Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: the influence of place
- 1 The obscurity of place
- 2 The structure of spatiality
- 3 Holism, content and self
- 4 Unity, locality and agency
- 5 Agency and objectivity
- 6 Self and the space of others
- 7 The unity and complexity of place
- 8 Place, past and person
- Conclusion: the place of philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Place, past and person
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: the influence of place
- 1 The obscurity of place
- 2 The structure of spatiality
- 3 Holism, content and self
- 4 Unity, locality and agency
- 5 Agency and objectivity
- 6 Self and the space of others
- 7 The unity and complexity of place
- 8 Place, past and person
- Conclusion: the place of philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the sighs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets.
Albert Camus, ‘Nuptials at Tipasa’Subjectivity, as was seen in chapters three and four, is to be understood as constituted in terms of an interplay of elements, organised specifically in relation to the concept of agency, rather than as some underlying ground in which the unity of those elements is independently founded – and, of course, one of the consequences of this (a consequence already explored to some extent in chapters five and six), is that subjectivity cannot be grasped independently of a larger structure that encompasses other subjects as well as the objects and events of the world. It is, we can say, in the dense structure of place that subjectivity is embedded and, inasmuch as subjectivity is only to be found within such a structure, so there is a necessary dependence of subjectivity on the other elements within that structure and on the structure as a whole. Up to this point, much of my discussion has been concerned only to map out the topography of the more general structure within which subjectivity – and the possibility of thought and experience – is constituted.
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- Information
- Place and ExperienceA Philosophical Topography, pp. 175 - 193Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999