Hägerstrand has unearthed that internal wisdom [of geography] by making a discovery, the human individual, not a psychological object, not an isolated being, but a human individual as corporeal neighbor; not a being without and outside history, but an individual on its life-path. In fact he discovered history and again created a link between history and geography by expanding the scope of the old concept of milieu.
In this way, he gathered up the threads of Vidal’s thought. Hägerstrand’s concept of ‘togetherness’ incorporates man and society in a complex, integral, corporeal world, which constitutes a ‘milieu’ for every human individual.
The geographer is by vocation oriented to the world. This vocation arises from an existential commitment of the human individual, for whom the world is horizon, milieu and situation. Individual-milieu-situation are interdependent concepts indicating a “geographicity” of human existence, which is the other side of the coin of historicity. Differentiation of milieus and historical development go hand in hand.
Like Ritter, Ratzel, and Vidal, Hägerstrand … places geography where it belongs: together with, and only with history in a field of integrative and concrete thought and construction. The original meaning of “concrete” is “grown together” and thus might be interpreted as a time-space concept.
Geography together with history studies the final stage of human aspirations, the stage of realization and ‘exteriorization’, the struggle to become event and part of a world that is the mixed product of reproduction and creation. The mystery of creation is a challenge to which, in my opinion, especially history and geography have to respond.
Christian van Paasen, “The Philosophy of Geography: From Vidal to Hägerstrand,” in Space and Time in Geography: Essays Dedicated to Torsten Hägerstrand (Lund Studies in Geography Ser. B. No. 48) (Lund: Royal University of Lund, 1981): pp. 17–29.
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