We are accustomed to thinking of the world as something already there.
There are things in it, events that happen to them, relations between them. There are places and times, causes and effects, objects that persist and processes that change. We encounter this world, and then we describe it. Some descriptions are accurate, others mistaken. Some concepts are useful, others misleading.
It is an appealing picture.
It is also a remarkably difficult one to maintain.
Consider a map.
A map is useful because it distinguishes things that matter for the journey: roads, rivers, towns, boundaries, landmarks. It leaves other things out. No one expects a map to contain the whole territory.
But suppose we reach the edge of the map.
The obvious thought is that the territory continues. We simply need a larger map.
Sometimes that is exactly right.
But not always.
There are occasions when reaching the edge of a map tells us something about the map itself. Perhaps the scale has ceased to be appropriate. Perhaps the distinctions it provides are no longer useful. Perhaps the very coordinates by which we have been locating things no longer make sense.
The difficulty is that we tend naturally to interpret such an edge as though it belonged to the territory.
We ask:
What is out there?
But perhaps the more revealing question is:
What has happened to the way we were representing the territory?
This distinction matters.
A description can fail without the thing described failing. A coordinate system can cease to function without space disappearing. A biological category can become unstable without organisms ceasing to exist. A physical theory can encounter a singularity without nature containing a peculiar object called a singularity.
The edge of a description is not necessarily the edge of the world.
This is the problem we want to explore.
We will call the activity by which something becomes intelligible in a particular way construal.
The word is deliberately modest. It does not mean that we invent the world. Nor does it mean that we passively copy a world that has already been divided into the forms our descriptions require.
To construe something is to make it available as something.
An event becomes distinguishable from what surrounds it. A thing becomes recognisable as something that persists. A boundary becomes significant. A relation becomes consequential. A background becomes available against which something can stand out.
We ordinarily notice the result and forget the conditions that made it possible.
The map hides its cartography.
And this is where the edge becomes interesting.
For while a successful construal allows us to move through a world of familiar distinctions, its failure may reveal something that success conceals: the conditions under which the world had become intelligible in the first place.
This gives us a different way of thinking about horizons.
A horizon is not necessarily a wall at the end of reality. It may be the point at which a particular way of making reality intelligible can no longer carry us further.
At such a point, the temptation is to ask what lies beyond.
But perhaps there is another question we should ask first:
What does the horizon reveal about the way we have been construing the world?
That question will take us into some strange territory.
We will encounter objects that are not quite objects, boundaries that do not belong neatly to either side, mathematical infinities that need not correspond to infinite things, material worlds whose materiality is itself something to be understood, and possibilities that seem to emerge rather than wait in advance for us to choose among them.
We will also return to an old question:
Where did the universe begin?
But perhaps by then we will see that the most interesting part of the question was never simply where the beginning was.
It was the map we brought with us when we went looking for it.
And perhaps, when we reach its edge, we should resist the urge to draw a larger map.
Perhaps we should first look carefully at the one we have.
For the edge may be telling us something.
Not about what lies beyond the world.
But about how a world became intelligible to us at all.
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