Thomas J. Nenon
The notion of horizonality plays an important role in hermeneutical philosophy above all owing to the centrality afforded the concept of horizon in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s groundbreaking Truth and Method (Gadamer 1989). One of the main insights of that work is that every interpretation is possible only against the backdrop of a perspective that the interpreter brings to the reading or, one could say, the horizon of the prejudgments that is typically not identical with that of the original text.
The notion of the horizon is explicitly introduced as a metaphor for the way that intellectual understanding mirrors everyday perceptions of visible objects in that they always and inevitably take place from a perspective that opens up a space within which some things can easily be seen but which also sets the limits beyond which things cannot easily be seen without additional efforts or movement (Gadamer, 386). Moreover, Gadamer notes, horizons are malleable—just as physical horizons can be expanded by seeking a higher vantage point or new horizons can be explored as one undertakes a journey beyond the heretofore fixed point of reference, so too is it possible to expand one’s own horizons through the encounter with texts that originate from and therefore provide access to a different horizon. Just as one can—at least imaginatively—take up the perspective of another or begin to understand things from a different perspective as one learns from others who see things from a different vantage point for visual perceptions, one can also come to imagine how one could understand things differently from a different horizon of understanding. The kinds of horizons most relevant for hermeneutics are described by Gadamer above all as historical, although one could also refer to them equally well as cultural horizons in a sense that will be developed in the following.
Gadamer himself recognizes that the insights into the role of horizons in any understanding developed in the nineteenth century with the rise of historical consciousness in general and then came to be themes of explicit reflection in his own immediate philosophical predecessors, Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger. The first of the three, Dilthey, was much more fully aware than Husserl, for example, how indebted his own work was to Hegel’s insights into history, not just as the key to understanding the development of various human societies, but also to understanding their different art works, religions, and philosophical approaches and systems. For Hegel and subsequently for Dilthey, all of these expressions of the human spirit are comprehensible only as expressions of the stage of historical development of spirit itself out of which they arise.1 Dilthey’s guiding conception is that of life—life as a continually evolving unity with a fundamentally temporal character. History is a basic category not just of social life but of life in general. The lives of individual humans are not simply a series of discrete events, but rather processes that take place against the backdrop of past experiences that set up tendencies and expectations for future experiences. This historical interconnectedness is constitutive for the “meaning” of individual experiences, the lives of individuals, and the products that are the expressions of those lives. As Gadamer formulates this important insight:
What supports the construction of the historical world … is … the internal historicity that is proper to experience itself. It is a process in the history of a life and has as its model not the recognition of facts, but rather the unique blending of memory and expectation to a whole that we can experience and that one acquires by undergoing experiences.”
(Gadamer, 208)
Understanding a product of human creativity involves understanding it as an expression of a life, and that means seeing as part of an interconnected whole with its own pattern or “style.” Moreover, each of these individual lives is only comprehensible against the backdrop of the historical and cultural context that provides the backdrop for all of the individual human beings who together constitute the historical and cultural communities of which they are the members.
The Husserlian notion of a horizon arose prior to his encounter with Dilthey but later came to incorporate key insights from Dilthey in the development of the closely related notion of a “surrounding world (Umwelt)” in his Ideas II (Husserl 1989) that would subsequently evolve into the notion of a “life-world (Lebenswelt)” in his later works and research manuscripts (Husserl 1970 and 2009). At first, the notion of a horizon emerges in Husserl’s analyses of perception. These analyses build on his basic notion from the Logical Investigations (Husserl 1973) of objects as essentially and always “intentional objects” with the notion of “intentions” as shorthand for “meaning-intentions” that are subject to subsequent confirmation or disconfirmation (i.e., “meaning-fulfillments”) through the further course of experience. As Husserl begins to develop this basic position of objects always as somehow intended objects using the example of simple perception of physical objects, the temporal dimension of all experience begins to emerge as an explicit theme since each new experience gives rise to the specific intention it does based on the backdrop of past experience, and this in turn gives rise to a horizon of more or less determinate future experiences that would count as the fulfillment of those intentions. The notion of horizon also comes to take on a specifically spatial dimension in these analyses first of all in the fact that it becomes apparent that physical objects are all perceived as located somewhere within a spatial horizon of other physical objects, within which the horizon can also move, but also in the sense that it is always perceived from the perspective of a spatially located perceiver whose body represents the “zero-point of orientation” for perception but is also a mobile body whose horizons change as it moves in its environment. In Husserl’s analyses of intersubjectivity, it becomes clear that subjects are not only aware of their own “here” that is a “there” for other subjects, but that other subjects are recognized as having their own particular “heres” that are in each case a “there” for the other subjects. Horizonality then involves both temporal and spatial locations not just for the intended objects but also for the subjects of those intentions, and these horizons are co-constitutive for those intended objects. As he moves to a transcendental phenomenology, Husserl also introduces the notion of “regions,” for example, the regions of ideal objects such as mathematical objects or logical principles versus real objects and then later of different regions of objects, for example, “use-objects” like books or automobiles to which different kinds of predicates do or do not apply. These regions also serve as kinds of horizons within which it becomes possible for objects of those kinds to appear at all. Other regions would be the region of “persons” as an entirely different kind of reality or of “animals” that have intentional states but not personhood.
For the notion of a “horizon,” it is important to note that the shift from simple perceptual objects as Husserl’s prime examples to things like use-objects and persons coincides with his encounter with Dilthey and his works. For the general philosophical public, this encounter went almost completely unnoticed during Husserl’s lifetime because the major works documenting those shifts remained unpublished until the establishment of the Husserliana series after the Second World War. But it has become very apparent since some of those works, such as Ideas II, have appeared, including very recently his extensive research manuscripts on the life-world. In those works, oriented on what Husserl calls the “geistige” world as an explicit reference to Dilthey’s insights, he makes clear that in everyday life objects show up as the kinds of objects they are not just because of their narrowly described perceptual features or properties but because of their suitability or unsuitability for our purposes and in light of the values or disvalues they have for us. This is precisely part of what it means to say that they are part of a “surrounding world (Umwelt)” now not only in the sense of temporal and spatial horizons, but of meaning horizons in terms of the practical and evaluative significance they have for the persons who encounter and interact with them. Horizons now become very explicitly historical and cultural horizons as Husserl’s notion of the “life-world”2 begins to emerge as the successor concept to the “surrounding world.” Moreover, Husserl notes not only that these worlds have different histories as the sedimentations of past individual or communal experiences, but that they take the form of “home-worlds” and “alien worlds” for different communities at different times. Finally, in his final work on the Crisis,3 Husserl analyzes how even the world of modern natural science itself is just one particular horizon of meaning that emerged at a specific time (at the beginning of the modern age) in a particular place (Europe) with its own sets of values and priorities that, under the heading of “objectivity,” masks own its cultural, historical origins and specific perspective and priorities.
Heidegger was well familiar with this side of Husserl due to his personal interactions with Husserl in Freiburg after 1916 and from Heidegger’s access to unpublished manuscripts like Ideas II. In his landmark Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) of 1927, he picks up on the aforementioned Husserlian themes, emphasizing how in our everyday lives objects show up for us as the kinds of objects they are in light of their “relevance (Bewandtnis)” to a “world” as a set of “possibilities of Dasein” even as he criticizes Husserl’s overreliance on a model of theoretical perception. “Worlds” as sets of possibilities for Dasein have “significance (Bedeutung)” for us in light of which entities within the world display relevance. Grasping such possibilities as such is one of the essential features—Heidegger calls such invariant structures of Dasein “existentiales”—that make Dasein what it is. This basic and essential encountering of possibilities in one way or another is what Heidegger calls “understanding.” As Gadamer puts it, “Understanding is the originary character of being of human life itself” (Gadamer, 246). Moreover, such understanding is always “situated (befindlich)” or “thrown (geworfen), and these thrown understandings set up the way that different possibilities and objects articulate themselves (sich auslegen) the way they do. Against this backdrop, modern science itself appears as a “way of being for Dasein” that is the epitome of “self-forgottenness” in that it forgets or actively denies that it is a constituted framework that is just one way that one comports oneself to the “objects” in the world around us. “Objectivity” itself then is founded in a way of comporting oneself, of one’s own self-understanding that conceals or hides the fact that it too has its origins in a specific form of “understanding.” Although it belongs to the essence of Dasein in that it has the possibility of relating to these possibilities as such, it is also part of the structure of Dasein in that it does so usually and for the most part in the form of a “fallenness” in which is simply takes over whatever the common understandings of the community in which historical Dasein finds itself. Since “being-with (Mitsein) is also a basic feature of Dasein, whatever understandings it adopts or projects is always against the backdrop of commonly understood, historically developed understandings. Dasein then is essentially and fundamentally historical.
It is important to note that, while for both Husserl and Heidegger historical situatedness is an essential feature of human life and understanding, both recognize the possibility of actively confronting and thereby modifying the commonly understood, inherited understandings through what Husserl calls “genuinely egoic acts” and Heidegger calls “resolute” or “authentic” Dasein.
Gadamer’s conception of horizonality draws on the insights of all three of these thinkers. Horizons are all-encompassing cultural and historical backgrounds against which things show themselves to us as they do. They are different for different persons and in different eras and cultural settings. However, he stresses that these horizons are never closed horizons (Gadamer, 288), but are always in movement in the encounter with new experiences and with others: “Gaining a horizon always implies that one learns to see beyond what is near and all too near, not to look away from it but rather to be able to see it better in a greater whole and in more correct measures” (Gadamer, 288–289). These encounters with the horizons of others from within one’s own horizon that is expanded through this encounter is what Gadamer calls “the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzing).” “[U]nderstanding is always the process of the fusing of such purportedly self-subsisting horizons” (Gadamer, 289). Understanding something that someone with a different horizon says or writes means neither jumping outside of or escaping one’s own horizon nor eliminating the different character of the other horizon: “In the enactment of understanding a genuine fusing of horizons occurs that, in the projection of a historical horizon, simultaneously brings about its overcoming. We characterize the controlled enactment of such fusion the task of a consciousness of effective history (des wirkungsgeschichtlichen Bewuβtseins)” (Gadamer, 290). Both what is expressed and understood and the understanding itself occur through the medium of language, Gadamer stresses, so that the process of such fusing of horizons is a moment of language itself (cf. Gadamer, 372ff.). Understanding is “interpreting” (Gadamer, 378) through such fusings of horizons.
Subsequent discussions of Gadamerian hermeneutics tend to focus on the question of the extent to which the horizon one brings to any understanding, the tradition as the background for understanding the other, is indeed malleable and correctible—whether the emphasis on the constitutive and inescapable role of horizons downplays the role of self-critique or social critique along the lines of Husserlian egoic acts or Heideggerian authentic Dasein mentioned earlier or of Habermas’s social critical reflection.4 For instance, another prominent hermeneutic philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, distinguishes between the social-political imagination governing a society as a kind of horizon within which one always finds oneself and a utopian imagination as an opening to an envisaged future. For him, ideology as a symbolic orientation toward the past and utopia as an opening to the future complement each other.5 From this perspective, one of the dangers of Gadamer’s approach is remaining too tied to historical legacies and traditions. However, even his critics recognize and applaud the important insights that led to Gadamer’s emphasis on the crucial role that horizons play in human’s interactions with each other and the world around them, especially with those things in the world that are expressions of the human spirit, such as speech, art works, and texts.