Linguistique de l’écrit

Revue internationale en libre accès

Livre | Chapitre

190271

The late lia and its urban sequel

reason, mental illness and the emergence of crowd

Abraham Akkerman

pp. 169-179

Résumé

There is sufficient evidence to show that a mitigating factor against mood disorder during the late LIA, has been the city walk. Quite apart from its therapeutic effect, in the case of both René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, the walking experience through seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' European streetscapes had thrust Descartes into his discovery of coordinate geometry, and Kant into his discernment of synthetic – a-priori concepts. In the nineteenth century the subjective experience of urban space has been also at the founding of European Existentialism. To Descartes orthogonally planned streets were the epitome of clear and distinct ideas as well as embryonic reference to axes x and y in a coordinate system. To Kant, according to some interpreters, direction in space was not absolute, but was the product of the body's encounter with space, leading him – through walking – to consider geometry not as a mere neutral a-priori standard of spatiality, but one into which synthetic subjectivity is injected.

Détails de la publication

Publié dans:

Akkerman Abraham (2016) Phenomenology of the Winter-city: myth in the rise and decline of built environments. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 169-179

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-26701-2_13

Citation complète:

Akkerman Abraham, 2016, The late lia and its urban sequel: reason, mental illness and the emergence of crowd. In A. Akkerman Phenomenology of the Winter-city (169-179). Dordrecht, Springer.