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The Moral Dimension of Human Geography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Guy Mercier  and
Gilles Ritchot
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Extract

      Quand tu es seul, debout au milieu de la haute plaine d'Asie,
      sous la coupole insondable où parfois un pilote
      ou un ange sème dans l'azur une coulée d'amidon;
      quand tu tressailles sentant ta petitesse,
      apprends-le: l'espace auquel semble-t-il il ne faut
      rien, a grandement besoin en réalité
      d'un regard extérieur, de distance, de vide.
      Tu es seid à pouvoir lui rendre ce service.
    Joseph Brodsky

In the course of this century, a number of authors have asserted that geographic knowledge is useful for the development of programs to parcel out land. Hoping to foster this link between insight and action, applied geography saw the light of day. In order to be genuinely effective, the practice of this kind of planning, so it was thought, needed to rely on the expertise of the geographer who studied forms of human settlement. More fundamentally, the utilitarian claim of applied geography rested on the conviction according to which the spatial organization of human societies brought into play the question of justice and commonweal. As Jean Gottmann wrote, our epoch is particularly sensitive to the fact that everyone, whoever or from wherever they may be, consider themselves “to be entitled to live just as well as all others.” In this way a “popular will” was affirmed “that the necessary measures be taken to envisage, prepare, and provide for an improvement of life's comforts …, for a better life.” Inspired by the “modern idea of planning,” applied geography set itself the goal of “establishing justice […] by a more even distribution of people, of their means of subsistence, [and] of their living standard.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 42 , Issue 166 , June 1994 , pp. 49 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

Notes

1. Vertumne (Paris, 1993), 173.

2. There are a great number of secondary sources on this subject, among them: T.W. Freeman, Geography and Planning (London, 1958); D. Stamp, Applied Geogra phy (London, 1960); M. Phlipponneau, Géographie et action. Introduction à la géo graphie appliquée (Paris, 1960); P. George et al., La Géographie active (Paris, 1964); J. Gottmann, Essais sur l'aménagement de l'espace habité (Paris, 1966); J. Labasse, L'or ganisation de l'espace. Eléments d'une géographie volontaire (Paris, 1966); J. Beaujeu-Garnier, "Les géographes au service de l'action," in: Revue internationale des sciences sociales, 2, 1975, 290-302; P. Pinchemel, "Aspects géographique de l'amé nagement du territoire," in: M. Lamotte, ed., Fondements rationnels de l'aménage ment du territoire (Paris, 1984), 8-33; P. Merlin, Géographie de l'aménagement (Paris, 1988); F. Hulbert, Essai de géopolitique urbaine et régionale. La comédie urbaine de Québec (Montreal, 1994).

3. J. Gottmann, op.cit., 19.

4. Ibid., 16.

5. Ibid., 9-16.

6. Ibid., 23.

7. J. Forester, for example, does this in his article "The Geography of Planning Practice," in: Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, Vol. I, 1983, 163-80.

8. This article resulted from research undertaken at Laval University in connection with a project entitled "Les enjeux éthiques du développement urbain de Québec" and financed by the "Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada." An earlier version of this text was presented to the meeting of the Association of Canadian Geographers, held at Ottawa in June 1993. The authors wish to thank G. Desmarais, S. Mascolo, and M. Savard of Laval University for the critical comments they made at the time of the editing of this article.

9. See esp. F. Ratzel, "Man as a Life Phenomenon on the Earth," in: H.F. Helmot, ed., The History of the World. A Survey of Man's Record, Vol. I (New York, 1901), 61-106; idem, La Géographie politique (Geneva, 1988); P. Vidal de la Blache, Principes de géographie humaine (Paris, 1922).

10. We are taking here Alberti's categories (necessitas, commoditas, and voluptas) as annotated by F. Choay, La Règle et le Modèle (Paris, 1980); See also K. Marx, Capi tal. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (New York, 1977), 125: "The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination makes no difference."

11. The criticism by J. Baudrillard, among others, does not escape this primacy of values. It demonstrates rightly that "objects" do not merely have usage values — they are not just "utensils" — if their consumption drives a "political econ omy of signs." This is no less the case if the "sign" in question appears as a value, which would justify the integration of the "objects" into the circuit of the general economy. See his Le Système des objets (Paris, 1968) and Pour une critique de économie politique du signe (Paris, 1972).

12. P. Claval, Géographie humaine et économique contemporaine (Paris, 1984), 162.

13. Several geographers have left a body of scholarship from which we can identify the decisive points of this sequence. Among the pioneering authors are F. Ratzel, P. Vidal de la Blache, J. Brunhes, A. Demangeon, P. George, and P. Claval, to mention only these.

14. G.-H. de Radkowski, Les Jeux du désir (Paris, 1980), 23, wrote: "The modern Occident is alone in conceiving of its economy as a positivity by bringing about the complete inversion of its object. It has replaced ascetic restraint with the emphasis on activity — becoming productive. It has replaced the crucial experi ence of human poverty by the expectation of riches." The author added: "This inversion has given rise to an economics that as a science up to then has been unthinkable: there is no science with a negative object, a science of an anti-object."

15. See J. Petitot, Physique du sens (Paris, 1992), 19-64.

16. See, inter alia, M. Godelier, L'Idéel et le Matériel (Paris, 1984); E.A. Hoebel, Anthropology: The Study of Man (New York, 1966); J. Goody, Death, Property and Ancestors (Stanford, 1962); I.A. Hallowell, "The Nature and the Function of Property as a Social Institution," in: Culture and Experience (Philadelphia, 1955), 236-49.

17. See G. Mercier, "Prémisses d'une théorie de la propriété," in: Cahiers de géogra phie du Québec, 81, 1986, 319-41. G. Ritchot has suggested to link the incest taboo to this "universal property prohibition." See the special issue (No.15, 1991, 34- 36) of Etudes de géographie structurale, publ. by the Centre de recherches en amé nagement et en développement, Laval University, Quebec.

18. See E. Levinas, Ethique et Infini (Paris, 1982); idem, "L'autre, utopie et justice," in: A quoi pensent les philosophes (Paris, 1988), 53-60.

19. M. Godelier, op.cit., 105.

20. On the nominal dimension of property, see G. Mercier, "La théorie géo graphique de la propriété et l'héritage ratzélien," in: Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 98, 1992, 241-42.

21. P. Legendre, L'Empire de la vérité. Introduction aux espaces dogmatiques industriels (Paris, 1983), 25. (Italics in the original).

22. The structural geographic notion of "vacuum" has been developed by G. Ritchot in his article "Prémisses d'une théorie de la forme urbaine," in: idem and C. Feltz, Forme urbaine et pratique sociale (Louvain-la-Neuve and Montreal, 1985), 37f. It has recently been made the object of thorough semiotic study by G. Desmarais in his La Théorie de la forme urbaine. Une problématique morpho-sémio tique (Ph.D. thesis, Montreal University, 1991), 67-100. There is also J.-P. Hubert's project to put it into mathematical form: La discontinuité critique. Essai sur les principes a priori de la géographie humaine (Paris, 1993), 120-27.

23. J.-J. Wunenburger, Questions d'éthique (Paris, 1993), 9, writes: "… the idea of good deeds and a good life according to a certain number of basic truths appears to be an indisputable anthropological constant." Put in this way, moral ity will also form a link with mythology that — as N. Frye has shown — plays a major role in the human configuration of space and time. Frye has developed this question particularly in his last book: The Double Vision. Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto, 1991), 39-58. One could also refer to Frye's defini tion of myth in his Le Grand Code. La Bible et la littérature (Paris, 1984), 74-99, and The Modern City (Toronto, 1990), 105-123.

24. On the theoretical problem of liberty in geography, see J.-P. Hubert, op.cit., passim.

25. See G. Demarais, op.cit., 92; R. Girard, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris, 1978), 115.

26. See G. Demarais, La Morphogenèse de Paris (Ph.D. thesis, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1993), ch. 3 and 4, offering an empirical illus tration of this process.