beyond? horizon, immanence, and transcendence
We do not move our horizon. As we move, it follows us. Yet, our
horizon can change as we change. This indicates that we do not have
horizon without time. Is horizon in time, or is time itself horizon?
Understanding seems to take time as horizon. In order to understand
what happens to us, we project possibilities into the future and in so
doing we carry our past with us: the past in which we have come to
see and understand as we do. But time also affects us in what we are:
being ourselves the ones seeing and understanding and seeking to
come to terms with what happens to us.
In time we change. Changing is an undergoing, and yet it has to do
with our ways of relating and doing. Is it then something that we do:
change? This of course depends on what it means that we change. We
can change a lot, if possibilities are offered: position, for example.
Although we can more or less identify ourselves with what we change,
this does not mean that we change. That we change requires that our
ways of seeing, understanding, thinking, living are changed. We are
changed in seeing, understanding, thinking, and living. That is, we
come to understand and to take ourselves differently. We can decide
to change in this way, and we can do a lot in order to change, but
whether we actually will do so (as we decide), we will have to wait and
see. If we do, we come to see and think differently. How we are what we
are, ourselves, is a matter of how we relate to the world, to others and
in this relating to ourselves, yet in a crucial sense we will have to
experience ourselves.
Still, in the course of time we can change our situation and even our
life. In projecting ourselves into the future, we can transcend what we
already are in terms of our past. However, if we follow Sartre^7 and take
our transcending in time as what makes us human, we encounter this
as a “fact” of freedom (we are doomed to be free). As humans we do
not make what makes us human.
If we understand transcendence as our transcending in time, this
movement of transcendence implies a passivity, which we tend to
overlook. First, in transcending ourselves, we are involved as the ones
a-changing. If this movement that we perform is going to change us,
it requires an undergoing: it requires that we change. Second, it is only
- Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant, Paris: Gallimard, [1943] 1977.