Central to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology is the concept of the horizon. These horizons are different kinds of intentional contexts in which our experiences appear. Human life takes place primarily in a familiar world, which Husserl often calls the ‘near-world’, and there are horizons of familiarity and unfamiliarity in all experience. The extreme limit is the completely unfamiliar or alien world where the customs and traditions are alien, strange or foreign. He wrote in his Cartesian Meditations:

“Every subjective process has a process ‘horizon’, which changes with the alteration of the process of consciousness to which the process belongs and with the attention of the process itself from phase to phase of its flow – an intentional horizon of reference to potentialities of consciousness that belong to the process itself.”

At present, our proper horizon of reference is obscured by the selfish interests of the conservative forces of Wealth. The depth of this horizon should be much greater, but the consumer society keeps it operating on a very thin surface of superficiality, which by denying the horizon’s field of depth, pulls it a lot closer to us and this has a cramping effect on reality – very much like art works made before the art of painting in perspective was conceived.

Life becomes an enclosure, we feel boxed in by it, as if the horizon’s wall is impossible to surmount. But what we, as a community of human beings, don’t realise is that the wall is an illusion, created by an atmospheric effect, just as mirages are created. To escape we merely need to walk through this illusionary barrier and it will evaporate before us, allowing us to get the real deeper perspective of reality. However, this walking through the illusionary horizon of reference is primarily a revolutionary act and that is what makes us hesitate. The great strength of the system is that, no matter what we think of it, it is still ‘the system’, and as ‘the system’ it is that which is perceived to sustain us, not matter how cramping that sustenance is felt. The wider horizon of the better world depends on our ability to unleash our imaginative power, the realisation of any Utopia is primarily dependent on our ability to imagine it: the better world will never arrive spontaneously. Imagination, therefore, is the first great revolutionary act.