Links and Horizons

This is a weblog, right? So I can surface ideas half-baked at best? Ideas under development? Ideas that may not make it through their difficult teen years? Well, here goes…

The word “horizon” became important to some philosophers in the second half of the 20th century. “Horizonal this” and “the horizonality of that” are sure signs that you’re dealing with a so-called Continental philosopher. They’re also the ones talking about silence, gestures, and, occasionally, nothingness. There’s a reason for this. It’s a reaction against a traditional ontology that equates “real” with “present” – “present” in both the sense of what exists now and in the sense of being present and not absent. Reality in the traditional ontology is what’s here now, a big clump of matter.

The problem isn’t that what’s here now isn’t real; the problem is that this definition excludes too many things that either aren’t now or aren’t matter. It’s not just fluffy stuff like dreams and emotions that the traditional understanding of reality excludes, it’s also things like potential (future) and tradition (past). Continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger say that we can’t understand our experience of the world without seeing that it is imbued with a sense of future possibilities and potentialities. We can’t even understand a simple hammer without taking it as something that can be used to accomplish some project; we understand things in terms of their future, potential use to us.

Horizon becomes an important term to these Continental philosophers because – although they don’t always put it this way – the horizon is not only the limit of what we can see, it indicates that there is more beyond it. The horizon isn’t simply where the sky meets the earth; it also points beyond itself to the hidden rest of the world. (Gesturing does the same thing. So does language. Different topics.)

So, does the Web world have an horizon? Since it’s not a physical world, it well might not have a structure analogous to the horizon. But I think it does: hyperlinks. Hyperlinks point to a page beyond itself. They are a quite explicit gesture – far more explicit than the real world horizon in suggesting what lies beyond.

So, who cares? Maybe no one. But I think one – tenuous – result is the Web helps make clear (Heideggerians would say “uncover”) the true nature of the real world. The real world isn’t really a big clump of matter. It’s a context of signficance, the present illuminated by its possible futures in light of the language that comes from the past. The real world is horizonal not just where the sky meets the earth but also in every thing that is understood by reference to the context and its possibilities that are beyond the thing itself. We can ignore that fact in the real world – and traditional philosophy has made a career of ignoring it – but we can’t ignore it on the Web, for at the heart of the Web’s nature are horizonal hyperlinks.

Or something like that.

Categories: Uncategorized dw