Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to build a railway line across what was then an undrained bog into which everything and
everyone, including the line itself, sank, leading to the final triumphant solution, the floating
of the railway across it on a bed of gorse and heather.
If we understand the story objectively we can say that it delivered some pieces of infor-
mation; it gave the bare factual bones - names, dates and an understanding of the place's
historical importance. Yet it also gave something more, it gave an intuition of the Victorian
world of commerce and enterprise, a world of historical overcoming which seemed to find
fulfilment in the name 'Chat Moss', at once familiar and mysterious, in the process giving a
particular understanding of this place in the landscape.
Hampson listened to the story, but it was more than mere listening; in the process of
listening he engaged with the story as he was told it through thinking and imagining through
which process the intuition was constructed. How can we account for this? Part of the answer
can be found in the concept of intentionality the elucidation of which was crucial in the
development of phenomenology. First developed by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of
the twentieth century, in his
Logical Investigations
(Husserl, 2001) and then further clarified
by Martin Heidegger, intentionality enabled an attack to be made on the Cartesian world
view. It discovers that we do not simply see things, or in this case hear things; instead, in
that hearing we have feelings for the thing that is heard. In our every act of perceptual or
imaginative engagement we direct ourselves towards the object of our attention. These acts
are inescapable.
Yet the intuitions are not automatically given: everyone listening to the Chat Moss story
would not have had the same insight. It would depend on the manner in which listeners
engaged with the data given in the story, leading to different degrees of 'givenness'. Phe-
nomenology discovered three levels of 'givenness': empty intended, the self-given and the
bodily given.
Empty intended refers to the manner in which we talk about something without bringing
it to mind, it is the way in which we converse and listen in everyday conversation. In normal
conversation we do not analyse each word or each reference to a person or thing; we do not
bring them to mind - we accept the reference and pass on.
The self-given allows us to construct an intuition of the subject of conversation by giving
us much more fully that towards which we direct our attention, in this case the importance
of Chat Moss as a foundational act for Victorian Society intuitively fulfilled from the story.
Bodily given is the next level of understanding, which involves intuitive fulfilment com-
plemented by the physical thing being before us. As such Heidegger calls it the 'superlative
mode of the self-givenness of an entity' (Heidegger, 1985, p. 41). To experience something
as it is in the world with us is to experience it in its full truthfulness. From this it would seem
to follow that, if the story enabled a 'self-given' intuition of the historical importance of the
Chat Moss, then all that was needed to develop an even deeper insight would be to go to the
place itself in order for it to be 'bodily given'.
This leads to the second experience that contributed towards the project's development,
a visit to the site itself. Yet when this happened, rather than making the understanding more
concrete, it only served to increase the complexity of understanding. All we could say of the
flat nondescript landscape of stumpy trees and expanses of grass before us, across which the
railway still ran, was that it was just there. It appeared to have an intractable nature that was
highly resistant to insight; it did not connect with the story in any way. By visiting Chat Moss
we confronted the place itself, which gave no inkling of the historic story that had taken us
there.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search