Horizons and Their Fusion

For Gadamer, no one sees everything. To see at all, one must see from somewhere, and the somewhere determines what is visible. The horizon is the range of vision available from a particular vantage point — shaped by history, language, tradition, and personal experience. Horizons are not prisons but conditions of sight. Understanding occurs not through the elimination of horizons (which would require a view from nowhere that does not exist) but through their fusion — Horizontverschmelzung — when the interpreter's horizon meets another's and the encounter produces a perspective broader than either possessed alone. The fusion is not compromise. It is genuine expansion. In the AI conversation, the question becomes whether the machine brings a genuine horizon to the encounter, or whether its output is a statistical reflection that only appears to constitute a perspective.