b) A World Devoid of an 'Unsurpassable Horizon': Sartre

Before passing judgement, let us consider a great thinker deeply engaged with the era of 'grand narratives': perhaps he can help us understand it better from within. In Situations, Sartre describes Marxism as the unsurpassable horizon of our time. Here we encounter a second perspective, one that employs the concept of 'horizon' rather than 'narrative'. What can this second perspective offer us? What is a 'horizon'? And what does it mean to be a 'horizon' for something?

A horizon is that which lies immensely far from me; it remains unreachable, always receding as I attempt to approach it. Its distance reveals the power of my vision—the formidable breadth of what I can take in. It is often while contemplating the sea, or surveying a landscape of snowy valleys from a mountain pass, that a feeling of power seizes the mind and swells it beyond measure.

When Sartre describes Marxism as the horizon of his time, he means that it is the vantage point from which people can comprehend the totality of their era, every event encompassed and given meaning within this Marxist horizon. For the Marxist, this confers a sense of power through clarity—a grasp of 'what the epoch wants' (as Hegel defines the great man in Reason in History).

The post-modern era, then, might be described as a 'time without horizons'—an era that has lost its overarching vantage point. What would that mean?
It is difficult to imagine, since the human eye naturally perceives any landscape as having a foreground, a middle ground, and ultimately a background that forms the horizon. What would a landscape look like if it had only a foreground?

It would no longer appear as a landscape at all, but would instead resemble a cluttered room. A room is an inherently confined space, one in which perspective lines cannot stretch out to infinity or even take shape as vanishing lines. The prevalent disorder matters too.
In an expansive landscape—the ocean, for instance—all elements, such as waves, naturally draw the eye towards the horizon. Nothing obstructs the view, and every object or creature harmoniously joins in this grand movement towards the vanishing point. In the mountains, a grazing animal in the foreground aligns naturally with a sheepfold in the middle distance, which in turn merges into a vast meadow in the background, eventually dissolving into towering peaks bathed in the light of a setting sun. Each element appears interconnected, contributing to an overall sense of unity. The horizon is the element of meaning that ultimately enables this union, endowing objects with a 'being-for-one-another'.

In a room filled with a random assortment of objects, by contrast, this harmony is absent. The books piled on a table bear no relation to the statuette lying overturned on the floor, nor to the half-open crate resting on a dilapidated piano. The objects merely coexist without coherence. There is no horizon to unify them.
If our age lacks an 'unsurpassable horizon', unlike Sartre's, it follows that its elements exist side by side rather than being interwoven for one another. Our time presents a jumble of meanings rather than a harmonious unity. It is as though humanity has ceased to gaze out over the grand expanse of the ocean, and retreated instead into the dim room of a dilapidated hotel.

We are now in a position to attempt a characterisation of the axiological profile of our age—guided, more precisely, by two concepts: the 'grand narrative' and the 'horizon'. Could it be that ours is an era that has abandoned all efforts at an 'axiological grand narrative' and lost any 'axiological horizon'?