Aristotle’s treatment of topos is tied to the idea of topos as that which is the answer to the question “where”—consequently topos figures as one of the Aristotelian Kategoriai (which constitute both the different ways in which things can be spoken and certain basic ways in which things can be).1 Here it seems as if Aristotle assumes an understanding of topos that would match the understanding of place as location, such that each thing has its own place within a world of such places, rather than as that open region within which things appear. Yet although Aristotle does indeed treat place in a way that seems to assimilate it to a notion of location, and his treating being-at-a-place as one of the nonsubstantial Kategoriai would also seem to indicate that place is only accidental to the being of the thing, he nevertheless also takes it to be a central concept in philosophical analysis, writing in Physics 4 of the importance of arriving at an understanding of place2 and reiterating the Archtyan maxim that to be is to be somewhere.3 Indeed, Heidegger himself recognizes the significance of the Aristotelian, and, more generally, the Greek understanding of place, as that which supports the being of the thing—“the place [Platz] pertains to the being itself. . . . every being has its place [Ort]. . . . The place [Ort] is constitutive of the presence of the being.”4 Notably, however, while the sense of place at issue is clearly more than the sense associated with mere location within a realm of spatial extension, still the way in which place might function as the open realm of gathered disclosure is not yet apparent. Place thus appears as a problematic notion, and appears to be recognized as such by Heidegger himself as he repeats Aristotle’s own comment that “it is something great and very difficult to grasp place for what it is.”5
In his own discussion in Physics 4, Aristotle criticizes and rejects a number of alternative accounts of the nature of topos as form, matter, and extension in order to arrive at his own characterization of the notion as “the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds.”6 The “place” or topos of a thing is thus understood to be the inner surface of the body (where “body” here means simply the thing in its physical extendedness) within which that thing is enclosed—on this account the “place” of a rosebud contained within a glass paperweight is the inner surface of the glass that surrounds the enclosed flower. The implication of this account is that to be “in place” is always to be contained within an enclosing body, and Aristotle states this explicitly: “a body is in place,” he says, “if, and only if, there is a body outside it which surrounds it.”7 Since Aristotle rejects the concept of void, almost everything is necessarily enclosed within something else. The only exception is the universe as a whole, which is literally “no-place” and which is therefore not contained within anything at all—a claim that gave rise to extended discussions among ancient and medieval writers concerning the possibility of something extending beyond the bounds of the universe. The Aristotelian characterization of place that understands the notion by means of the idea of containment within an enclosing body is echoed by Heidegger, not only in section 12, but also in section 21 of Being and Time, where he writes of the contrast between being-there and “a way of Being in space which we call ‘insideness’ [Inwendigkeit].”8 “Insideness” is elucidated by reference to the way in which “an entity which is itself extended is closed round [umschlossen] by the extended boundaries of something that is likewise extended.”16 Here, particularly in the notion of being “closed around by . . . boundaries,” there seems a clear echo of Aristotle’s “unchangeable limit of that which surrounds.”
See my discussion in “Kategoriai and the Unity of Being,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy (new serie), 4 (1990), 13-36. ↩
See Physics, 208a27-31. ↩
Physics, 208a29-31. ↩
See Plato’s “Sophist,” trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 73 (GA19:105-106). ↩
Aristotle, Physics, 212a7, quoted by Heidegger in Plato’s “Sophist,” p. 75 (GA19:108). ↩
Aristotle, Physics IV, 5, 212a20, in Aristotle’s Physics Books III and IV, trans. Edward Hussey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Elsewhere Aristotle presents the same idea in slightly different form. Place is “the limit of the surrounding body, at which it is in contact with that which is surrounded” (212a36). ↩
Consequently the world does not have a place since “there is nothing besides the universe [to pan] and the sum of things, nothing which is outside the universe; and this is why everything is in the world [ouranos]. (For the world is (perhaps) the universe). The place [of changeable body] is not the world but a part of the world,” Physics IV, 212a31. ↩
Being and Time (GA2), H101. ↩