Space

We produce signs (and especially symbols) in order to make the universe intelligible. Semiosis is the lifeblood of reason, one of two traits that “make us men” (the other is freedom, says the hymnist).  But the ability to use symbols is in turn dependent, in the first instance, on forming a primordial concept of the spatial Other. “The foundation of the identity of things is their spatial location,” observed René Thom, that remarkable mathematical prodigy-turned-philosopher, who attempted, late in his intellectual development, to bring a sort of proto-scientific rigor to semiotic philosophy. “All ontology, all semantics necessarily depends on a study of space,” Thom also noted, echoing a sentiment found in Spengler and elsewhere. By “space,” Thom meant both physical and conceptual space; the internal “semiotic space” which characterizes human thought is no less susceptible to topological analysis, he believed, than is the external space in which matter  and energy are suspended.

In formulating a hypothesis of Self during the earliest stages of cognitive development, the infant soul is crucially dependent on external sensory stimuli, which furnish evidence for the notion of a Self in which reactions to an outside Other can inhere. This Other, as non-Self, is of necessity removed in space, and hence is born the idea of extendedness. As Spengler pointed out long ago, the symbol representing spatial extension can take various forms, depending on the culture of origin. For the Western mind, space is regarded as infinite, for example, whereas for the “Magian” soul of the Arabian culture, it is bounded like a cosmic cavern. But whatever form it may take, the space-symbol requires extension, with its corollary assumption that space is populated by differentiable things that, in order to be distinct, must occupy different portions of space.

Note that this applies both to conceptual and to physical space: the distinction between a blue giant star and an emperor penguin resides in the first instance on their not being spatially coextensive, both externally and within the "universe of discourse," and all other distinguishing characteristics will flow from that first assumption.

What is, after all, this thing we characterize as [physical] “space”? If we blithely suppose it to be the nothingness in which matter and energy is to be found, then we contradict both the authority of the hymnist, who denies the existence of “pure space,” and the revelations of 20^th century physics, which (thanks to the paradoxes of quantum physics) has found space to be suffused with virtual matter in addition to the more tangible stuff. As to the mysterious (and possibly misnamed) "dark matter" which only lately has been found to pervade the cosmos, we can venture no opinion other than the obvious inference: there appears to be no such thing as empty space on either a microcosmic or macrocosmic scale.

 

What, then, remains to answer the semantic requirements of space? The answer, it seems to me, can only be found in the realm of the symbolic: the space-symbol is that which affords any cognizing mind the possibility of differentiability and, hence, of cognition. Thus, while the Other may be ontologically prior to the Other-as-Symbol, the Symbol is in its turn prior to the notion of physical or corporeal space. That such a notion may appear to smack of mysticism is only because the assumption of spatiality so compenetrates our semiotic being.

It was Joseph Smith’s first great realization, that both God the Father and Jesus Christ are corporeal (i.e., spatial) beings, that forever revolutionized religion. The old notion that Divinity somehow transcends space and corporeality—that He is both everywhere and nowhere -- is one of the last refuges of primitive animism. Such a concept of God must yield in the end to the pantheism of the ancients, since, semiotically at least, if God is coextensive with the universe, he must be consubstantial as well. This we must admit if we acknowledge that any two signs, in order to be distinct, must also occupy “spatially disjoint domains” (per Thom).

But the boy Joseph learned in the Sacred Grove that God the Father is a “man like ourselves” – in terms of spatial extension, in any case. In later years, it was further revealed to Joseph and his associates how this Man’s influence spans the cosmos: it is through the instrumentality of light, which “fills the immensity of space” (NB: we need not assume that by “space” is meant here only the expanse inhabited by galaxies and cosmic radiation; instead, since “the light which shineth, which giveth you light … is the same light that quickeneth your understandings,” we may, in this context as in our previous musings, understand “space” to denote also the boundless realms of cognition).

As composite beings, we both think and (more importantly) act in space. Spatiality, a cardinal attribute of physical bodies both mortal and immortal, is thus indispensable to the exercise of agency – that is, to think and act for ourselves.

All reality, both cognitive and corporeal, has symbolic life, as Peirce perceived and as we have elsewhere noted. The universe itself is a grand symbol, and no symbol – owing to its indissoluble connection to purposeful thought, can be dissociated from the notion of purpose. But purpose in its turn requires a spatial Other unto which purpose can be directed, and thus are Symbol and Space (sensu lato) ontologically linked. Perhaps this is why “there is no space in the which there is no kingdom; and there is no kingdom in which there is no space.”