O espaço geográfico como categoria filosófica: um estudo do problema do espaço em Milton Santos à luz da filosofia do trabalho de Simone Weil

Abstract

Like all the main categories of philosophical thought, space is an irresolute question. In recent centuries, Newton (empty and absolute space) and Einstein (spacetime relative to the curvature of a field) have stood out in questioning a problem that is still open, namely the ontology of space. Apart from the epistemological aspect of the problem, in terms of the nature and reality of its exteriority and/or total character, it is less clear how it is approached in conjunction with human action, in the process of overlapping between a social nature and a physical nature. In view of this, geographical space (systems of objects and actions), which for Milton Santos is a medium constructed in the work by technique, directs an interpretation of space-time that looks to philosophy for an understanding of nature that becomes social and, through this, contains an immaterial causality within itself. In order to understand its assumption as a philosophical category, we emphasize that socio-spatial formation, dialectically understood, invests itself as a material and ordered structure for thought and, at the same time, is subject to the possibility of the subject's open transformation with the world. For Simone Weil, work has a privileged place in this contradictory duality between subject and matter, as it is the key aspect for understanding the problem of knowledge through the sense of transformation of reality and the realization of human life in society. Thus, at the intersection of the passive character of being affected by exteriority and the active character of trying to dominate it, understanding finds in the extensive action of the body a living participation imprinted in space. The product of work imprints a relationship with necessity which, for Weil, is what indicates the true order of reality; therefore, it is in the space produced that the possibility of access to things in themselves is made. It is said that when the subject is alienated from the meaning of their work and their construction of society as a spatio-temporal reality, the possibility of true knowledge and the assumption of value is lost or hypostasized based on an order of power given by specific social forces. It is understood that this research makes it possible, based on a return to the concept of geographical space as a philosophical category (initiated by Milton Santos at the V ENG in 1982 in Porto Alegre), to breathe life into problems not only of an ontological and epistemic nature, such as the contradictions between mind and matter, subject and object, reason and experience, but also ethical and political ones, such as those relating to the problems of freedom and determinism, whether at a social level (in the guise of alienation and domination) or at the level of the inherently human condition in the face of the world.