Ínsula

Ínsula.\n\nIn the seventeenth century the rugged mountains of the Alps caused complete horror to people. The same views that today attract millions of tourists were experienced at that moment as horrifying. Even valiant men did not venture into "the inhospitable and impenetrable wildness of forests and mountains" without necessity. In the accounts of travelers to Italy who had crossed the Alps, we read how horrified they were at the sight of precipices and voids.\n\nOne hundred years later the situation began to change as a result of the Enlightenment.\n\nJean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, describes in his autobiography that he loved to walk to his favorite place in the Savoyard Alps, a path at the edge of a ravine, in which, secured by a railing, he could look down into the ravine, in order to "gagner des vertiges tout à mon aise," in order to obtain the sensation of vertigo at his ease, and he adds, "I love this dizziness, provided I am in conditions of safety."\n\nLet us pause for a moment at this image of Rousseau leaning on a railing and looking down into the ravine. What does this image tell us? What change has occurred here so that the same ravine that might have struck a seventeenth-century man with horror can now become thrilling?\n\nI said the same ravine. Certainly, the Alps out there did not change. What changed was the ontological framework within which the same view is seen and from which it receives its nature, its quality, and ontological status. In the first case, in the older century, the ravine was, no doubt, as bounded as in Rousseau's time. But obviously, it was not confined to being merely that particular thing. Rather, it opened and allowed you to see the abyss of being as such, the primordial void, the enormous chasm before all creation, the cosmological Chaos. An individual ravine was like a window through which the all-encompassing wildness was looking at one and at one's life, threatening to break into the insular human world of day, hope, and security. One looked at this particular thing, at the ravine that was there, but what one saw in it was completely around one, also behind one's back and even in one's own heart. And in this way one was in it, one's security was only the security borrowed from a small boat upon the ocean of being. It would have been impossible for a railing to have been placed around the ravine during that era, because despite its limited quantitative size, it was immense, infinite, and bottomless."\n\nFragment from Save the Bomb / Wolfgang Giegerich