Abstract

The dissertation aims to complicate conventional teleological or developmental accounts of the history of space, according to which metaphysics and epistemology played a supporting role in the cumulative homogenization, infinitization, and evacuation of space effected by modern science. Yet it also tries to resist the triumphant interpretations which so many 20th century recuperations of a spatiality of lived experience and celebrations of the embodiment of human existence seem to invite. Any attempt to derive space from bodily experience remains inconclusive. If philosophical space promises a bodily presence of thought, it also threatens with radical disembodiment. This is perhaps best illustrated in one of the versions of the Kantian argument about incongruent counterparts that serves as a guiding threat of this study, the disembodied hand in a universe otherwise empty, which, Kant argues, will have to be oriented in itself, if it is to fit a future body. The spaces thought by philosophy always also constitute the spatiality of thought, without one finding safeguard in the other. The problem of orientation thus threatens thought with disorientation; the problematic limit of space in the point paralyzes thinking. The dissertation focuses on three thinkers-Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger---and their successive attempts to come to a radical understanding of the originary exteriority of thinking.Kant's attempt to refute idealism by anchoring thought and its continuity in the persistence of extended objects in the world, Husserl's account of the passive synthesis at work in the kinesthetic co-constitution of thing and space, and Heidegger's attempt to make Being-in-the-world the first determination of Dasein---all three attempt to assess a primordial expanse of thought. All three understand this project as bound up with the task to give an account for the finitude of this thought that would no longer treat it as negation, privation, or as in any way ontologically inferior. A first chapter on Descartes explores the prehistory of the problem of orientation, which only Kant was to develop into what he believed to be a genuine philosophical argument---one to which both Husserl and Heidegger turn at crucial moments of their thinking about space.