The Horizon of Construal: Epilogue — The World Beyond the Map

We began with a map.

A world already divided into things, events, relations and places.

We asked what happens when the map reaches its edge.

And gradually, the question changed.

We discovered that the world we thought we had simply inherited was already a world of construal.

Things became distinguishable.

Differences became consequential.

Backgrounds made foregrounds possible.

Relations gave stability to things.

Conditions that had disappeared from view became visible when the construal began to fail.

And eventually we reached the horizon.

Not the edge of reality.

The edge of a way of making reality intelligible.

The horizon turned out not to be a wall.

It was productive.

A failed distinction could open another.

A vanished background could reveal a hidden condition.

A singularity could expose the limits of a theory.

A new relation could make a new possibility possible.

And possibility itself turned out not to be a warehouse containing everything that could ever happen.

Possibilities can emerge.

The world can become otherwise because the relations within it can become otherwise.

Then, at the end, something even stranger happened.

We began to construe construal itself.

The map appeared within the landscape.

And this is perhaps where we should leave the question.

Not because there is nothing more to say.

But because there is no final map waiting for us.

Every construal makes some things visible and leaves others in the background. Every successful way of making the world intelligible carries conditions that may eventually become its horizon. Every horizon can become the opening through which another distinction, another relation, another possibility becomes available.

The point is not to escape construal.

There is nowhere outside it from which the world could finally be seen without a map.

Nor is the point to conclude that the world is merely something we construct.

The world pushes back.

It constrains what can endure, what can matter, what can be related, what can become possible.

We are neither outside the world, describing it from nowhere, nor inside a world of our own making.

We participate in a world that is continually becoming available to us in different ways.

Perhaps, then, the world beyond the map is not another world.

It is the world that remains when we remember that the map was never the territory.

There will always be another horizon.

Another distinction waiting to become consequential.

Another background waiting to become visible.

Another possibility that could not yet have been imagined as a possibility.

And so the question with which we began can be turned around.

Not:

Where does the map end?

But:

What becomes possible when we learn to see the world beyond the map?

Perhaps that is not the end of the journey.

Perhaps it is what makes the journey possible.