Brücke, Tür und Tempelschwelle – Denkorte bei Simmel, Cassirer und Heidegger | Bridges, Doors and the Threshold of the Temple – Places of Thought in Simmel, Cassirer and Heidegger

Representatives of a phenomenology of place, which has – not least inspired by Heidegger – emerged in the Anglo-Saxon Human Geography, make a difference between place, understood as a concrete, (bodily) perceivable, qualitative entity, and space as a mathematical construct, within which relationships and positions can only be expressed quantitatively. According to philosophers like Jeff Malpas and Edward Casey, place is not simply the subjective side of space, but a fundamental condition of our access to the world that precedes each experience. It is place that gives access to that space the natural sciences deal with, and not vice versa. Places are apparently more than points in a coordinate system. And yet the question remains, whether one can think of place entirely separated from an abstract reference system, as it is offered by space. Therefore, the determination of the relationship between place and space remains a challenge for any philosophical preoccupation with this topic.

The paper refers to the relationship between place and space in three authors playing very different roles in the context of the “spatial turn” in the humanities, namely Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. While Heidegger’s influence on the philosophy of place is generally accepted, Simmel and Cassirer seem to contribute little to the concrete local aspect of experience due to their Neo-Kantian approach. But Simmel did not only reflect upon the social dimension of space, but also developed a kind of “phenomenology” of specific places, which seeks to highlight the cultural and anthropological dimension of location. Cassirer on the other hand deals with the systematic distinction between different forms of spatial perception in the context of different symbolic forms. His description of mythical space shows aspects that are also important in the phenomenology of place. Heidegger, however, does not only develop an understanding of the spatiality of “Dasein”, but also delineates a topology of being, in which place wins an importance that goes far beyond a cultural-philosophical or anthropological inquiry.

Instead of a detailed comparison of these three authors, the paper focusses on the specific places that serve as characteristic examples in the works all three thinkers. By means of these paradigmatic “places of thought” – bridge, door, temple – it is to be worked out how the the relationship of place and space is conceived within the different theoretical contexts of the philosophers in question.

Annika Schlitte, geboren 1981, studierte von 2001 bis 2006 Philosophie und Deutsch an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Die philosophische Promotion erfolgte dort 2010 (Titel: „Die Grundlegung von Georg Simmels Symbolphilosophie in der Philosophie des Geldes“). Nach Lehraufträgen im Fachbereich Germanistik an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum sowie an der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal ist sie seit 2011 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Katholischen Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Lehrstuhl für Philosophie) und seit Juni 2013 Sprecherin des Graduiertenkollegs „Philosophie des Ortes“ an der KU.

Annika Schlitte (born in 1981) studied Philosophy and German Studies at the Ruhr University of Bochum from 2001 to 2006. In 2010 she obtained a doctor's degree in philosophy at the Ruhr University of Bochum (title of the dissertation: “Die Grundlegung von Georg Simmels Symbolphilosophie in der Philosophie des Geldes“). From 2007-2011 she worked as a lecturer at the Ruhr-University of Bochum and the University of Wuppertal (Department of German Studies), since 2011 she has been Research Assistant at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Chair of Philosophy) and since 2013 Research Fellow and Speaker of the Graduate School “Philosophy of Place“ at the CU.