Back to place

Out of place

Three lessons have told one story: three experiences of space (Lesson 1), Galileo, Descartes and Newton swapping Aristotle’s places for one endless, empty, measurable space (Lesson 2), and then the critics, curved geometry and Einstein (Lesson 3). This last lesson asks what the swap cost, and whether the cure is to go back to place. It is the most opinionated lesson of the course, so we mark which sentences are history and which are this course’s claims, and give the objections full weight.

Begin in the seventeenth century. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) left unfinished notes for a defense of Christianity, later published as the Pensées. One note has become the motto of modern unease: Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Handle it with care. Scholars disagree about who is speaking, and many hear the unbeliever Pascal hoped to persuade, not his own confession. The original sheet is lost. Two seventeenth-century copies survive, the first edition of 1670 left it out, and it reached print only in 1844. Pascal had also helped show that a vacuum can exist: he published vacuum experiments in 1647, and in 1648 his brother-in-law Florin Périer ran the barometer test on the Puy-de-Dôme. For Pascal’s own voice, a safer line sits in the same notes. He writes of “spaces that I do not know and that do not know me,” and says they frighten and astonish him.

Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), a historian of science born in Russia, named what changed. In From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) he reduced the seventeenth-century revolution to “the destruction of the cosmos and the geometrization of space.” Aristotle’s “differentiated set of innerworldly places” gave way to Euclid’s “essentially infinite and homogenous extension.” In Newtonian Studies (1965) he gave the cost in one line: in the new world of quantity, “there is place for everything, there is no place for man.”

This course draws a large conclusion: a world of places became a world of positions. In this reading, the move that made modern science possible, treating all space as alike and measurable, also dropped from the picture what we mean by being at home, or out of place. That is a thesis, not a settled finding, and the lesson tests it.

Two fears

This course says the loss shows up as two fears. The first is ordinary and old: the fear of losing one’s place. It is being lost in a strange city with a dead phone, served an eviction notice, or driven from home by fire or war. English keeps it in everyday phrases: out of place, displaced, know your place. Many readers know it firsthand, as people, or as children of people, who left a home that no longer exists as it was.

As Lesson 1 showed, 位 means both a spot and a rank, and Confucius assumed the link in an Analects saying about not planning the affairs of a post one does not hold (Lesson 1). This course argues that 失范 grows out of 失位: that a good deal of social disorder is partly a loss of place. In this reading, rules are written for people who know where they stand, as parent, clerk or neighbor. When positions blur, duties blur with them. That is a debatable thesis about society, and the end of this lesson gives its dark side.

The second fear is Pascal’s. In this reading, what frightens is sameness more than dark or cold. A space that is the same everywhere and in every direction has no here and no there, nothing to tell one spot from another, and difference, the course says, is where meaning comes from. That is an interpretation: Pascal wrote “silence,” not “sameness.”

A few people have now met emptiness in person. On 27 September 2008 Zhai Zhigang left Shenzhou 7 for about twenty minutes, China’s first spacewalk and the third country’s, after the Soviet Union and the United States. On 24 December 1968 William Anders photographed the Earth rising over the Moon from Apollo 8. Frank White’s 1987 book named the “overview effect,” the awe some astronauts report on seeing Earth whole. The hedges matter: not every astronaut reports it, the evidence is mostly interviews, and one historian argues that culture shapes it. This course imagines the astronaut asking: who am I, where do I come from, where am I going? It is a vivid picture, not a finding.

The fear has a twin, the wish to leave. Around 1911 the rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote, in a line often quoted in this form, that Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever. In this reading, once leaving is possible, Earth is home by choice, not necessity. Both fears, the course concludes, come from one replacement: an endless space that is alike everywhere leaves nowhere to be at home.

Back to place

The remedy offered by a line of twentieth-century thinkers is to put place back at the center. The best-known voice is Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). On 5 August 1951 he gave the lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking” at a conference in Darmstadt on “Man and Space,” in a Germany still rebuilding after the war. He grants that people talk about the housing shortage “and with good reason,” but “the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses.” Dwelling comes first and building serves it, and people must “ever learn to dwell.”

His word study has a limit. The old German bauen, to build, once also meant “to dwell,” and language historians agree. His next step, that ich bin, “I am,” really means “I dwell,” is his own interpretation, which most scholars call philosophy, not philology. Note the date too. Being and Time (1927) did not yet put place first, and in a 1962 lecture he called its attempt to derive human spatiality from time “untenable.” Interpreters differ on how much place was already there: Jeff Malpas argues in Heidegger’s Topology (2006) that it matters throughout, though early on as a derived theme.

From the 1970s, geographers and philosophers carried the idea on. Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) argued that mass communication, big business and central authority make places “not only look alike but feel alike.” Tuan’s Space and Place (1977) gave the plainest definition: undifferentiated space “becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place (1997) tells this course’s history in one book, from place sinking below space to its return in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and Heidegger. Marc Augé’s Non-lieux (1992; English Non-Places, 1995) called a place “relational, historical and concerned with identity,” and named motorways, airports and hotel chains “non-places,” without saying they are bad in themselves.

The course adds an illustration of what a place does: it gathers. A traditional home had a center, a hearth or a stove; many homes now have a television. In this reading, a place draws people, things and routines around a point and gives each a part, though whether a television still gathers a family is an open question. That is an illustration, not a research finding. The worry also runs the other way. George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society (1993) took the fast-food restaurant as the model of a wider drive to standardize daily life. This course goes further and claims that energy-hungry industry makes the Earth’s surface more and more alike, so that we must travel farther to find difference. That is a hypothesis about culture and ecology, not a law of thermodynamics.

Places made and unmade

Ideas about place are easy to admire and hard to test, so take a test case: Chinese American neighborhoods. They were made on purpose, by displaced people, and some were taken apart again. These are stories of place made, taken and made again. They do not prove this course’s thesis.

In California the first Chinese associations were huiguan, associations organized by the county a man came from in Guangdong. According to Los Angeles’s survey of Chinese American history, they gave loans, found jobs, settled disputes, ran hospitals and burials, and fought anti-Chinese laws. Chinatowns grew in the same years. In the 1870s and 1880s, under hostility and violence, Chinese people in American cities gathered in enclaves for protection. The Chinese Exclusion Act, signed on 6 May 1882, then barred Chinese laborers for ten years. It was renewed, made permanent in 1902, and repealed only in 1943, with a quota of 105 Chinese immigrants a year. A Chinatown was part refuge, part cage.

Los Angeles shows the whole cycle. Old Chinatown, an identifiable district by 1870, had survived a mob that killed 18 of its residents on 24 October 1871. In 1926 voters approved a union passenger terminal, built on part of the old quarter. A popular version says Chinese residents lost a case in the U.S. Supreme Court, but that is not what happened. The 1931 case, Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway v. Railroad Commission of California, was fought between three railroads and the state commission that had ordered them to build a union station near the Plaza. The Court upheld the order, and the residents were not parties. Demolition began in 1933, and Union Station opened on 3 May 1939.

Then the community did what a map cannot show. In 1937 the Los Angeles Chinatown Project Association was organized, and the money was raised among Chinese Americans themselves, without bank loans. New Chinatown opened on 25 June 1938. The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California describes it as the first Chinese district in the United States conceived, planned and owned by Chinese Americans. Of the old quarter one building survives, the Garnier Building, now the Chinese American Museum.

Boston shows the taking, too. In the 1950s and 1960s a highway, a turnpike and a growing hospital were built on land that had been Chinatown’s, and hundreds of families lost their homes. The Central Artery alone displaced about 300 families. Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, was built to keep people out. Its immigration station opened on 21 January 1910, designed, in its foundation’s words, “to detain, rather than welcome.” Hundreds of thousands of people, the largest group Chinese, were processed or questioned there before it closed in 1940. Poems carved into the wooden barrack walls were noticed again in 1970 by a park ranger, and the foundation says hundreds survive.

Notice what these stories do not show. No theory of space dispossessed anyone: property law, race and politics did the taking. Yet a planner who sees a district as interchangeable acres to be cleared is looking at space as the earlier lessons described it. Whether that view caused the losses or only excused them, the stories cannot say.

Four questions to end on

The course closes with four questions from listeners. The answers show how this course thinks, and where it goes beyond the evidence.

Markets, entropy and openness

One listener asked: if equilibrium means disorder, does a free market mean chaos and a monopoly order? The answer adds a missing variable, whether a system is open or closed. The physics is sound. Entropy, roughly how spread out and unusable energy has become, cannot decrease in an isolated system. An open system, which takes in energy and sends out waste heat, can grow more ordered inside by exporting entropy. The Earth is one: sunlight in, heat out. Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on “dissipative structures,” patterns from hurricanes to living cells that persist by taking in and dissipating energy (Course 5). The course then claims that openness, not freedom as such, keeps a market orderly. That step is an analogy, and economists disagree about it. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) argued that economic activity irreversibly degrades low-entropy resources. Critics found errors in his thermodynamics, and mainstream economists such as Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz reject his pessimism about substitutes for the resources we use up.

Is life the pursuit of the infinite?

A second listener asked whether life’s meaning is the pursuit of the infinite. The course calls that the modern, “Faustian” spirit, after Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918, 1922), where the word names a culture, rising in the West from about the tenth century, with a yearning toward endless space. The course applies it to a person who tries to conquer and impose will. That is its own use of the word, not Spengler’s claim, and most historians reject his scheme of cultures as living organisms. Its example is Pavel Korchagin, the paralyzed, blind hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered (part 1 in 1932, part 2 in 1934). A famous passage speaks of life as a person’s dearest possession, to be given to the liberation of mankind. Calling that ideal Faustian is the course’s interpretation.

Its main point is that endless striving is not what people have always done. In this reading, many older cultures taught stillness, or set the highest aim outside the self, as in the pilgrimage to Mecca that a Muslim who is able is expected to make once. Chinese readers will remember Lu You (1125–1210), who wrote near the end of his life, in “To My Son”: 死去元知万事空，但悲不见九州同, “Dead, I know, all things are empty; I only grieve that I will not see the nine provinces united” (our translation). The course hears there what the Faustian picture splits apart: acceptance of emptiness, and grief for a particular land.

Can slowing down, or art, be a way out?

A third listener worried that modern science has turned from seeking truth to seeking power, and now speaks of a “singularity.” First the history. Francis Bacon wrote in 1597 that knowledge itself is power, and in 1620 that “human knowledge and human power meet in one.” The slogan scientia potentia est is Hobbes’s wording, from his Latin Leviathan of 1668. Course 2 tells how knowledge became useful (How science became useful). The singularity is the idea that technology will create intelligence greater than ours and change everything. Vernor Vinge predicted in 1993 that “within thirty years” we would have the means, and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2005) popularized the idea. It is a forecast, not a finding. The course’s remedy is one word: slow down, because refinement takes time. It suggests that art, work with no use, may be how people make the meanings the world no longer supplies.

It adds a speculation: that dance and music arose 50,000 to 100,000 years ago to discipline a surplus of energy. That is untested. Engraved ochre from Blombos Cave in South Africa is about 70,000 to 77,000 years old. A hand stencil on Muna Island, Indonesia, was reported in 2026 to be at least 67,800 years old. Bone and ivory flutes from Germany’s Swabian Jura are more than 35,000 years old. Art and music are very old, then. But singing and drumming leave no trace, dance leaves none at all, and nothing found supports a single cause, or a date for the first dance.

What use is all this?

The last question may be the most honest: what is any of this good for? The course gives three answers. There is no general rule for turning ideas into a life or a career, and each person converts them differently. A new idea loosens thinking that has set in a groove. And a true idea should connect to ordinary life, perhaps unplanned: flowers planted on purpose may never bloom, says the proverb, while a careless willow cutting grows into shade (有心栽花花不开，无心插柳柳成荫). It is the bet Course 1 found in the Greeks, who prized knowledge with no outside purpose (Science was not for survival). An answer that cannot fail is easy to give, so test it on yourself: do you notice something about your surroundings that you did not before?