The Borrowed Horizon

The note

Not just a desire, a whole horizon

Consider somebody who spends twenty years building a successful career.

They worked hard, made sacrifices and reached the position they wanted. But then they begin wondering why they wanted that particular life in the first place. They might discover that they inherited not simply the desire for a particular promotion, but an entire understanding of what a successful future ought to look like.

René Girard’s mimetic desire is a useful starting point, but I’d like to push beyond the borrowing of individual desires. The distinction I’m after is between borrowing a particular desire and borrowing the horizon within which certain things appear desirable at all.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Other people introduce possibilities we might never have imagined for ourselves.

The question is what happens when their horizon becomes so familiar that we stop recognising it as one possible horizon among others.

An everyday example

Twenty years to the boardroom

Imagine someone who’s spent twenty years climbing the career ladder. They’ve worked hard, made sacrifices, moved companies, collected qualifications and gradually become more successful.

And now they’re a director. It’s what they’ve wanted for years. Or at least, it’s what they’ve been working towards.

Then something rather strange happens. They’re sitting in a meeting, looking around at the other directors, when they realise they don’t particularly want any of their lives. They don’t envy their responsibilities. They don’t want their schedules. They don’t especially admire how they spend their time.

Which raises an awkward question. Why have they spent twenty years trying to join them?

Perhaps nobody ever sat them down and told them to want this. They simply grew up in a world where ambition had a particular shape. Good grades led to good jobs. Good jobs led to promotions. Promotions led to success.

They inherited more than a destination. They inherited a whole picture of what a desirable future looked like.

Not to be confused with

Similar species

The phrase isn’t new, so the meaning has to be precise. Here are its nearest neighbours, and how to tell them apart in the field.

• Mimetic desireRené Girard’s idea that we want things because people we admire want them. That’s one desire at a time. A borrowed horizon is the whole landscape in which some things look desirable at all.
• ConformityDoing what the people around you do. You can borrow a horizon while living very unconventionally: the dream of being your own boss gets handed round as much as the corner office.
• The cultural life scriptA culture’s expected timetable for a life. The script tells you when things should happen. The horizon tells you what the whole thing is for.
• AuthenticityUsually sold as finding the real you underneath everyone else’s expectations. The Borrowed Horizon doesn’t promise an unborrowed self. Nobody invents their picture of a worthwhile life from nothing.

Earlier sightings

Who spotted it before me

1. 

   René Girard Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1961

   Girard is the obvious starting point. His theory of mimetic desire suggests that our desires are often mediated by other people. We learn what to want partly by watching what others want, admire and pursue.

   Girard helps us understand why another person’s promotion or possessions might become desirable. The Borrowed Horizon asks how we acquire the wider picture within which promotions, possessions and particular ways of living appear desirable in the first place. It’s the difference between borrowing an object of desire and inheriting an orientation towards the future.

2. 

   Harry Frankfurt Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, 1971

   Frankfurt provides an interesting complication through his account of first-order desires and second-order volitions: wanting something isn’t necessarily the same as wanting that desire to govern what we do.

   But there’s a question we can push further. What if our second-order desires have also been shaped by the same inherited assumptions? What if even our picture of the person we want to become has been borrowed?

3. 

   Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope, 1954–59

   This is where Bloch becomes particularly interesting. His philosophy of the not-yet challenges the idea that the future is simply the continuation or fulfilment of possibilities we can already describe. Genuine novelty may go beyond the horizons we’ve inherited. “Thinking means venturing beyond,” he wrote.

   I made a short film about him.

4. 

   Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887

   Nietzsche complicates matters further by questioning the origins and authority of the values through which we judge our ambitions. He wanted to call “the value of these values” into question. Applied to a career, that’s not “am I succeeding?” but “who decided this was success?”

Where it gets complicated

Nobody paints from nothing

The Borrowed Horizon isn’t simply wanting what somebody else has. That’s closer to mimetic desire. Nor is it necessarily conformity. Someone might believe they’re living unconventionally while pursuing an equally borrowed picture of what an unconventional life ought to look like.

And we shouldn’t assume that borrowed horizons are inherently bad. Other people help us discover what might be possible. We inherit languages, traditions, stories and examples that let us imagine futures we couldn’t have constructed alone. Without those influences, our horizons might be much narrower.

So the interesting distinction is between a horizon we’ve inherited and can examine, and one we’ve inherited but mistake for the only possible future.

We don’t need to discover some perfectly original desire untouched by other people. Perhaps the more realistic ambition is to take part consciously in how our horizons develop.

Which leaves a stranger question. If you could no longer use anybody else’s life as a reference point, would you still be heading in the same direction? And could you even imagine your future without borrowing something from somebody else?

The difficult questionWhose idea of a good life have you been using to decide what yours should become?