of attuned space in whichthings have voices to call out to the Body. This quite reverses the direction of intentionality, if one canspeak of intentionality still: it is not the multiple“adumbrations” (Husserl ref.) of the object – the views in whicha thing appears in consciousness – that lead to the intuition ofan identical thing; it is the other way around, as strange andcounterintuitive as this sounds: an Etwas, a simple

undifferentiated something stands first in a relationship to theBody and this connection enables one to fill in the differentviews and modes of appearing as sides of one and the same object.We understand little or nothing about how this connection isestablished other than that it is what Husserl announces as thework of passive synthesis. But it is clear that only a Body couldstand in such a connection to a thing, because it existsalongside it within the same world and really made of the samestuff: what Merleau-Ponty calls “flesh of the world.”“Passiver Lebensuntergrund,” as Husserl calls it, is thencondition of possibility for the spontaneous acts of the Body andground of the basic activities of living. It means that the worldapproaches as an already structured and an already affectivewhole. Moreover, as affective and meaningful, it exerts a pull onus (“…ein Zug, den ein bewusster Gegenstand auf das Ich ausuebt.”Ref. Husserl) and causes this affective turning towards it thatprecedes the intentional act directed towards an identified andidentifiable object; indeed it is not really a turning to, i.e.not a movement from one position to another; it is an ongoingorienting in the world as in a force field, in which experienceis the expression of an alignment, not of an act – purepassivity. On it builds, Husserl again, the more activepassivity, that is already within the Body’s potential awareness,and this passivity enables the cognitive acts that constitute theobject as being thus-and-thus, relating to us so-and-so. This iswhat Husserl ends up calling passive synthesis and passiveconstitution, which, as he claims, is everywhere.

References

Csikszentmihaily, M. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.Harper&Row, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Repetition and Difference. Columbia U. Press 1995.Gibson, James. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. LawrenceErlbaum, New edition 1986. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Harper Perennial ModernClassics. Reprint Ed. 2008.Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern U. Press 1970

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to aPhenomenological Philosophy. First Book. Kluwer Academic Publ. 1983.First paperback ed. transl. F. KerstenJullien, Francois. A Treatise on Efficacy. Hawaii U. Press. 2004.Lingis, Alphonso. Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility. Humanity Books.1996.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishers, Engl.Translation 1991 First Publication. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. © Gallimard1945. Routledge 1962. Transl. P. Kegan Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. © Gallimard 1943. Routledge2003.Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.Rinehart Editions 1967.Ströker, Elizabeth. Investigations into the Phenomenology of Space. OhioState U. Press. Tiemersma, Douwe. Body Schema & Body Image. Garland Sciecne. Ed. 1,1989.