2.16
There’s an urge to shirk responsibility and look elsewhere—e.g., to defer or wait for a transformation—but we must turn to things themselves. Yes, waiting and patience are part of transformation. But this transformation happens only by a turn to things themselves as it is about finding a new way of relating within our world.
The call to turn to things themselves isn’t new: we hear it from classical empiricists and phenomenologists.
But we need to clear up a common misconception. To turn to things themselves isn’t to be rid of metaphysics, as though we access the naked thing, with things (physics) on the one side and metaphysics on the other. These two are bound to one another: physics is already metaphysics. ‘Meta’ doesn’t mean going beyond physics in the sense of leaving things behind, for example, in another realm. Instead, physics itself is a going-beyond — physics becomes possible within a metaphysics.
Physics is a going-beyond because it embodies a meaning of being and beings; it involves an interpretation of things, including what and how things are. ‘Physics’ is how a particular metaphysics conceives of collections of things; the study of ‘metaphysics’ is the explicit theorization of going-beyond this collection. But the concept of ‘physics’ already goes beyond beings.
Our understanding of things always involves more than bare things because things themselves are always involved with more than themselves: in being related to countless others, they, too, go beyond themselves. Any engagement with beings involves going-beyond.
To clarify, it’s also not that metaphysics is subjective (our projection) and ontology is objective (what’s really there). Rather, metaphysics is a going-beyond things, and we go beyond because things always go beyond themselves. Ontology is what there is, and because things can be taken up in different ways for different beings, there are different ontologies (§2.4–2.5). The idea that there is ‘physics’ on one hand and ‘metaphysics’ on the other is a particular ontological understanding (an understanding of what is really there). An ontology is what is really there, and what is really there is going beyond itself and, thus, drives us beyond itself.
Thus, our task, rather than getting rid of metaphysics (which we cannot do), is to make our it, or our engagement with it, more responsive to our situation. And our situation is to respond to real others who we encounter from within their own worlds.
I renew a call to turn to things themselves. To try to look elsewhere is to try to shirk our responsibility (§2.14). Of course, to look elsewhere is a response, but an inadequate one. We’re always already responding and open to responding. How do we respond to our responding? – How do we take up our situation?