Space of Experience, Horizon of Expectation. Spatiotemporal Metaphors, Philosophical Anthropology, and the Flesh

Authors

  • Roger W. H. Savage University of California at Los Angeles, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/errs.2021.557

Keywords:

Body, Flesh, Geography, Historiography, Phenomenology, Space, Time.

Abstract

Paul Ricœur’s recourse to the metahistorical categories, space of experience and horizon of expectation, invites an inquiry into geography’s role as the guarantor of history. The ontology of the flesh provides the first indication of how one’s body is implicated in the sense of one’s place in the world. In turn, narrative inscriptions of events on the landscape transform the physical topography of a place into an array of sites where memories of ancestral wisdom and historical traumas endure. By anchoring historians’ representations of the past in the places and locales in which events took place, geography constructs a third space analogous to the third time of history. The aporias engendered by the phenomenology of time, however, have no equivalent in the phenomenology of space. The dissymmetry between the dialectic that informs the discourse of space and the one that informs the discourse of time thus keeps in place the  reciprocal relation between geography and historiography.

Author Biography

Roger W. H. Savage, University of California at Los Angeles, USA

Roger W. H. Savage is a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. His books include Hermeneutics and Music Criticism,  Music, Time, and Its Other: Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity, and Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation: Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Imagination. He also edited Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique and Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body. Prof. Savage is a founding member and past president of the Society for Ricoeur Studies.

References

Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Horst Krüger, “Something’s Missing. A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968).

Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places. Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

Keith H. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places,” in Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds), Senses of Places (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996).

Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French. Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vol., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

Anne Buttimer, “Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers vol. 66/2 (1976), 277-92.

Edward Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time. Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds), Senses of Places (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996).

———, “Between Geography and Philosophy. What Does it Mean to Be in the Place-World?,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 91/4 (2001), 683-93.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

———, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989 [1975]).

Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980).

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 [1995]).

Reinhardt Koselleck, “Space of Experience and ‘Horizon of Expectation’. Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005).

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “A Ghostly Alhambra,” in Tom Hayden (ed.), Irish Hunger. Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine (Boulder: Roberts Rinehart, 1998).

Paul Ricœur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).

———, The Rule of Metaphor. Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

———, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

———, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986).

———, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

———, “Ethics and Human Capability. A Response,” in John Wall, William Schweiker and W. David Hall (eds), Paul Ricœur and Contemporary Moral Thought (New York: Routledge, 2002).

———, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

———, Philosophical Anthropology. Writings and Lectures, Volume 3, ed. Johann Michel and Jérôme Porée, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).

Edward Soja, Third Space. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996).

Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire, Bright Star of the West. Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Downloads

Published

2021-12-15

Issue

Section

Articles