Abstract
We argue that the understanding of space, as an extended, simultaneous totality, although useful in some scientific contexts, is not true to our embodied experiences of space. It is an abstraction, involving a de-temporalization of space that falsifies our experience. From the phenomenological-enactivist perspective, space is not already there, neutrally constituted in its objective extension; rather, it is enacted, put in place relative to action affordances that are both corporeal and intercorporeal. Moreover, these action affordances are permeated by an intrinsic temporality, so that the experience of space is fully temporal because it is fully embodied. Space, as the experienced phenomenon of a delimited embodied enactment, is also hermeneutically situated so that meaning emerges for the embodied agent just because of its dynamical relations to a set of physical and social affordances.
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Notes
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This dynamical coordination that structures its own temporality is embodied in the interaction of the agents, but interaction in an enactive perspective is not just space-time coincidence:
We must go beyond a view that identifies interaction as simply the spacio-temporal coincidence of two agents that influence each other. We must move towards an interpretation of how their history of coordination demarcates the interaction as an identifiable pattern with its own internal structure, and its own role to play in the process of understanding each other and the world. (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, p. 492)
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Gallagher, S., Martínez, S.F., Gastelum, M. (2017). Action-Space and Time: Towards an Enactive Hermeneutics. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_7
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