Re-spatializing: Space-walking the Stars, a Multitude of Horizons

To stand on the ground beneath our feet; to sit in silence, tears and prayers is not, and have never been, to be still. Instead, we careen on our wet rock through the black fabric of space and time. As solid as it may seem, the ground is not static. It is dynamic to the highest degree. This cosmic orb is not only our spaceship through the vastness of being, but the orb itself twists like a whirling dervish, and the plates shift under the pads of our feet while the ground sifts through the cracks between our skin. If there is a substantive metaphysics available for the contemporary person it probably will not be erected on concrete, but either plastic or quicksand.

Heralding the end of the metaphysics of presence is to embrace the basic instability of existence. But recognizing that being is not a 'stable' definitive structure does not require us to lose our footing as it so often does. Instead, it invites a metaphysics which accounts for the motion of being, shifting from static architectonics to tropes of movements and directionality. Embracing a metaphysics of movement upsets the dualism of stable-unstable conceptualizations of being. Rather, to find ones footing while in motion, while space-walking, is to stand on the shifting ground and 'take heed lest we fall.' But how exactly does one begin to find their footing while moving on moving ground? Or floating through bottomless space?

This space exploration departs from here, where we can set a heading with regard to being and its horizons. Opening with our primary interlocutor—Paul Tillich—will help to more precisely identify the conceptual territory and its primary stakes.

The creative process of the divine life precedes the differentiation between essences and existents. In the creative vision of God the individual is present as a whole in his essential being and inner telos and, at the same time, in the infinity of the special moments of his life-process. Of course, this is said symbolically, since we are unable to have a perception or even an imagination of that which belongs to the divine life. The mystery of being beyond essence and existence is hidden in the mystery of the creativity of the divine life.¹

Tillich departs from Aquinas by conceiving of God as that which is "beyond" essence and existence (rather than the unity of essence and existence).² The result is twofold: on one hand, Tillich sweeps the rug out from under the traditional praxis of "metaphysics of presence." If "the mystery of being beyond essence and existence" is hidden in the divine life, than ontology itself is a practice which is fundamentally groundless. On the other hand, Tillich gestures toward a novel way for conceptualizing the divine life ontologically (and the cosmos as a result). Typified in the discrepancy between Barth and Tillich, theology as a whole is faced with the problem of delimiting the human religious experience in a way which resists conflating the divine and human.

This mystery, that the divine life is somehow both wholly other and radically immanent, is a function of the phenomenality of the human qua being. It is the groundlessness of Tillich's ground of being, rooted in the Tillichian paradox that somehow 'being-itself' is beyond being all together. The "mystery of being beyond essence and existence" is concealed because it is beyond the horizon of being which is a result of our existence as being. To draw on Gadamer, being is the "situation" in which we have come to ourselves. Being is "a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision" like Adam and Eve in Milton's paradise.³ Initially, like Eve, we draw to "the murmuring sound" she hears from "not distant far" (4.453).⁴ The murmuring of the water breaks into the situation from beyond the horizon, and draws her toward it, expanding the horizon itself.⁵ For Gadamer, this standpoint is delimited by temporality and "the finite present." Both Gadamer and Tillich react against over-determining existentialist interpretations of temporality typified by classical existentialism (e.g. in Heidegger) albeit in slightly different ways.⁶ But as Gadamer says elsewhere—and Tillich would undoubtedly agree—"'reality' always stands in a horizon of [...] still undecided future possibilities."⁷ The trajectory of this exploration, however is not through time, but space. Before introducing the major movements of this analysis, its helpful to take a detour to demarcate the situation which guides our ultimate concern.⁸