arne grønReligion: Beyond Ourselves?
Let us now return to our opening sentence: “Lord, help us to see
beyond what we see.” Why “help us”? As we are the ones seeing, why
do we not just see differently, as we wish, if we wish? Imagine someone
responding: “You are the one seeing. If you want to see differently, just
do it!” Why not? Because selfhood means that we are selves in what
we are doing and undergoing. Embodiment is serious. We cannot just
see the world in one way and then in another. Of course, we can
imagine what it would be like to see the world in another way. We can
play with ways of seeing the world. But imagining seeing is not actually
seeing, that is: embodying our way of seeing the world. In imagining
we can make efforts to see for ourselves what is implied in seeing the
world differently. The implication of these implications however
would be to live a life in facing or bearing the implications. Actually
seeing the world in this way would also imply that if we wanted to
escape the implications we would then be the ones escaping.
That is why the opening sentence is paradoxical: we cannot see
otherwise than we do. Something must happen to us if we are to come
to see differently. The crucial point implied in the paradoxical character
of seeing beyond what we see can be put in terms of horizon: we
cannot see beyond what we see because we ourselves carry our horizon
with us. If we imagine what it would be like to see the world differently,
from a different perspective, we can make the effort to enter into a new
horizon, but in doing so we bring our own perspective along. We can
only go beyond our own horizon in taking it with us: it is also the
horizon of our transcending our horizon. However, in this movement
our horizon might change.^11 Imagining other ways of seeing the world
can affect the way we see the world. But we do not ourselves decide
how it in fact affects us. Even though our way of seeing the world is
reflective, we cannot enter into a position in which we are in control
- Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of fusion of horizons (cf. Wahrheit und Methode,
[1960], Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975, 289f) reflects that we are not simply with-
in our horizon, but that we “within” our horizon encounter horizons foreign to
us, and that there is a history of horizon: fusion of horizons happens to us. How-
ever, the question is whether this should be described in terms of fusions of hori-
zon.