Battle Lines

Abstract

The horizon is an interior. The horizon is ‘not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, that from which something begins its presencing’. The horizon defines an enclosure. In its familiar sense, it marks a limit to the space of what can be seen, which is to say, it organizes this visual space into an interior. It makes the outside, the landscape, into an inside. How could that happen? Only if the ‘walls’ that enclose the space cease to be thought of (exclusively) as solid pieces of material, as stone walls, as brick walls. The horizon organizes the outside into a vertical plane, that of vision. Shelter is provided by the horizon’s ability to turn the threatening world of the ‘outside’ into a reassuring picture. But Heidegger repeatedly opposed the transformation of the world into a picture, a ‘world-picture’. In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, he makes even more explicit the idea that the horizon is an enclosure, but also quickly dismisses the primacy of vision implied in the familiar sense of horizon: ‘We understand ‘horizon’ to be the circumference of the field of vision. But horizon, from δρíςειν, is not at all primarily related to looking and intuiting, but by itself means simply that which delimits, encloses, the enclosure.’¹ Before vision, the horizon is a boundary, an enclosure, an architecture.

What the word for space, Raum, Rum, designates is said by its ancient meaning. Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds.

(Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, 1952)