When a description stops working, it is tempting to imagine that we have reached a boundary.
On one side, there is what we understand.
On the other, there is what we do not.
The temptation is to turn the boundary into a thing.
A wall.
But a horizon is not a wall.
When we stand at the edge of a landscape, the horizon does not mark the place where the landscape ends. It marks the point beyond which this particular view can no longer distinguish what is there.
The distinction is subtle but important.
A horizon belongs to a perspective.
So too with construal.
When a way of making the world intelligible reaches its limit, the limit does not necessarily belong to the world itself. It may belong to the relations, distinctions and conditions through which we have been making the world intelligible.
This is why horizons can move.
A new distinction may make visible what was previously indistinguishable. A new relation may connect what had appeared separate. A new conceptual framework may allow questions to be asked that could not previously even be formulated.
What was beyond the horizon has not necessarily appeared from nowhere.
The horizon has changed.
This does not mean that every horizon is arbitrary.
The world still pushes back.
A new construal must find relations that can sustain it. It must make distinctions that matter. It must answer to something beyond itself.
But the failure of one construal does not tell us that there is nothing to be construed.
It tells us that this way of construing has reached its limit.
This changes how we should think about the unknown.
The unknown is not simply a region containing facts we have not yet collected. Sometimes it is what becomes available only when a different way of making distinctions becomes possible.
The horizon therefore has a peculiar double character.
It is a limit.
And it is an opening.
It tells us where our present way of seeing stops—and, precisely by doing so, makes us wonder what kind of seeing might carry us further.
Perhaps the most important thing about a horizon is therefore not what lies beyond it.
It is that there can be another way of seeing at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment