Only a philosopher could look from his sitting room and see his whole house
J. E. Malpas writes, ‘places always open up to disclose other places within them … while from within any particular place one can always look outwards to find oneself within some much larger expanse (as one can look from the room in which one sits to the house in which one lives).’
Only a philosopher could look from his sitting room and see his whole house! For its ordinary residents, the house or apartment is disclosed processionally, as a temporal series of vistas, occlusions and transitions unfolding along the myriad of pathways they take, from room to room and in and out of doors, as they go about their daily tasks. Malpas, however, writes of leaving his room for his apartment, his apartment for the building, and the building for the neighbourhood and city in which he lives, as though each step along the way were a movement not along but upwards, from level to level, from smaller, more exclusive places to larger, more inclusive ones. And the higher he climbs, the further removed he feels from the groundedness of place, and the more drawn to an abstract sense of space.
Tim Ingold, “Against Space,” Being Alive