That which constitutes our reality, our symbolic world, has a limit, or 'horizon', beyond which we cannot 'see'. The text itself as an intention symbolic structure, has its own horizons, its own set of knowledges of the world in view of which it was written. This difference of horizons becomes a focus for the problem of historical and cultural interpretation. The text is cut off from its original context and is thrust into an alien context through the act of reading. The very function of form 'opens up' the text for dialogue in a way that texts with less 'form' do.
Form is a way of structuring the symbolic world so that there is shareability.
Jurgen Habermas introduces a more political note into the problem of historical understanding, in that the embodiment of understanding in the text can include sedimented violence, systematically distorted communication. One's own horizons may include such unacknowledged grounds of injustice.