Space

Abstract

The concept of space is not specific to Phenomenology. As a philosophical problem space has so much history as philosophy itself. But Phenomenology gives to it an original sense that can not be separated from this history, especially the recent one, that of modern philosophy since Descartes. In modern times space has been reduced to a purely quantitative lifeless extension. The emptying of life from space had its correspondence with the classical modern physics that conceptualized space as pure exteriority and as empty container. The consecuence was the strengthen of the inner life of subjectivity. The great contribution of the phenomenological concept of space can be summarized as the «return to space»: Phenomenology has recovered space for life, it has made space inseparable from time, from the movement of the body, from the subjectivity and from the understanding of being. We will see the important phenomenological contributions of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. First, we will analyze Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, the lived body and the historical genesis of the concept of objective and abstract space. Then we will study Heidegger’s notion of the space of things and the space of human beings (Dasein) in Being and Time. We will see how space acquires a central role in his later work to the point of understanding the task of philosophy itself as the thinking of place or topology of being. We will conclude with the reception of the phenomenological concept of space recognizing the extraordinary influence it has had in what is called the «spatial turn».

Keywords: perception, objective space, lived space, physical body, lived body, movement, place, zone, Dasein, Fourfold, topology, Husserl, Heidegger.