10.13125/CH/3150
In this paper I would like to venture certain assumptions on what could be a consequential ontology of place, as sketched from a – probably unconventional and somewhat free – reading of Ricoeur’s debate with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit on the subject of temporality, resumed in the third part of La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. The challenge is now to try to conceive of an ontology of place at the same level as the ontology of historicity, which Ricoeur begins to unfold in the way I have identified.
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Luís António Umbelino
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Critical Hermeneutics
On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place
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Luís António Umbelino
2017/12/28
10.13125/CH/3150
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On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place
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Critical Hermeneutics, 1 (2017)                            Articolo presentato il 30/9/2017
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy               Articolo accettato il 30/9/2017
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index                   Articolo pubblicato il 22/12/2017
ISSN 2533-1825; DOI 10.13125/CH/3150




  On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of
                                               Place


                                   Luís António Umbelino




Abstract
In this paper I would like to venture certain assumptions on what could
be a consequential ontology of place, as sketched from a – probably
unconventional and somewhat free – reading of Ricoeur’s debate with
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit on the subject of temporality, resumed in the
third part of La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. The challenge is now to try to
conceive of an ontology of place at the same level as the ontology of
historicity, which Ricoeur begins to unfold in the way I have identified.
Key-words: Space, Place, Memory, History




1. Entrance
The surprising subtitle of Interpreting Nature, a 2004 book edited by F.
Clingerman, B. Treanor, M. Drenthen, and D. Utsler, announces the
‘emergent field of environmental hermeneutics’ (Clingerman, Treanor,
Drenthen, Utsler, 2014). In its most robust sense, the editors argue,
this “new” field of hermeneutic research should be understood as ‘a
philosophical stance which understands how the inevitability of what
Gadamer          called      our      ‘hermeneutical   consciousness’         informs          our
relationship with environments’ (4). More precisely, this field of research
Luís António Umbelino, On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place




is organized around a double fundamental concern: the application of
hermeneutic principles to the interpretation of environments (natural,
cultural, territorial, political, historical, etc.) where human life takes
place, and research into an ontological framework for interpreting the
human way of mediating the meaning of place.
      Whether we should speak of this as an “emergent field” rather than
a constitutive dimension of hermeneutics is open to debate. Yet the
interest of this kind of proposal – one that calls attention to
environments and, consequently, to the spatial side of the human
condition – is unquestionable. In this paper, I would like to discuss a
specific part of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical project, where he offers us
decisive suggestions for how to conceive of a hermeneutic account of
human space. I will focus my analysis on selected sections in La
mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, with the aim of trying to understand (with
Ricoeur, but also beyond Ricoeur) the importance of concepts such as
space, place, environment, architecture, and urbanism in the context of
Ricoeur’s philosophical project.


2. Emplacements
It is in La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli that Ricoeur, talking about the
“spatial side” (Ricoeur, 2004: 148) of the relation between memory and
history, clearly proposes that three irreducible axes of a “hermeneutic
rationalization” of the idea of place are central to his analysis. The first
is the axis of a “phenomenology of place”, which Ricoeur locates in the
works of E. Casey, whose analysis is indebted to M. Merleau-Ponty’s
revolutionary work on the body’s lived spatiality. The second axis is




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developed by a ‘hermeneutic of the built space’1 insofar as Ricoeur, in a
very interesting paper titled ‘Architecture et narrativité’ (Ricoeur, 1998:
44–51) ‘tried to transpose to the architectural plane the categories
linked to threefold mimesis in the first volume of […] Time and
Narrative: prefiguration, configuration, refiguration’ (Ricoeur, 2004:
527n). Finally, according to Ricoeur, a higher level of rationalization of
place, which we might call the axis of a “long duration” geo-politics of
inhabited land, is unfolded by examining the question of whether
geography might be to space as history is to time (in the same sense
that    narrative    and     architecture     are    analogous       and     mutually
corresponding ways of accessing and creating human time and human
space, respectively). Following the original idea of a “geo-history”
(suggested by Vidal de la Blanch and pursued by the momentous
developments of the School of the Annals) up to the point where it
changes into a geo-politics of long duration (exemplified in Braudel’s
works on the Mediterranean), Ricoeur is here interested in the way lived
space is reconstructed (by relations of commerce, by political projects,
military endeavours, agricultural choices, types of communities, ethnic
traditions, religious habits, etc.) at the hyper-geometrical level of the
“oikoumene”2.
       It is precisely at this point of his analysis that Ricoeur adds the
following provocative and surprizing suggestion: ‘One could pursue this


1
  I have studied several philosophical variations of the first two axes in: Umbelino,
2016; Id., 2016a; Id., 2013; Id., 2011.
2
  ‘In conclusion, from the phenomenology of “places” that beings of flesh and blood
occupy, leave, lose, rediscover — in passing through the intelligibility belonging to
architecture — up to the geography that describes an inhabited space, the discourse of
space too has traced out an itinerary thanks to which lived spaced is turn by turn
abolished by geometrical space and reconstructed at the hyper-geometrical level of the
oikoumene’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 153).




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Luís António Umbelino, On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place




odyssey of turn by turn lived, constructed, traversed, and inhabited
space by an ontology of ‘place,’ at the same level as the ontology of
historicity that we shall consider in part 3 of this work’ (582n). What
might such an ontology be?
        The expression “at the same level” is in my view crucial: it would be
fairly safe to begin by saying that Ricoeur is suggesting that both an
ontology of place and an ontological hermeneutics addressed to the
historical condition come together in ‘any attempt to characterize the
mode of being that we are, in each case in opposition to the mode of
being characterizing beings other than ourselves, whatever the ultimate
relation of this being to Being may be’ (344). Given that the mode of
being that we are is characterized both by the “power to remember”
(Ib.)(pouvoir faire mémoire) and the ability to “write” history, it could
be added that spatiality (in the                   broad sense of the fabric of
environments and places) is as fundamental to and constitutive of our
historical fabric – understood as res gestae et historia rerum gestarum3
– as temporality. But how so?
        Allow me to venture certain assumptions on what could be a
consequential ontology of place, as sketched from a – probably
unconventional and somewhat free – reading of Ricoeur’s debate with
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit on the subject of temporality, resumed in the
third part of La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli4. It is a complex discussion:
Ricoeur does not hide his debt to Heidegger, yet it seems that he
somehow takes that debt as a philosophical motive to clearly show,


3
    ‘We make history and we make histories because we are historical’ (349).
4
  It is of course true that very few thinkers have thought profoundly about the nature
of place more than Heidegger; I believe, however, that our thoughts on place can
profit from Ricoeur’s controversial assessment.




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despite his closeness to Heidegger, his “reservations” regarding key
aspects of Sein und Zeit.
    An initial point of disagreement has to do with what Ricoeur
considers to be, at the centre of Heidegger’s existential analytic of
Dasein (and regarding his famous analysis of the concept of care) an
insufficient account of the importance of a 'very particular existential
that is the flesh, the animate body, my own body, as Husserl had begun
to develop this notion in his last works in line with the Fifth Cartesian
Meditation’ (345). This notion is decisive for developing a meditation on
death and birth, but most of all in accounting for “the between” upon
which Heidegger constructs his idea of historicity. In this sense,
according to Ricoeur, only the development of an analysis of our
incarnated way of being can help us to understand this “between”, as it
entails ‘bridging the logical gulf hollowed out by the hermeneutics of
Dasein between the existentials gravitating around the centre of care
and the categories in which the modes of being of things’, objectively
present (vorhanden) or handy (zunhanden), ‘are related’ (Ib.).
    A second precaution taken by Ricoeur regarding Heidegger’s
analysis has to do with the following central idea, developed in Being
and Time (an idea that Ricoeur himself shares): the notion that time is a
metacategory of the same order as care, in keeping with a philosophical
anthropology of the capable human being. As Ricoeur puts it, ‘[c]are is
temporal, and time is the time of care’ (346). The problem is that time,
in philosophical terms, has always been a source of aporetical
discourses, and it is not guaranteed that Heidegger’s critique of the
“vulgar” category of time is sufficient to overcame those aporetical
perspectives in favour of a conception of authentic human temporality.
Ricoeur’s solution is, as I have discussed elsewhere (see apud n. 4), to



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consider narrative as a way of accessing “human time”, only to be found
at the point or rupture and suture between lived time and cosmological
time.
      A third worry concerns Heidegger’s thought-provoking choice to
place the main accent of his approach on the future and not on the
present. ‘Under the province of care, in Heidegger, ‘being ahead of
oneself’ becomes the pole of reference for the entire analysis of
temporality, with its heroic connotation of “anticipatory resoluteness”’
(Ricoeur, 2004: 347) and its focus on being-towards-death. One can,
nevertheless, according to Ricoeur, resist the hierarchizing of time that
comes along with the suggestion that an orientation toward the future
would be ‘more authentic and more original’ (348) than an orientation
toward the past and the present. It is Heidegger’s concept of
authenticity that is clearly at stake here, and more precisely its auto-
referential dimension, which Ricoeur is trying to dismiss in order to think
of historicity without privileging any one dimension of time over the
others.
      In fact – and this is a fourth consideration made by Ricoeur
regarding Heidegger’s analysis – in addition to the new manner of
ordering the threefold division of temporal experience, Heidegger
proposes       ‘an    original     hierarchical      ordering       of   the     modes   of
temporalization’ (Ib.), starting from the future and going back to the
past, understood as a progressive loss of ‘authenticity’, as a ‘descent
from the authentic to the inauthentic’ (Jervolino, 2002: 63). Ricoeur
does not share this perspective as he considers that what Heidegger
calls ‘authenticity here lacks any criterion of intelligibility’ (Ricoeur,
2004: 349) and remains but a self-referential term. By contrast, Ricoeur
proposes a conception of the equal dignity of the three instances and



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levels of time, as expressing the potentialities of the embodied and
intersubjective capable human being.
    This is the only way, Ricoeur argues, to overcame the confrontation
between the ontology of historical being and the epistemology of
history, something that Heidegger’s discourse, ‘succumbing to what
Adorno denounced as the jargon of authenticity’ (Ib.), does not allow.
Heidegger could have saved himself from this jargon, which tends to
couple “authenticity” with the “primordial”, ‘if by historical condition he
was to understand, in accordance with what the expression suggests, an
existential condition of the possibility of the entire series of discourses
concerning the historical in general, in everyday life, in fiction, and in
history’ (Ib.). If we make history and we make histories, this is precisely
‘because   we   are   historical’;   this   is   the   ‘because     of   existential
conditionality’ upon which it is finally possible to ‘organize an order of
derivation that would not be reduced to a progressive loss of ontological
density but that would be marked by increasing determination on the
side of epistemology’ (Ib.). In other words, in each confrontation
between the ontology of the historical condition and the historical
knowledge that intersects with a phenomenology of memory, it is
always possible to find the prospect of a riposte to the law of mortal
inevitability as primordially authentic. Ricoeur’s suggestion here is of a
‘humble alternative of the meaning of mortality in which the reference to
one’s own body requires a detour through biology and the return to the
self by way of a patient appropriation of a knowledge entirely outside of
the mere fact of death’ (350): a knowledge of birth, of the gift of life, of
the resilience against the wounds of existence, of the ties of solidarity
and recognition. This possibility can finally pave the way for a true
historical awareness of the presence of death (of the self, of those close



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to us, and among all these others, the dead of the past) in life. In the
face of this philosophical possibility, a new positive dialogue with
historical knowledge is made possible, as the privileged retrospective
gaze of history offers to the absent ones of history ‘the pity of an offer
of burial’5. But this can only be so at the difficult point where memory
and history meet, only to mutually temper one another with regards to
their hegemonic temptations6.


3. The ontology of place
The challenge is now to try to conceive of an ontology of place at the
same level as the ontology of historicity, which Ricoeur begins to unfold
in the way I have identified.
      Let us return to the suggestion that the existential of flesh, of the
lived body, should have been deepened by Heidegger. Such a needed
development would imply, in my view, the symmetrical development of
an analysis of the spatial fabric of place in a double sense: first, as the
dimension that constitutes itself around bodies and permeates each
dynamic way of belonging to the world; but also, and foremost, as the
genetic condition of the Da of Dasein, as it were. We are the sort of
embodied being-in-the-world that we are – the sort of manipulating,
thinking, remembering, experiencing, embodied creatures in-the-world

5
  ‘The equation between writing and sepulchre would thus be proposed as the reply
furnished by the discourse of the historian to the discourse of the philosopher’ (Ricoeur
2004: 351).
6
  ‘On the one hand, history would like to reduce memory to the status of one object
among others in its field of investigation; on the other hand, collective memory
opposes its resources of commemoration to the enterprise of neutralizing lived
significations under the distant gaze of the historian. Under conditions of retrospection
common to history and to memory the contest of priority is undecidable. It is this very
undecidability that is accounted for in an ontology responsible for its epistemic
counterpart’ (Ib.).




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that we are – only in virtue of our active engagement in place (Malpas,
2004: 177) and, conversely, in virtue of what places themselves, as
they become significant densifications of space, contribute to our way of
being involved in those places.
    In this sense we might say that spatiality, as the possibility of
emplacement, is a primordial dimension in which all aspects of human
engagement in the world are actively rooted and can be unfolded: the
mediation of one’s own identity, the relationship between different
human beings, the relationship between humans and things of the world
– all these connections are originally negotiated with the dense structure
of places. If our way of capably being-in-the-world is to some extent
assured by our embodied connectedness to specific places, and if the
homo capax is “capable of making memory”, it must be added that the
link we are talking about is also one that operates in memory and,
consequently, in history (that is to say, in time) at a radical level: we do
not remember ourselves or other people merely as abstract meanings or
ideas of actions and decisions; we remember them (individually or
collectively) as being emplaced. The people we remember are what they
are because of their way of inhabiting, their way of belonging, their way
of making place for themselves - but also, crucially, because of the ways
in which the dynamics of place themselves materialize meaning and
allow history to account for it, thus contributing to making each person,
action or event who or what it is.
    If this is so, an ontology of place must then – and this is a second
clue I would like to suggest – include research into an “authentic”
conception of space. This research must – like Ricoeur’s research into
human time – surpass the aporetic perspectives on space that tend to
elude the point of rupture and suture, where “human space” (as a third



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Luís António Umbelino, On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place




space between lived space and geometrical space) can truly be found.
This research will confirm that it is the fabric of built spaces that forges
the places we dwell. Ricoeur has shown quite convincingly the sense in
which architecture and urbanism (civil, military) create the places we
live in, that is to say where human time, in its historical and existential
modes, takes place. Be it a building, a city, or a natural landscape that
has been shaped by human actions, it is the human act of building in a
broad sense that can change geological environments into meaningful
lived or inhabited places in place. Therefore, something similar to what
is said of the capacity for an ontology of temporality must be said of the
spatial dimension of human dwelling when it comes to making possible
(in an existential sense) the representation of the past by history and,
before that, by memory (Ricoeur, 2004: 350): such an alignment, I
would like to argue, will first of all show that the existential possibility of
remembering is both temporal and spatial in the sense that no identity,
no person, no action, no event of the past, and no time gone by is what
it was outside the place that made it what it was. This means that the
spatial dimension we are talking about is neither a psychological one nor
a simple conception of localization in an inert positive extension. What I
am arguing here is that any sense of the past implies the spatial
dimension of emplacement, in the sense that the recuperation of the
past by memory and, following that, by history equally needs a sense of
place.
      This being so, a further dimension of an ontology of place can be
unfolded following Ricoeur’s suggestion of “not privileging any dimension
of time over the others”: to have a sense of place is, in fact, to
understand all dimensions of time as equally authentic. In this way, we
might say that “being-towards-a-place” is never the same as being-



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towards-death. Starting with the originality of belonging or being for
somewhere means that any sense of time respects to situated,
remembering persons as they interact within specific multi-layered
spaces and particular locations, with concrete and material objects,
environments, intersubjective relations and mundane presences. In this
sense, to be emplaced is never merely to point to one dimension of
time, because each place maintains our connection to several layers of
being in the world. In place we are at home, and at home, in places that
combine and connect several times, we build our lives (sometimes over
our dead), we resist the wounds of existence, we make space in life for
“our” dead and, at the same time, we celebrate each birth.
    The concreteness of places sustains the equal authenticity of all the
dimensions of time, and for any situated individual a sense of the past
will not be detached from the way in which present and future actions
sometimes seem to be embedded in a complex history of old
emplacements and ways of inhabiting. This is why we might say that –
another clue – it is at the level of an ontology of place that the grounds
for a point of intersection are first sketched, where memory and history
meet and mutually temper one another with regards to their hegemonic
temptations. In fact, if it is true that the past cannot be prised away
from places – that is to say, away from the dwelling “stories” of
someone’s embodied activity within particular spaces, as engaged with
particular objects, environments, and other people – this connection
must also be true with respect ‘both to the past that can be recounted
as a part of a personal biography and to the past that is articulated
through communal narrative and history’ (Malpas, 2004: 177) – neither,
it must be added, ‘wholly independent of the other’ (180). This is to say
that when we take places into account, we must begin by understanding



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Luís António Umbelino, On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place




that they are indicative of many crossovers between space and time:
time is spatialized, materialized, anchored and kept by objects, places
and environments, such that it is possible to recover the past in
embodied, shared ways (more or less familiar, more or less uncanny) of
dwelling; and space, on the other hand is memorialised, densified, and
dimensionalised in many layers of present, past and future actions, in
this way becoming the possibility of dwelling that defines the human
condition.
       What must be added to this perspective is – as Ricoeur suggests –
an extension of the idea of emplaced dwelling “to the level of the
oikoumene”. In my view, this requires a development of the idea of
home that is robust enough to allow “birth” and “hope” to riposte to
Heidegger’s “being-towards-death”. From a spatial perspective, I find a
first inspiration for this in Bachelard’s topoanalysis of the poetic image
of inhabited spaces. As he develops this perspective, Bachelard notes
that a home is ‘our first world’ (Bachelard, 1964: 4). Those who posit
the universe as existing prior to the house qua home are therefore
wrong. It is impossible, according to Bachelard, to know the universe
before we know the “house”, and this means that we cannot truly know
our world independently of a primordial sense of being at home. In a
way, before being-towards-death we are born at home, and this is why
we will never forget, as human beings, the constitutive archaic sense of
the degree of intimacy and intensity that goes along with any
experience of being in the world. If this is so, then it becomes necessary
to understand that, ‘rather than claim[ing] that the world is a house’,
Bachelard’s perspective ‘tries to convince us that the house is a world. It
is a place-world, a world of places’ (Casey, 1997: 291) where time takes
place in the inhabited house-world.



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    Regarding time, it is then important to underscore that memory on
the one hand, and the care and depth that must nourish historical
interpretations on the other, is partially lost, or at least damagingly
blocked, if we lose sight of what only in and by the embodied, spatial,
environmental or – to sum it all up – homely dimensions of existence
can somehow be regained as a familiar (even if never lived by me)
presence.


4. Exit
A sense of the past is possible because we can become attached to what
– at any time – wraps us up into its space by touching us almost
physically. This is what can assure us that, as Ricoeur would say,
memory can never be reduced to a ‘simple region of historical science’
(Ricoeur, 2004: 351), as if history itself were not rooted in a mémoire
vivante. At the same time, it is also what can assure us that an
emplaced ground of time – not one of simple commemorative sites, but
one densified by objects, buildings, streets, ruins, atmospheres, and
landscapes that carry within them the accumulated history of ancient
labours and duties, of communities with their hopes, choices and
decisions, of political and social experiences, of suffering and death –
will always help history to critically balance the traces and testimonies of
the past.


References
Bachelard, G. (1964). Poetics of space. M. Jolas Trans. New York: Orion.
Casey, E. S. (1997). The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History.
Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press.




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Luís António Umbelino, On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place




Clingerman, F., Treanor, B., Drenthen, M., Utsler, D., eds. (2014).
Interpreting Nature. The emergent field of environmental hermeneutics.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1998). Architecture et narrativité. Urbanisme, 303, 44–51.
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Jervolino, D. (2002). Paul Ricoeur. Une herméneutique de la condition
humaine. Paris: Ellipses.
Malpas, J. E. (2004). Place and experience. A Philosophical Topography.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Umbelino, L. A. (2011). Herméneutique, architecture et humanisation de
l’espace. Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 91(1), 67–82.
Umbelino, L. A. (2013). L’étoffe spatiale de la mémoire. Lectures de M.
Merleau-Ponty et P. Ricœur. Studia Phaenomenologica, 13, 325–334.
Umbelino, L. A. (2015). Memory of the Body, Temptation of Space. The
European Legacy, 20(8), 844–851.
Umbelino, L. A. (2016). Memory, Space, Oblivion. In S. Davidson, M.-A.
Vallée (eds.), Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur. Cham:
Springer International Publishing, 115–122.
Umbelino, L. A. (2016b). On the Ricoeurian Projet of a Hermeneutics of
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