2.35
If there was a world that fully encompassed us, a real totality, we could have no distance from it.[1] Because there’s no distance, there could be no deviation and so could be no question of ethics and no question of decision. No question of ethics, because our ethicality is our responsivity, which is our responsiveness or our responsibility to things; if our world was a totality, there would be no ‘otherwise,’ for all would be encompassed. Thus, how we respond would be predelineated — there would be no other and no surprise.[2]
We know things aren’t like this. We can speak of worlds, different disclosures, tensions inherent in worlds, and the varying takes on or in the world. However, we can also say that worlds are like totalities.
Worlds are like totalities insofar as one can ask what it would be like to be immersed in this. Though they trail off or show fragments, they show in these cracks how one could be immersed. They beckon one to consider this possibility: they say, ‘Look at things this way.’ Worlds appear, at times, as fragments of worlds, tatters of world, wisps of world; all worlds are fragmentary and never full totalities.
Thus, we’re always inside our world, which is always open to the outside: this is how any world is. The limits are, shall I say, fuzzy. There’s no need to doubt that worlds can encounter each other, because the fact is they do: you already catch glimpses of other ways of being from within your way of disclosure.
There isn’t a question of fully and authentically experiencing another’s way of being. This desire, like the desire to completely disregard it, will lead us astray.
[1] Even those who’ve (implicitly) tried to maintain one world nonetheless argue for some other ‘realm’: e.g., the noumenal, the real, the outside, the supersensible, beings without being.