beyond? horizon, immanence, and transcendenceof the way we see the world. Our horizon escapes us precisely because
it is a matter of how we ourselves see the world.
When reading the opening sentence the question is not only: why
“help us”? There is also a second question: “seeing beyond what we
see” — could this not just be a matter of time? This would make the
paradoxical character disappear: what “we” wish for, namely to see
beyond what we see, is a future possibility. We cannot now see beyond
what we — now — see, but then — in some future — we shall come to see
beyond what we now see. In a sense, this is in fact so. The prayer is
about coming to see differently. Yet, it not only invokes a future
possibility. The prayer is about being transformed as the one now
seeing.
But there is more to it. Implied is not only the impossibility in
principle — here and now — to see beyond what we see. The situation
in which the prayer was uttered is one of mutual deadlock. “We” are
people (the South African ex-convict and members of his family)
seeing each others in ways in which they themselves are caught. They
are precisely not seeing the world, others, and themselves in the same
way. In the prayer a common “we” is invoked, which is only to be
hoped for (if it is), but which also seems to be beyond repair. One
might even get an uneasy sense that the one uttering the prayer seeks
to make the others see differently, others who have good reasons for
not doing so.
What makes the prayer “seeing beyond what we see” paradoxical,
then, is not only that it is impossible, in principle, for us actually to
see otherwise than how we in fact see, because we are the ones seeing.
It is also the context in which the ones seeing are locked up in their
ways of seeing. To see beyond what “we” see would mean not to be at
this deadlock. But what is it to be at a deadlock in the sense that one
is locked up in one’s way of seeing others, the world, and oneself? We
are locked, we suffer from being so, but we are locked up in our ways
of seeing. We have not only been locked up, due to what has happened
to us (so that we have been “made” locked up), we have also locked up
ourselves. Not in the sense that we have decided to do so, but in
responding to what has happened to us. And we keep or maintain
ourselves in this state, in seeing others, the world, and ourselves as we