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

But we are confronted by a significant difficulty with regard to Beatrice's word (as well the paradox of the circumspection of de-severence in Heidegger when considered with regard to what is beyond-being). Consider briefly the ontological-logic of the Divine Comedy; in Beatrice's words, every "where" has its center in the mind of God, but this "where" lies also beyond the "boundary line"—the horizon of being. This is the existential anxiety of spatiality alluded to in the beginning with Tillich's mystery. That my "where" lies beyond the very horizon of being to which I am directed—in space, chasing space. Even on my best days this space-walking pails in comparison to Dante's. When I look down, there is no earth; and when I look up, no heaven. I look to the stars and see the horizon of being, but when I look into myself, I see the same horizon. As far as my microscopic and telescopic gaze may penetrate, if I am honest with myself, I see horizons everywhere I look: the quantum field, the psyche of a lover, the edge of the universe. The horizon is within me because I too am beyond the horizon. This undergirds both the anxiety and hope in Derrida's observation: "It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other."⁴¹ What Derrida sees as evident in the economy of identity definition, seems given by the very structure of being itself.⁴² And, following Derrida, this is both the tyranny and gift of the horizon: one can never tell whether it is an eternal dawn, or the eternal dusk. Drawing on Tillich and Marion, we can try to distinguish between the break of dawn, and dusk twilight.

The horizon is not an idol which is in essence the beyond brought-to-hand, robbed of its beyond-being by giving it "place." The demonic in Tillich and the idol in Marion bear this similarity when considered from the standpoint of the horizon of being—each is an attempt to reassert what is beyond-being, with being back upon being.⁴³ It would be tempting to say that, simply, it is no longer "Being-toward." But in the Heideggerian sense this misses the mark, since for Heidegger Being-toward is delimited by Being-toward-the-end which in this case is the misconception necessary to upend: the end as horizon is not a closed end or a circumscription.⁴⁴

In the second half of Being and Time, Heidegger proceeds by doing exactly what I would prefer to avoid: take the horizon as the-end and bring-it-to-hand, to set ones gaze upon it as idol rather than to rest the gaze on the horizon for what it insinuates beyond itself.⁴⁵ The demonic and the idol both attempt to proximate the horizon and reassert themselves as horizon which collapses its very horizon-ness. In this spatial sense, the demonic does have a serpentine form: the Ouroboros. It is the collapse of being upon itself that in perceiving a horizon as end becomes its own end. It is Lucifer frozen in stasis batting on endlessly for freedom destining his infernal stasis—incurvatus in se.

If one were to free it from its Heideggerian baggage, the best way to describe the individual in an open economy of being is "Being-toward-." The second hyphen is not a typo but necessary a representation of the horizon which readies-to-hand the beyond which cannot be brought-to-hand. The divine in Tillich and the icon in Marion share this similarity. The divine remains open to the process of being overcoming non-being. Here Marion is worth quoting at length,

The icon summons the gaze to surpass itself here in view of the invisible. The gaze can never rest or settle if it looks at an icon; it always must rebound upon the visible, in order to go back in it up the infinite stream of the invisible.⁴⁶

The horizon of being lies always everywhere as an icon of the beyond in this sense. It is what comes on to us on which our gaze can never rest or settle. For Gadamer, this is because the nature of the horizon is in its drawing one to advance toward it.⁴⁷ If our gaze does 'rest' or settle, it is not on the horizon that it lies, because so long as our gaze is fixed on the horizon we are Be-ing-toward- it. Whatever our gaze can rest upon is an idol, which is not a horizon. The horizon of being performs precisely the function of the icon—it "makes visible only by giving rise to an infinite gaze." By the gaze resting upon the horizon as visible icon it gives rise to an infinite gaze by which we orient ourselves always toward what is beyond it.

This is the manner in which Tillich can assert that "infinity is a directing concept, not a constituting concept. It directs the mind to experience its own unlimited potentialities, but it does not establish the existence of an infinite being."⁴⁸ The infinite and the finite are not ontological categories of being, but descriptions which reveal the situatedness of the individual within horizons. This unearths the tension of existence albeit with a slight pivot. "If we say that nonbeing belongs to being-itself," Tillich writes, "we say that finitude and anxiety belong to being-itself."⁴⁹ What Tillich frames ontologically, might be better framed strictly phenomenologically: namely, that to be situated within horizons is to see the horizons as the reason for one's finitude and the reasons for one's infinitude. Being does not insinuate infinitude in the same way which it insinuates finitude, but it does insinuate both because of the constant presence of the horizon to direct being (or a being) beyond its very being.

Nothing, particularly in spatial terms, could more accurately describe this function than a horizon. Which in this sense is more helpful because of the spatial concern present. The notion of "the gaze" is first and foremost a phenomenon of situatedness and spatiality. Space comes from the horizon. The horizon is unique then in the sense which it is the everyday phenomenon, a primal phenomenon which discloses the beyond as visible because its very function is to transport the gaze beyond itself as a phenomenon. The horizon-in-itself is a unique phenomena which never discloses itself-as-itself because it can do no such thing. It only discloses itself insofar as it conceals what is beyond itself and therefore spatializes us in relation to what is beyond. In addition, it continually discloses more of what is beyond insofar as one is oriented toward it. In doing so, it renders the eyes so "clear and keen" that one can endure gazing into the sun itself. Dante's stars then, are also our stars—they are horizons, icons of the invisible divine.

The horizons which surround us in everydayness are the same horizon on which Beatrice and Dante stand. This metaphysics spatializes a hermeneutics of love.⁵⁰ To love is to move toward the horizon of the other, and vice versa, both horizons of which are the same horizon of being. As Marion writes, "the icon opens in a face, where man's sight envisages nothing, but goes back infinitely from the visible to the invisible by the grace of the visible itself."⁵¹ This grace is the gift of gift given as the horizon of being; the horizon which lays between God and the world, is the same horizon which lies between the self and the other.