general regions and chōra are made marginal. The amplitude of the Receptacle gives way to the stringency of the container; and within place-as-container, concrete issues bearing on boundary and limit, line and surface, point and void, are addressed in scrupulous detail.
VII
It is obvious that one has to grant priority to place.
—Archytas
This is not to claim that Aristotle’s idea of place is without complications and difficulties. To begin with, there is the fact that he changed his model of place in a major way in the period between the early composition of the Categories—where place qua chōra is construed as equivalent to empty “interval” (diastēma)—and the text of the Physics, where this very model is decisively rejected.80 More important, there are at least four serious problems in Aristotle’s mature view of place as the immobile inner surface of a container, (1) By its emphasis on surface (epiphaneia), this view is confined to a two-dimensional model of place, despite the fact that place itself is manifestly three-dimensional inasmuch as it surrounds solid objects. (In comparison, Aristotle’s fascination with the point can be taken as an incursion into one-dimensional or even zero-dimensional space and, for all its interest, is foredoomed as a fitting model for volumetric containment.) (2) There is an unresolved tension between the localism of the container model—which points to physical things as “place tight” in their immediate environs—and the globalism implicit in certain of the Stagirite’s descriptions of the physical universe.81 Even if it is true that “everything is in the world” (212b17) and that there is nothing outside the world—no external void—the world-whole encompasses any particular place of any given changeable body and must be a global Place for that place-cum-body. (That the total world is a Place follows from the fact that it contains and surrounds all more particular places within it.) A place is not only a place for a body but a place in the larger world-Place.82 In addition, only such a cosmic Place can make sense of Aristotle’s insistence on the irreducibility of the up/down dimension. Construed as cosmic, this dimension signifies that the earth is at the center of the universe and the heavens at its outer limit.83 But to make this latter claim—to say that the earth is always and only at the center of the universe—is to call for a sense of space as absolute or global that is not allowed, strictly speaking, by the container model in its constrictive, localizing character. (3) The full determination of the “first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds” remains moot. In the case of the floating vessel, is this limit the immediately surrounding water regarded as an ideal perimeter (yet as flowing water, it is constantly changing, with the result that the place of a stationary boat will be continually changing), or is it the river’s bed-and-banks or even the river itself as a whole (in both of these last cases, two boats equidistant from two banks but heading in opposite directions will occupy the same place)?84 This seemingly trivial but in fact momentous question was to engage over two thousand years of debate in Western philosophy: it is still a live issue for Descartes in the seventeenth century A.D. (4) Finally, we must inquire as to what it means to contain something. Is it merely a matter of “holding,” as is implied by the verb periechein—in which case, the emphasis is on the act of delimitation, that is, of surrounding? Or is it a question of establishing a boundary—which stresses the surrounder? Where the former interpretation directs us to what is surrounded, the latter points to what is other than, and beyond, the surrounded object (and perhaps even beyond the surrounder itself). How are we to choose between these two interpretations—one of which stresses the container as limit, the other the container as boundary? And if we cannot choose effectively, are we not confronted with an essentially undecidable phenomenon?
Despite these perplexities and still others,85 we need to retain what is most original—and most lasting—in Aristotle’s mature vision of place. This is the acknowledgment of place as a unique and nonreducible feature of the physical world, something with its own inherent powers, a pre–metric phenomenon (thus both historically and conceptually pre-Euclidean in its specification), and above all something that reflects the situation of being in, and moving between, places. It is just this accommodating and yet polyvalent model of place that became lost in Euclidean and post-Euclidean theories of strictly measurable space.86 Aristotle was able to resist this mensurational view even as he was drawn to it early in his career: he came to realize that, regarded as extension or interval, place becomes merely an item of exact quantitative determination. For what matters most is not the measurement of objects in empty space but the presence of sensible things in their appropriate and fitting places.
In effecting this tour de force—whereby a focused, forceful description yields what may well be the most astute assessment of place to be found in Western philosophy—Aristotle proceeds with a phenomenologist’s deft sensibilities.87 This is most evident in his resolute refusal to restrict the phenomenon of place to atomistic or formal properties. Just as he rejects Plato’s attempt to regularize sensible bodies by the imposition of elementary geometric figures (he takes such bodies to be straightforwardly “what is extended in three dimensions”),88 so he approaches place on its own terms. His preoccupation with the propriety of place is evident in his telling remark that “each thing moves to its own place” (Physics 212b29), that is to say, to its proper natural place. That each such place is encompassed by the common place of the firmament—and that this latter is conceived as having constant circular curvature—does not mean that Aristotle has “spatialized” place in the manner of the spatialization of time decried by Bergson and Heidegger alike.89 Problematic as we have just seen it to be, the very nesting of special topoi within an overarching Topos has the virtue of conceiving the cosmos not as an empty and endless Space but as an embracing Place, filled to the brim with snugly fitting proper places. The firmament that encircles the world-whole is at once a paradigm for all lesser places and filled with these very same places. Everything, or almost everything, is in place. To be an existing sensible thing is never not to be in some place. Place prevails. Archytas stands vindicated.
Aristotle surpasses Archytas, however, in his eagerness to show just how “it is obvious that one has to grant priority to place” and just why “it is the first of all things.”90 He does so by demonstrating that place, beyond providing mere position, gives bountiful aegis—active protective support—to what it locates. Defined as a bounding container, place in Aristotle’s sure hands takes on a quite dynamic role in the determination of the physical universe. Place indeed “has some power.” It has the power to make things be somewhere and to hold and guard them once they are there. Without place, things would not only fail to be located; they would not even be things: they would have no place to be the things they are. The loss would be ontological and not only cosmological: it would be a loss in a kind of being and not merely in the number of beings that exists.
Part Two
From Place to Space
Interlude
In Part I we witnessed a development—or, more in keeping with Aristotle’s thinking, an “envelopment”—of remarkable scope. The scope is impressive not just in terms of time (a period of approximately two thousand years) but also in terms of theme: all the way from muthos to logos. Yet Plato’s Timaeus combines both of these latter extremes in a single text: hence its position in the middle of Part I, flanked on one side by imaginative mythicoreligious accounts of creation and on the other side by Aristotle’s sober descriptions. Nevertheless, this progression in time and theme is no simple matter of progress. Anticipations and retroactions abound: Aristotle’s closely containing topos is foreshadowed in the final stage of Plato’s tale, while the Stagirite’s concern with the importance of the point rejoins the stress in the Enuma Elish on the deadly edges of weapons of war. Nor can it be said that Plato “improves upon” myth, given that the language of his dialogue is so deeply indebted to earlier mythical traditions. Indeed, Aristotle himself, “the Master of Those Who Know,” is by no means free from mythical borrowings and infusions. We have seen that Hesiod is an important source in his opening,
