On the Mountains, or The Aristocracies of Space

Abstract

Mountain peaks, like all uninhabitable and barely accessible environments, stand in the way of a clear-cut distinction between “place” and “space.” Building on the environmental thought of Aldo Leopold, as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and twentiethcentury phenomenology, I draw attention to this obscure in-between region and argue that the conceptual distinction must be subject to careful adumbration, depending on the concrete place where it is employed. Subsequently, mountains are theorized as the sites of friction between earth and world, where sovereign authority and objectivizing thinking are equally suspended. Between Space and Place Contemporary phenomenology prides itself on the nesse with which it describes the structures of lived experience, down to their minutiae. Rather than suppose the transcendental primacy of abstract spatiality and an equally vacuous notion of the temporal continuum, it focuses on a rich tapestry of places and an uneven sense of time that changes along with shifts in our a# ective relation to the world. In contrast to the axioms of modern scienti c rationality, re! ected most faithfully in the philosophy of