The Horizon of Construal: 19. The Construal That Knows Itself

A map is useful because we can forget that it is a map.

We look at its roads, boundaries and landmarks and allow them to stand for the world.

But eventually, perhaps, we notice the map itself.

Something similar can happen with construal.

At first, we simply construe.

We distinguish things.

We recognise events.

We follow relations.

We make sense of what happens.

The construal disappears into the world it makes intelligible.

Then, at some horizon, the construal itself becomes visible.

We begin to notice that the distinctions through which the world appears were not simply sitting there waiting to be copied.

Nor were they arbitrary inventions.

They emerged from our participation in a world that constrained and enabled what could matter.

This is a peculiar moment.

The activity by which a world becomes intelligible has itself become something we can construe.

The map has entered the map.

And once that happens, something changes.

We can ask why this distinction rather than another.

We can examine what a category makes visible and what it leaves in the background.

We can ask what relations sustain a concept, where it reaches its horizon, and what becomes possible when it changes.

Construal becomes reflexive.

But this does not place us outside the world we are construing.

There is no final viewpoint from which we can survey reality without a construal.

To recognise construal is simply to recognise that we are already participating in the activity of making a world intelligible.

The reflexive construal therefore does not free us from horizons.

It gives us a way of noticing them.

And perhaps that is its real significance.

A horizon once encountered as an obstacle can become an object of inquiry.

A failed distinction can become a clue.

A hidden background can become visible.

A possibility that once seemed impossible can become thinkable—not because we have escaped the world, but because we have learned something about the conditions under which a world becomes intelligible.

The map does not disappear.

It becomes part of the landscape.

And perhaps this is where the journey of construal leads us.

Not to a world finally stripped of all interpretation.

Not to an ultimate description beyond every horizon.

But to a world in which the activity of making the world intelligible can itself become intelligible.

At that point, the horizon has changed once again.

We are no longer asking only:

What is the world?

Or even:

How does a world become intelligible?

We can ask the more open question:

What might become possible when we can construe the ways in which we construe?