Dialectics of Inside and Outside: Overcoming Spatial Dualism with Gaston Bachelard and Louis-Marie Chauvet
Abstract
In the process of the recognition of the other we also think within the adverbs of space inside and outside. These adverbs are part of a dualistic thinking and as such bring ontological determination, where inside is connected with fullness of being and outside with the lack of being.
Behind these metaphorical expressions of space lies alienation and division and as a consequence it also brings asymmetry into anthropology and human relationships, where the insider (of the church) stands in opposition to the outsider, who is characterized as a stranger or even worse as an enemy. With the help of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), especially with his philosophical investigation of inhabited space The Poetics of Space, and the contemporary French sacramental theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet (*1942), the chapter explores the possibilities of how to surmount the spatial dualism which goes hand-in-hand with the instrumental notion of language.