phainomena

PHAINOMENA XXV/98-99
THE HORIZONS OF EMBODIMENT
238
of a transition from one regime of visibility to another, from the obscure human
vision St. Paul characterizes as “enigmatic” to divine sight, theoria. Could we,
perchance, say that the verticality of religious experience, mediated by the
mountains, is, in the first instance, that of time as opposed to space? In other
words, is not spatial elevation but a figuration (or a prefiguration) of temporal
difference, the unevenness of time beyond any horizon of expectation?
The mundane horizons of human embodiment, too, cannot be purely spatial
because the body is a constantly metamorphosing process, never embodied
once and for all. These temporal horizons, still operative for Sartre’s climber,
follow the logic of Husserlian time-consciousness, where the past is the already
bygone present and the future is a present still underway. Temporal verticality,
on the other hand, is a stand-alone instant exempt from the mutations of the
present and irrupting on its horizon with an unexpected and inexplicable force.
Such instants are analogous to mountain peaks peppering the continuum of
time and disrupting its horizontality, be it in the shape of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
monumental history, or in Emmanuel Levinas’s absolutely immemorial past,
or Jacques Derrida’s messianic future “to come.” Faced with a temporal peak
(or a chasm), we are subject to the same vertigo as when we glance at a spatial
summit (or an abyss). The present present no longer seamlessly extends back
to past present and forward to future present; in fact, its timeless horizon melts
away when it is converted into a site for the vertical irruption of the event.
With no safety nets on the temporal horizon, the subject is thrown back onto
itself, just as we saw it happen in the mountains. In the throw, the sense of
“before” and “after” is unsettled as thoroughly as the spatial difference between
“up” and “down”. Incipit vertigo!
On the basis of concrete experiences of verticality, with their corresponding
vertigos, it is possible to venture a generalization of what both exceeds and
precedes the horizontality of the phenomenological horizon. The places where
the questioning of the horizontal takes place matter. Although the mountains
are hardly the symbols of the lifeworld, they are the preferred milieus for
the intersections of different verticalities—the mediating surfaces between
the human and the divine, the physical and the spiritual, immanence and
transcendence. If, finding ourselves there, we feel our heads spin, that is a sure
sign that the passage from one dimension to the other is well on its way. Be this