If you’ve been following our conversations, one thing is clear in our group and may be less clear online, we don’t all agree. If you’re interested in learning why, coming to understand how our worlds relate can be a big help. A cautionary note: Fr. Lonergan’s presentation below is at one and the same time very concrete but heuristic, by “heuristic” I mean that the categories of thought are given but the discernment of the content of those categories in each case has to be supplied by you and only you can do it.
Perhaps the be most revealing of his categories is how he talks about horizons that are “dialectically opposed.” Most noteworthy are the motives he identifies as being ascribe to someone whose world is “dialectically opposed” to ours. “The other position is ascribed to wishful thinking, the acceptance of myth, ignorance or fallacy, blindness or illusion, backwardness or immaturity, infidelity, bad will or a refusal of God’s grace.” Do any of these words speak to you about those whom you truly disagree with? Would you be willing to share your thoughts?
Reflecting on this one sentence may give us a clue as to why it is so hard to hear the other who really differs from us. Paying attention to when we ascribe such motives to the other and then realizing what we are doing can become a tool to help us rise to the level of our times.
You can listen to Fr. Lonergan’s description of the notion of Horizon or you can read the transcript.
Horizon is the line where earth and sky apparently meet. It comes from the Greek “ὁρίζων κύκλος” (horizōn kyklos), “bounding circle.” It recedes when we advance and closes in behind us. It divides objects into visible now and not now visible according to one’s standpoint. As one moves about one standpoint changes and the objects that are within one’s horizon change. What’s within one’s horizon is now accessible to vision, what’s beyond one’s horizon one can’t now possibly see.
So much for the literal sense but besides the literal sense there’s also a metaphorical or analogous sense. As the range of our vision so our interest and our knowledge are limited. Within our horizon, within the world of our interest and knowledge, there is all we care for, know about to some extent great or small. What’s beyond our horizon is what we know nothing about and care less. Horizons may be compared in three ways. They may complement one another, they may be related genetically, they may be opposed dialectically.
First complementary horizons, there are different interests, skills, knowledge, in workmen, foremen, supervisors, technicians, engineers, managers, doctors, lawyers, professors and so on. But each knows about the others. Each has some general idea what the other does. Each recognizes the need for the others. And no one is willing to take up the other fellows work and do it for him. Together they constitute a common world. Each compliments the other. Each knows something about the others. Together they work together within a common world. Yet the focus, the what is fully understood and fully a matter of interest varies from one man to the next. Their horizons are complementary.
Genetic horizons are related to one another as successive stages in some process of development. The later includes the earlier but diverges from it, dropping some elements, changing others, adding still others. They’re not complimentary because they’re not simultaneous. They are parts of the same biography or the same history.
Horizons may be dialectically opposed. Then each has some awareness of the others but this inclusion is also a rejection and a condemnation. The other position is ascribed to wishful thinking, the acceptance of myth, ignorance or fallacy, blindness or illusion, backwardness or immaturity, infidelity, bad will or a refusal of God’s grace. Rejection may be passionate and then suggestion that one should cultivate openness makes one furious, But the rejection may also have the firmness of ice without an trace of passion except perhaps a wand smile. Both genocide and astrology may be beyond the pale. But the former is excoriated, the latter is ignored or merely amuses. So we’ve compared horizons in three different ways, as complementary – parts of a single world, as genetically related – one arises from the other but differs from it and as dialectically opposed.
Horizons also differ in their structures. In the first place horizons are structured. Learning is not just an addition to an already acquired store but rather an organic growth out of what already is known. And so there is always context. Our intentions, our statements, our deeds all occur within context. And it is to context we appeal when we explain our deeds. What are you doing? What are you up to? When we clarify and amplify, qualify our statements. What I really meant I was this. And you appeal to the context within which you made your judgments. Or when you explain your goals you give a context. Husserl who did terrifically delicate analyses of everything practically said that to describe even a single perception without any mention of the comprehensive horizon of a world and its encompassing frame of reference was to give a mutilated account of the perception. All our acts of our intentional consciousness are within the context of their past in a movement towards their future.
Further regulative of our learning is our interest. We take the trouble to attend and learn in accord with the values we respect and the satisfactions we prize. But the values that are respected and the satisfactions that are prized can vary from age to age, group to group, man to man, and within the lifetime of each one of us. So that the variation of horizons from the context from which they’re built up in learning and the influence above all of values, values and satisfactions are a great determinants horizons give rise to different structures in the horizons. You can have different scales of values, you can have different values highly prized and others ignored and so on. And that gives rise to enormous differences in horizons.