The Horizon of Construal: 7. The Conditions We Mistake for the World

We have seen that things depend upon relations.

We have seen that distinctions require a background.

We have seen that a construal works because certain conditions hold.

But there is a curious consequence.

Once a construal becomes familiar, we tend to forget its conditions.

The space in which things can be located becomes simply space.

The continuity against which events can be distinguished becomes time.

The relations through which events can be connected become causes.

The stability through which objects can persist becomes a property of the objects themselves.

What made the world intelligible begins to look like the world itself.

This is an easy mistake to make.

A successful construal disappears into what it allows us to see.

We no longer notice the distinctions that make an object an object, or the relations that allow it to persist. We simply encounter the object.

The conditions have become invisible because they work so well.

This does not mean that space, time, causation or objects are unreal.

It means that we should be careful about assuming that the forms in which we successfully construe the world must also be the forms in which the world exists independently of that construal.

The distinction is subtle but important.

A condition of intelligibility is not necessarily an object of which the world is made.

And once we forget that, we can begin asking questions that quietly presuppose the answer.

What is an object in itself?

Where is something located before there is a space in which to locate it?

What happened before time?

What caused the existence of causation itself?

We have encountered versions of these questions before.

Perhaps the problem is not that they are difficult questions.

Perhaps they are questions that have carried the conditions of one construal beyond the point at which those conditions can be assumed.

The map has become so familiar that we have mistaken its coordinates for the territory.

And this gives us a new reason to be interested in the horizon.

For perhaps the quickest way to discover the conditions of a construal is to follow it to the point where those conditions stop working.