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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
MICHAEL MARDER as it may, the spatial and temporal disruptions of horizontality in the mountains are the harbingers of a fleeting truth, which, phenomenologically speaking, reduces the subject to its body outside the bounds of a familiar world. As such, they effect a practical deconstruction of the everyday experience’s horizons and of the very idea of the horizon constitutive of our experience. Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston (1994): The Poetics of Space, transl. by Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon. Claudel, Paul (2000): La Connaissance de l’Est, Paris: Gallimard. Husserl, Edmund (1950a): Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, S. Strasser (ed.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1950b): Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, W. Biemel (ed.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Marder, Michael (2012): “On the Mountains, or the Aristocracies of Space” Environment, Space, Place 4 (2), 63–74. Marder, Michael (2015): “The Place of Plants: Spatiality, Movement, Growth” Performance Philosophy 1, 185–194. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1996): The Confessions, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1997): Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, transl. by Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 6. Hanover, London: Dartmouth College Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2000): The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letter to Franquières. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 6. Hanover, London: Dartmouth College Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul (2001): Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, transl. by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Citadel Press. Steinbock, Anthony (2007): Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 239
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