Studies in Continental Thought

Edward S. Casey

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253026712
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

From one of continental philosophy's most distinctive voices comes a creative contribution to spatial studies, environmental philosophy, and phenomenology. Edward S. Casey identifies how important edges are to us, not only in terms of how we perceive our world, but in our cognitive, artistic, and sociopolitical attentions to it. We live in a world that is constantly on edge, yet edges as such are rarely explored. Casey systematically describes the major and minor edges that configure the human and other-than-human realms, including our everyday experience. He also explores edges in high- stakes situations, such as those that emerge in natural disasters, moments of political and economic upheaval, and encroaching climate change. Casey's work enables a more lucid understanding of the edge-world that is a necessary part of living in a shared global environment.

PART 1

Sorting Out Edges

Preface to Part One

In part one, I undertake close descriptions of certain basic sorts of edge in order to set forth a nomenclature on which author and reader can converge—which is important in view of the nebulous niche that the term edge inhabits in the collective linguistic consciousness of English speakers. In common usage, “edge” signifies such things as “the outermost part of an object” or “the abrupt termination of something”—casual meanings that unduly restrict the idea of edge, leading us to overlook the fact that there is a plurality of edge types, each of which calls for its own description. I take up a number of these in the first chapter of this part and in three interludes; they range from borders to boundaries, rims to margins, gaps to picture frames, cusps to veils. The descriptions I give are designed to convey the diversity of edges that form part of human experience. The interludes, in particular, detail the considerable range of edges that human beings (and other animals) routinely encounter in their respective life-worlds.

A second chapter in this part takes up two pairs of terms: edges and surfaces, and edges and limits. The first pair exhibits a mutual indissociability; just as there is no surface that does not have an edge of some sort,¹ so there is no edge that does not belong to some kind of surface. The second pair, edges and limits, manifest a basic difference in kind despite their being run together in ordinary language. I argue that we need to recognize this difference in kind if we are to do justice to what is uniquely true of edges.

On this clarified basis, the last chapter of this part extends the scope of edges to include edges of places as well as events. Every place has its characteristic edges, beyond which it is no longer that place, or any place at all. The same holds for events; these, too, run out, and they do so in time as well as space: where and when they come to an end, there is their edge. Not only is this extension of edges to places and events descriptively demanded, it has the merit of expanding the scope of what counts as an edge beyond the edges of finite things. In this context, I contest the hegemony of things (material substances, reified particulars, res extensa) that has dominated Western metaphysics since Aristotle. Places and events are ontological domains that call for their own accounting and recognition as distinct realms of being. A crucial aspect of this accounting and recognition is that any given place comes with its own edges, without which it wouldn’t be that place. Similarly, events come edged in certain unique ways that I spell out, emphasizing the temporal parameters of such edges—which is not to deny that the edges of places also have historical depth.

Beyond making crucial peri-phenomenological distinctions, the three chapters and three interludes of this part of the book seek to immerse the reader in edge phenomena. This means gaining a concrete sense of what being an edge is like, and in particular how any given edge both configures and concludes that of which it is the edge. By employing close description, I attempt to draw the reader into the edge-world: that world in which edges are determinative even if not always conspicuous. This is none other than the very world that human beings and other living things inhabit; it is an intrinsic dimension of their life-world, their place-world. For there is no world that does not come edged in multiplicitous ways. Were edges lacking, there would be no way to determine where one thing or place or event concludes and another starts. And if everything were plenary and undifferentiated—if all were one edgeless mass—there would be no sense of being in a world; indeed, there would be no world at all. It follows that there is no world without edges and that every world is an edge-world.

An immense variety of edges goes into constituting the surrounding world, despite a given edge’s delimited appearance—an appearance that is in effect a disappearance. An edge is just where something gives out: a paradox of perishing to which we shall have occasion to return more than once. But what is undeniably slight, being lesser in extent than that which it edges, turns out to have a force and influence of its own.² Edges are instances of augmented returns from what is presented or appears as diminutive (as when something begins to give out at its edge). They constitute a variation on what I designated as the Logic of the Less in my earlier study of the glance. According to this logic, what seems to be of minor import is seen, upon closer analysis, to be indispensable to existing in the worlds in which we and other sentient beings dwell.³

In becoming oriented in the world we inhabit, we cannot do without edges any more than we can do without our bodies or brains. We could not get anywhere or accomplish anything without them. They are a formative presence in our experiential lives despite their endemic vanishing and their marginal status in virtually every epistemology and ontology in Western systems of thought.

Notes

1. I say “of some sort” to allow for apparent anomalies such as that found in the Möbius strip, which I discuss in chapter 2.

2. Edges are not always diminutive or slight: certain Constructivist sculptures bristle with edges as the most prominent feature of these works, and border walls constitute one continuous edge. But such exceptions only prove the rule that for the most part edges are recessive and nonconspicuous.

3. See “Concluding Thoughts” in Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance, where I identify several variants of this “Logic of the Less,” whereby from the less the more results—often to paradoxical effect. I return to the above formulation in the postlude to the present book, where I argue in detail that it is another way to express what I consider a “heterodox” of the edge-world.

ONE

Borders and Boundaries

Boundary (horos) is the primary cause of bodies.

—Iamblichus, cited by Simplicius in Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quatturo Priores Commentaria

Borders are clearly demarcated edges that serve to distinguish one place (region, state, territory) from another. An international border, such as the one between the United States and Canada, is an obvious instance, but so is the footprint of a building, the building’s precise profile on the ground. The precision of borders—the fact that they can be traced out by a simple line (the “borderline”)—is a function of their having a shape regular enough to be describable in geometric terms (as straight, curvilinear, and so on) while also being easily projected (for example, envisioning a given borderline as traversing rugged terrain). Thanks to this dual aspect, the one ideal and the other imaginary, borders often approach a certain formal perfection, as when the founders of a city decide just where the city limits should be. Borders are often the basis of such representations as maps afford: for example, a map of the state of Kansas after its statehood was established in 1861, as it borders on Colorado to the west and Missouri to the east. Cartographic representations make clear that the comparative abstractness of both the imaginary and the ideal dimensions of a border readily invite literal delineation, the exact determination of where public or private lands (or bodies of water) begin and end.

Boundaries, in contrast, resist linearization; they are inherently indeterminate, porous, and often change configuration. This is most easily observed in the case of a bioregion—say, the edge of a desert that alters its exact shape with passing seasons and climate change. But boundaries also characterize human habitations. Where exactly does “southern California” begin and end? How are we to determine the precise extent of New York City’s “lower East Side”? Of course, efforts at mapping places and regions, civilized or wild, are made all the time. But most attempts at cartographic representation involve significant simplification of the terrain; the strict borders they depict in the form of continuous lines are an imposition on an indeterminate and often unruly situation on the ground.

A boundary, despite its apparent imperfection vis-à-vis a geometric ideal of perfect linearity, has the advantage of being directly perceptible: it is a literal part of the actual place for which it forms the edge. The place itself can be natural—a desert, a river—or artificial, insofar as it is created, shaped, and reshaped by human beings: such as a planted forest in Utah or a neighborhood in Minneapolis. Either way, the boundary belongs to the place or region as its outer edge. It is an inherent and nondetachable part of it: where the “of” of “part of” is a subjective genitive that signifies belonging to.¹ The boundary of the forest or the city neighborhood belongs to the forest or neighborhood, not to what surrounds it. And yet the same boundary also opens outward into other sectors of the landscape or city, being continuous with them rather than closed off from them.

I

We may usefully contrast border and boundary by recourse to a single example: the Mississippi River. Considered as a natural phenomenon, this river has continually shifting boundaries: it swells and shrinks, depending on the season and the weather. Even when it is comparatively stable, its precise shape is difficult to make out: just where does its outer edge begin or end? When the river is ensconced in its accustomed banks, we can plausibly say that this edge is found in these banks. But the banks themselves alter shape, position, even their entire identity—notoriously so when spring rains cause extensive flooding or hurricanes suddenly raise water levels. Furthermore, in many stretches the banks are barely discernible or have been overlain by wetlands in the form of marshes or floodplains. The latter, which are no less boundaries than are the banks, are still more indefinite in form, and are rarely included in cartographic representations. In their passion for accuracy, such representations prefer the simplicity of continuous single lines, hence the characteristic remove of these representations from the local landscape by the assumption of a bird’s eye view far above it. Seen from a sufficient height, even the massive Mississippi increasingly resembles a line drawn in planiform space. But the closer one comes to the river itself, the less likely a strictly linear representation is able to capture its natural coursing and seasonal variability.

I imagine myself floating in the air high above the Mississippi: at first I grasp the river below as a sinuous serpentine line cutting across the surrounding land, making curvilinear incisions into it. Descending slowly in imaginary space, I notice the river broadening, beginning to look like a ribbon on the land. This ribbon continues to augment in diameter as I drift downward toward it; before long, I begin to perceive the outreaches of the river—its winding width, changing shape, and present extent. No longer does it resemble any kind of line, nor can any line claim to adequately represent these boundaries in their intrinsically amorphous edging. By the time my descending body touches down into the river itself, I glimpse the banks directly opposite me at eye level. As I sink into the muddy waters, my body enters the river’s flowing mass and I lose track of any definite edge, except for the river’s surface glimmering above me as I sink further down into the waters, returning to the surface only when I must come back up for air.

From this brief thought experiment one realizes the futility of representing the edge of an ever-mutating river by a perfectly regular, one-dimensional line. This is not to deny that for various practical purposes, linear representation has its uses: it is economic in means, instantly readable as an image, and it is entirely appropriate to employ in representing a border, joining forces with its inherent geometrism. But it is precisely the indefiniteness of a boundary that resists linear representation and calls for a more appropriate means of indication, one that respects the permeability of natural entities like river banks and marshlands, their immersive (and submersive) powers. Let us not be tempted too quickly to replace the indeterminacy of boundaries with the alluring determinacy of elegantly depictive lines! We should not submit unthinkingly to the hunger for securing “simple location” (in Whitehead’s term). Such location is suitable only for a border—as when the Mississippi is considered the legal border between various states (say, Missouri and Illinois); only then does the sparseness of linear representation have a point and a purpose. Otherwise, it is literally out of place.

II

How, then, do we do justice to the dynamic character of a boundary? We may grant that naturally given contours can, by sufficient abstraction, give rise to regular geometric shapes. In “The Origin of Geometry,” Husserl sketches out such a process of geometrization in the land surveys of ancient Egypt. The evolution of proto-Euclidean geometries can be traced from these surveys, which gave bare descriptions of the natural features of rivers and deserts.² But this genealogy of geometry does not address the more difficult question of the intrinsic shapefulness of the earth’s land and water masses. What forms inhere in them in their own right? Husserl himself provides a crucial clue in a passage of Ideas I, entitled “Descriptive and Exact Sciences.” There, Husserl distinguishes between the demands of exact sciences that involve formal eidetics—such as Euclidean geometry, which employs constructed or projected figures—and genuinely descriptive undertakings such as phenomenology, which must take account of the imperfect and irregular shapes found in ordinary perceptual experience. (Husserl’s own examples of the latter are “notched,” “umbelliform,” “scalloped,” and “lens-shaped.”) These shapes, asserts Husserl, are “essentially, rather than accidentally, inexact and consequently also non-mathematical.”³ In contrast with “ideal” shapes, such as the perfect circle or rectangle, these shapes are inherently “fluid” and “vague,”⁴ and can only approach the ideal limits that belong to ideal shapes—and more generally, to ideal essences—“without ever reaching them.”⁵ Nevertheless, such shapes possess “the firmness and the pure distinguishability of generic concepts.”⁶ They can be named and described as such in their very indefiniteness. Thus “the vagueness of such concepts, the circumstance that their spheres of application are fluid, does not make them defective.”⁷ Indeed, “morphological concepts of vague configurational types” are not only grasped directly within sensuous intuition and describable on this basis, but in certain areas of knowledge they are “absolutely indispensable,” and in these same areas they are “the only legitimate concepts.”⁸

Despite the seeming complexity of Husserl’s formulations, his proposal is straightforward when carried over into actual experience. Boundaries, as I have here described them, constitute a domain of experience in which indefinite nonlinear shapes are intrinsic to the phenomena of this domain, and are thus valid descriptions of these shapes. Rather than being dismissed as degenerate geometric formations, such shapes “must be taken as they are given.”⁹ They are given precisely as inherent parts of a domain such as “water” or “earth.” They belong to such domains and must be included in any adequate description of them, including one that focuses on the visual or tactile forms of the corresponding phenomena.

If it seems counterintuitive to reduce the waters of the Mississippi to a line, this is because the line belongs to one order of things—that of ideal shapes a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• Part 1 Sorting Out Edges
• Part 2 Constructed versus Naturally Given Edges
• Part 3 Edges of Body and Psyche, Earth and Sky
• Part 4 Parting Thoughts
• Afterword/Foreword: Thinking Edges, Edges of Thinking
• Index