What, then, constitutes the basic concepts and the taken-for-granted framework of meaning with which this work is primarily concerned? It is nothing less than the tradition in geographical thinking itself, with a mode of inquiry which has predicated itself on and has developed from a particular world-view or metaphysical interpretation of man and world. This we can call the Cartesian or Newtonian world-view, and presupposes what Heidegger has called a pro-posing, positing form of thinking and interpreting the world, “which secures beings as objects over against itself and for itself’ (Welte, 1981, 92). Western metaphysics has increasingly become such a pro-posing, positing thinking of objects, where along with the objectivity of the objects the subjectivity of the subjects is developed. The subjectivity so implanted grows throughout Western thinking, culminating in Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power, and differently in modem science and the technological domination of the world that follows from it, epitomized by the nuclear age (see Heidegger, 1977a). If we can accept with Heidegger that in different ages man and world are appropriated differently, then the manner in which man and world are appropriated one to the other in this age constitutes the most fundamental level at which the taken-for-grantedness of the world operates. It is this fundament alone which allows us to clarify fully the nature of man and world, and to delimit the manner in which science can operate as a valid and true domain of discourse within limits.
There is one element common to all true phenomenologies since Husserl and that is their rejection of the traditional metaphysical assumption of the separation of subject and object as the description of the fundamental state of affairs. We exist primordially not as subjects manipulating objects in the external, ‘real’, physical world, but as beings in, alongside, and toward the world. Within that world we can, of course, discover intramundane beings or entities, and through a formal process of abstraction we can establish a world of subjects and objects for purely theoretical reflection. But generally and primarily we exist — that is, ek-sist, or stand out — toward a world.
If, as I have claimed, the greater part of this work is to deal with [18] phenomenology, and by implication with that process of ek-sistence, and if this has yet to be achieved in geographical inquiry, then I must show, (a) how geography presumes the categories of traditional metaphysics, remaining ensconced in an ontology of physical nature where the world is only and always a world of subjects and objects, and (b) how the rejection of this state of affairs has resulted in a by-passing of phenomenology itself in favour of a world of subjects. This is the aim of this and the following two chapters.
Furthermore, it is necessary to show how the epistemological dilemma to which this situation has led cannot be transcended from within. Nothing less than an overcoming of the subject-object dichotomy of Western thinking will allow us to move beyond the relativism and dogmatism of contemporary geographical science, and only in this way will we be able to retrieve the scientific project — as the appropriate domain for a pro-posing, positing or objectifying activity — in a rational and coherent manner for the human sciences. Only in this way can we fully appreciate the nature and the limits of the project of positive science. Only in this way can a coherent and meaningful research programme concerned with human spatiality and worldhood be developed. To demonstrate how and why this is the case is the aim of the rest of the work.