arne grønpossible to transcend ourselves in time because time already affects
and changes us. That is, in transcending we are ourselves transcended.
This makes it even more manifest that we do not have a horizon
without time. Yet, we do not need to turn time itself into a horizon.
Rather, time has to do with how horizon is horizon. We are “in” time in
the sense that time already moves and affects us in our being ourselves:
in our relating to the world, to others and to ourselves. This means
that we are never simply within a horizon. Time already enters our
horizon as field of vision. Horizon in this first sense is finite and open
in that something can come up on the horizon which we did not see
before. Furthermore, we are still to see what it is that we see: we are
still to understand what we encounter.
I have argued that horizon does not encircle or delimit a sphere of
immanence. Rather it opens up a field of vision and understanding in
which our ways of seeing and understanding can be challenged and
changed. Humans can even lose the sense of the world as their world.
This critical feature of horizon — that our ways of understanding the
world are at stake — points back to time and history. Being “in” time
does not amount to a kind of immanence. Rather, time comes to us:^8
it happens to us and affects us in what we are. Time changes us —
without us changing ourselves, and yet, it changes us in our relating,
doing, and thinking: we change. We are ourselves in time, relating to
time, and yet, in time we escape ourselves.
Before again turning to religion and the question of selfhood
implied in “seeing beyond what we see,” let us briefly reconsider
horizon as a question of immanence and transcendence.
Horizon: In-finity
Horizon does not simply imply immanence; rather it opens the
question of immanence. It is difficult to account for the peculiar
character of horizon (limiting and opening, and opening a field of
understanding in which understanding can be questioned and
changed) without a notion of transcendence. If time has to do with
- This is brought out both in Kierkegaard (Danish: det til-kommende) and in
Heidegger (Zu-kunft).