Introduction: Shifting Horizons – a Line and Its Movement in Art, History, and Philosophy Lucas Burkart and Beate Fricke What happens when horizons shift? More specifically, what occurs when that line, which in everyday experience appears so consistent and omnipresent, reveals itself to be contingent? And if the horizon line is mutable, what does that imply about the systems of knowledge, order, and faith that the seemingly immutable horizon appears to neatly delimit and order? These are the questions the following volume of essays addresses, offering perspectives from multiple historical periods and disciplines that tackle instances in literature, history, and art in which shifts in conceptualizing the horizon have made themselves manifest. These shifts, as the contributions here point out, propose models for re-thinking the horizon’s boundaries as mobile instead of static. The horizon, as Albrecht Koschorke has observed, is many qualities: it appears as a motif, a symbol, a locus, and a metaphor.1 Most of all, the horizon is a figure of thought (Denkfigur) that serves as a means of organizing perception and information. 2 Fixing the horizon thus means delimiting parameters (visual, epistemological, experiential) that aid in establishing a framework for understanding the world and the place of humans within it. Shifting the horizon, on the other hand, means rethinking the fixity of these limits; it means taking a step over to the other side in order to acknowledge a point of view that may well be obscure or elusive, but which is nonetheless present if one conceives of knowledge and experience as multivalent and situated. 3 To make these observations more concrete, we propose to introduce this volume by taking a look at a particular example of a moment in which we can observe the horizon shifting.4 In an illuminated twelfth-century British manuscript we encounter a curious image (Fig. 1). At first glance, it seems a rather unusual choice for an examination of the horizon, for in this image seems to be no horizon at first glance. Looking closer we begin to imagine, however, that it does exist, running somewhere along the diagonal boundary where green and blue waves meet in the image’s center. 1 2 3 4
Koschorke (1990). For the terms Denkfigur and Denkraum in Aby Warburg’s Oeuvre see Treml/Flach/Schneider (2014). On «situated» knowledge see e. g., Harraway (1983; 1989). Alexander (1970), 141 n. 2; Ayers (1973), 127, Fig. 4.17; Baker (1978); Brown (2003), 209; Stein-Keks (2011).
