The Horizon of Construal: 13. When the Background Disappears

We have seen that a construal depends upon a background.

Things appear against something.

Events occur within continuity.

Objects persist within relations.

Measurements presuppose a structure in which measurement can make sense.

Usually, we do not notice any of this.

The background is successful precisely because it remains in the background.

But what happens when it disappears?

Not when it becomes invisible.

When the relations that allowed it to function as a background can no longer be sustained.

Then something more fundamental than a description may begin to fail.

Consider an object.

To construe something as an object, we need some distinction between the object and what surrounds it. We need enough stability for it to remain identifiable across change. We need relations that allow it to occupy a position, interact with other things, and persist.

But if those relations cease to hold, the problem is not simply that we can no longer describe the object accurately.

The object itself may cease to be an available construal.

Something remains.

But what remains may no longer be available as that kind of thing.

The same can happen with an event.

An event depends upon some distinction between what happens and the continuity within which it happens. If that distinction collapses, asking when the event occurred may no longer be merely difficult.

The question may no longer have the same meaning.

This is why horizons can be deeper than the failure of particular descriptions.

Sometimes it is not a matter of finding better words for the same structure.

The structure that made those words intelligible has itself become unavailable.

And here the background reveals its peculiar status.

It was never merely empty space behind the things we described.

It was part of the condition under which there could be things to describe.

We normally discover this only retrospectively.

The background becomes visible when it stops functioning as background.

A horizon, then, can mark not simply the failure of a foreground distinction, but the disappearance of the field that sustained it.

This is perhaps what makes certain limits in physics so conceptually strange.

We ask what happens to an object when space and time cease to behave as the stable background within which objects are normally construed.

But perhaps the deeper question is different:

What becomes of the very idea of an object when the conditions for objecthood are no longer available?

At that point, we have not necessarily reached the edge of reality.

We may have reached the edge of a world.

Not the end of what exists, but the point at which the background that made one particular world intelligible can no longer hold it together.

And when the background disappears, the horizon does something remarkable.

It reveals what we had mistaken for the world itself.