Philosophy of Place

Outline of Book

“When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always 'outside' alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered” (Heidegger, 1927, p.89).

“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is ←1 | 2→nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked” (Jung 1961, p.225).

The philosophy of place is a complex topic. The way we understand place in this book cannot be easily reduced to a simple definition. Our aim in this book is to investigate the complexity of place and highlight the vastness of this concept. We take a phenomenological and humanistic approach to understanding place. This follows in a tradition of philosophers such as Relph, Seamon and Malpas among others. Relph (1976, p. 4) notes that place “is not just a formal concept awaiting a precise definition … clarification cannot be achieved by imposing precise but arbitrary definitions”. Furthermore, Seamon (1987, p. 20) says applying reductive and superficial definitions loses the “phenomenological essence of place as a psycho-social-environmental whole larger than the sum of its parts”.

Moore (2000, p. 208) provides an excellent way to express the difficulty of providing a simple definition for place. She says the “difficulty in defining the concept is in part due to its many layers of meaning”. Moore argues understanding place,

“is like trying to describe an onion. It appears simple on the outside, but it is deceptive, for it has many layers. If it is cut apart, there are just onion skins left and the original form has disappeared. If each layer is described separately, we lose sight of the whole. The layers are transparent so that when we look at the whole onion we see not just the surface but also something of the interior”.

As a result, place “has to be examined in terms of its parts as well as a whole, mindful that to focus strongly on one part, it is possible to lose sight of the whole concept itself” (ibid).

This book follows Seamon (2018) who says it is important to use a wide range of resources to investigate and explore place to “offer mutual illumination, amplification, and validation of place as a phenomenon”. Our book follows this method and brings together the varying chapters in the conclusion to give new insights to place. Seamon called this “method triangulation, whereby one source of evidence provides insights into other sources of evidence, and one’s understanding of the phenomenon is therefore deepened and strengthened” (ibid). This method can also give insight to a phenomenological and humanistic understanding of place. Gildersleeve and Crowden (2018, p. 96–97) have previously argued that finding an authentic place (or home) in the world involves triangulation.

This book triangulates and brings together authors who give us insight into a number of dimensions of place. This book begins by highlighting the phenomenological method of analysis which provides us an interpretive ←2 | 3→framework to understand place and draw together the various chapters. Next, we show how humanistic geographers have come to understand place which leads into a discussion of the fundamental concept of home which is essential to understand self and its relation to place. In this book we argue that to know the self is to feel “at home in the world” whereas to not know the self is to feel dislodged and “not at home in the world”. However, as this book shows it is not so simple as this because sometimes, we are required to go through “not being at world” to come to better know the self and feel “at home in the world”. This dialectic is discussed in this introduction in the section on “Journey and Reach” and is further detailed in the conclusion. Following this is an introduction to the relationship between power and place. This section is particularly important to the chapter by Matthew Gildersleeve on Foucault. As will become clear in his chapter and in the conclusion, there are powers that can dislodge us from feeling “at home in the world” and it is important to identify these, so we have resistance to establish ourselves authentically instead of being under the power of unconscious and ideological domination. After this there are two sections before the individual chapters begin. There is a section on place and the body to highlight how the body is one way of showing the constitution of place and to show that it separates and structures place for each individual. Finally, there is a focused discussion of the relationship between self and place and how they both mutually refer to each other. There is no place without self and there is no self without place. In the conclusion (Chapter 9) we revisit most of these topics and sections from the introduction to better understand how the individual chapters and authors of this book contribute to each theme. As a result, we see a discussion of phenomenology, humanistic geography, home and not at home, journey and reach, and Tim Cresswell’s writings on power as well as an analysis of the findings from this book presented in relation to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, who many consider the “father” of a phenomenological understanding of place.

Ultimately, we aim to build on the existing understanding of place presented in phenomenology and humanistic geography and apply this to a new understanding of various topics that have not been immersed in this place literature. Reciprocally these various topics on ecology, Nietzsche, Sloterdijk, power, Romanian culture, ethics and ontogenesis will provide a new understanding and appreciation of place. The authors of this volume have worked together before and are familiar with each other’s background and understanding of place. The authors of this book have been selected to write about and apply place in different directions but then the editors aim to bring this ←3 | 4→diverse work together to give a more holistic and wide-reaching understanding of place and self.