Edward S. Casey

Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?

remarkable convergence between geography and philosophy has become increasingly manifest in the past two decades. It is as if Strabo’s celebrated opening claim in his Geographia had finally become true two millennia later: “The science of Geography, which I now propose to investigate, is, I think, quite as much as any other science, a concern of the philosopher” (Strabo I, 3). What is new (and not in Strabo) is the growing conviction that philosophy is the concern of the geographer as well, or more exactly that philosophy and geography now need each other—and profit from this mutual need. Collaboration between the two fields has been evident ever since concerted attention to place began to emerge just over twenty years ago in, e.g., Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place (1976). Because of their emphasis on the experiential features of place—its “subjective” or “lived” aspects— such works were natural allies of phenomenology, a form of philosophy that attempts to give a direct description of first-person experience. Both geography and phenomenology have come to focus on place as experienced by human beings, in contrast to space, whose abstractness discourages experiential explorations. In the case of geography, a primary task has been to do justice to the indispensability of place in geographic theory and practice. So much is this the case that Robert David Sack (1997, 34, 30), a more recent proponent of the importance of place, can claim unhesitatingly that “[in geography] the truly important factor is place and its relationship to space.” 1

Imagining : a phenomenological study

Preface to the Second Edition Introduction The Problematic Place of Imagination Part One Preliminary Portrait 1. Examples and First Approximations 2. Imagining as Intentional Part Two Detailed Descriptions 3. Spontaneity and Controlledness 4. Self-Containedness and Self Evidence 5. Indeterminacy and Pure Possibility Part Three Phenomenological Comparisons 6. Imagining and Perceiving: Continuities 7. Imagining and Perceiving: Discontinuities Part Four The Autonomy of Imagining 8. The Nature of Imaginative Autonomy 9. The Significance of Imaginative Autonomy

On Habitus and Place: Responding to My Critics

et me thank all three of my respondents for their insightful remarks on my essay as it stands above. One reader is supportive, another ambivalent, and a third downright unsympathetic. This diversity of response constitutes a challenging array, and I will attempt to do at least minimal justice to each in my reply. Nicholas Entrikin is right to note that while geographers have been making creative and selective use of philosophy for quite a while, it is only recently that philosophers have come directly to geography for inspiration in their own work. I count myself as one of these migrant thinkers, and if my engagement with the extant geographical literature is not as thorough as Entrikin wishes it were, this is not for lack of intense interest.

Habitual body and memory in Merleau-Ponty

It was Bergson who first attempted to distinguish “habit memory” from “image memory.” By the latter he meant any form of representation of past experience, typically via visualization; it is what we normally term “recollection.” Before Bergson made the pointed suggestion that there are at least two fundamental forms of memory, it had been widely assumed by philosophers and psychologists alike that there is only one basic kind of remembering, namely, recollecting. This was the case whether recollection is conceived in a transpersonal setting (as by Plato, who made it essential to all eidetic knowledge) or in a strictly personal context (which is how we tend to think of it today). Either way, recollection is considered to be reproductive in operation, proceeding by isomorphism — whether this be an isomorphism between dianoetic diagrams in the soul and the Forms, or between “ideas” that resemble “impressions,” or between mind and its own past being. The premise at work throughout this redoubtable tradition is that remembering, if it is to work at all, must replicate past events in an explicitly representational format. These events in turn make up the life history of the Individual rememberer (this holds true even for Plato insofar as the history of a given soul includes episodes of viewing the Forms in a previous life).

Border versus Boundary at La Frontera

In this essay I discuss the complex and evolving situation at La Frontera, the US – Mexico border. I do so in light of my current research on the intervention of edges in human experiences. In that research, I distinguish several basic types of edge, such as rims, frames, and margins. Two of these types are of particular relevance to the circumstance at La Frontera: borders and boundaries. I identify certain primary differences between these two kinds of edge in order to illuminate the earlier history of La Frontera as well as what is now happening at this vexed site. I take up issues of mapping the border, the nature of the borderline, borderlands, and especially the presence of the massive wall that has been constructed along considerable portions of La Frontera. Implications for basic issues of being versus becoming in matters of society and space conclude the piece.

Boundary, place, and event in the spatiality of history

In this commentary on Philip Ethingtons essay, I focus on the importance of boundary as a basic parameter of the spatial dimensions of history. I also emphasize the relationship between place and event in understanding these same dimensions. In these ways and others, I agree with Ethingtons overall thesis as to the inherent spatiality of history; my effort is to specify further some of the precise ways in which this is the case.

Keeping art to its edge

“Art”: something established, even conventional; at the least, a matter of recognized and recognizable genres/styles; teachable in art schools and academies of art. By the time we designate something as “art,” it has lost its disruptive presence, its radical novelty, its challenge to our usual modes of classification, starting with those that belong to what we call “aesthetics,” i.e., the codification of primary directions of art in the last pertinent historical epoch. It has lost its edge. It has become institutionalized in keeping with the fateful sclerotization of fresh art – indeed, innovative action of any sort – as Sartre outlines when, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, he traces the evolution of a group in fusion into a hierarchical social formation. Art, as “art,” has lots its edge. “Edge”: something that dis-establishes and upsets by its very structure. A structure whose effect is to obscure what is coming and to come – the sudden, the surprising, the new. Requiring a certain fixity in perception or palpation (otherwise it could not serve as an edge at all), it opens onto what is un-fixed in time or space: in time, since we don’t know just when a certain event, now unseen, will occur; in space, given that the layout we shall witness is yet unknown and can take many forms, none of them wholly predictable. Any situation or thing with such occultative properties is apt to make us “edgy” – to put us “on edge.”

Taking a Glance at the Environment: Prolegomena to an Ethics of the Environment

It is remarkable how much we can understand about an environmental problem at a mere glance. By means of a glance - at once quick and comprehensive - we can detect that something is going wrong in a given environmental circumstance, and we can even begin to suspect what needs to be done to rectify the situation. In this paper I explore the unsuspected power of the glance in environmental thought and practice, drawing special lessons for an ethics of the environment. Specific examples are analyzed, and authors as diverse as John Dewey and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are invoked in an effort to develop a coherent vision of how the human glance helps to locate and remedy environmental crises.

Sym-Phenomenologizing: Talking Shop

In this essay I discuss the idea of deploying workshops in phenomenology -- i.e., teaching the discipline by practising it. I focus on the model proposed by Herbert Spiegelberg, the first person to give systematic attention to this idea and the first to institutionalize it over a period of several years. Drawing on my experience in several of the workshops he led at Washington University, St. Louis, I detail the method he recommended in preparation for a workshop I ten led at the inaugural meeting of “To the Things Themselves” at the University of New Hampshire.

Levinas on Memory and the Trace

Let me start with the following paradox, one that arises from the very idea of trace: what seems at first exceedingly limited in scope and secondary in status is capable of drawing together the most divergent realms of human experience and theories about that experience. On the one hand, the ordinary notion of trace is that of a mere mark left by an entity or an event of which it is but the finite and fragile reflection. Its nature seems to consist in a self-surpassing operation whereby its meaning or value lies elsewhere — namely, in that of which it is the trace, that which the trace signifies by a self-suspension of its own being or happening. On the other hand, despite this apparent disposability, the concept of trace has proved indispensable in several quite disparate domains: the neurophysiology of memory, the graphematics of writing, and the overcoming of metaphysics. (Indeed, just because the activity of tracing is so critical to all three arenas, we can no longer afford to regard them as so disparate, and we begin to suspect the possibility of a deep alliance between them.) This is not to mention the rather uncanny way in which a concern with the unsuspected importance of traces brings together Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas with such unlikely bedfellows as Plotinus, Descartes, and Peirce—all six of whom regard traces as strictly unexpungeable and even as having a certain primacy.