Absolute Space

Geographical space may be viewed from a variety of conceptual vantage points, all of which reflect and sustain various ideologies and interests in society at large. The division between absolute and relative space is one of the most long-standing and important of these contending theoretical frameworks. Absolute space is typically represented as fixed, mathematized, geometrified, asocial, and atemporal.

Absolute space has a long lineage in Western history that can be traced back to classical Greece. Plato, for example, equated light with the good, in which the cave is a metaphor for the kosmos, the world of human ignorance. For Plato, time was a moving image of eternity, an imperfect and untrustworthy mirror of eternal forms embedded in space that transcend time. Time is derived from change in space, which preexisted time. Space exists in its own right by virtue of its visibility, whereas time is derivative of changes in the spatial order. Time, then, was a facade, and space as the realm of changeless, permanent forms took precedence in his thought. Intellectual progress consisted of attempting to discover transcendental forms located outside of time. For Plato, the process of becoming belonged to the domain of time and illusion, in contrast to the state of being, which was empirically observable in space and thus more “real.”

Similarly, Greek geometry reflected the mathematization of terrestrial and celestial space. Aristotle reasoned that since Earth's shadow on the moon was an orb, and only a sphere could throw such a shadow, the Earth must therefore be spherical. Many Greek intellectuals subscribed to the dichotomy between chora, or space as an empty container, and topos, space that is bound, inhabited, and given meaning. Hipparchus came up with the system of locating every place in a coordinate grid, dividing Earth's circumference into 360°, inventing the mathematical vocabulary of cartography still in use today. Euclidean geometry, grounded in the assumption of one uniform, continuous space, dominated the mathematics of spatial representation for the next two millennia. Ó Tuathail (1996) asserts that “Greek geography, geometry, and cartography are all suffused with the teleological dream of displaying space as a simultaneous, synchronic totality” (p. 70). The tradition of Greek geometry initiated by Euclid, Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras powerfully informed Western metaphysics for the next two millennia and initiated a long history of Western ocularcentrism.

The explicit division between absolute and relative space can be traced back to the famous debate in the 17th century between two geniuses, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton, greatly influenced by the recent popularity of the clock, viewed time and space as abstract, absolute entities that existed independently of their measurement; that is, their existence was absolute, for their reality remained real regardless of what they contained or how they were measured. Leibniz, in contrast, held that time and space were relational—that is, comprehensible only with reference to specific frames of interpretation: Distance, for example, [Page 3]could only be understood through appeal to the space between two or more objects situated in space. Space and time, therefore, had no independent existence but were derivative of how we measured them. Eventually, for reasons having little to do with inherent intellectual merit and much to do with the emergence of early capitalist modernity, Newton's view triumphed.

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