2.18
Addressing our situation, awakening to it—presuming we’ve rescued something of the term—is a major task of philosophy. There’s often another impetus in philosophy to describe the world: not ‘what is the case’ but ‘what can be the case’ (e.g., logically) or what makes ‘what is the case’ possible. One problem is that this impetus tends to ossify historical contingencies as either transcendental principles or necessary stages of development. (For example: Freud, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and so on.)
Perhaps I should be more precise: the problem is that this impetus always ossifies historical contingencies, for any articulation derives from a moment within a world and so brings forth metaphysical and historical particularities.
This isn’t to say that such projects aren’t worthwhile. Nor that such projects don’t open up new possibilities for thought. But such projects needn’t be the limits to thought either.
Of course, in this text, I’m also discussing conditions of possibility. But I’m trying not to make this the beginning and end of thought, because it’s become important to think not only conditions or grounds but also to think new orientations. Such reorientations can take place only within world, and so must be precipitated within relational contexts infused with our tradition, into which we’re thrown and which we never simply leave behind. This means that we must, in some sense, repeat what we find in our tradition but with a difference: i.e., not simply expanding on or stepping back[1] from a supposed grounding moment, but also reorienting ourselves relative to things and world; not stepping back from particular things, but entering into engagement with them. We aim at a new interpretation, or, at least, we point in the direction of one: for example, interlocking multiplicities of worlds.
[1] See Derrida’s imaginary discussion with Heidegger on this matter in Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 110–3.