2.93
The gods war amongst each other: this phrase illuminates not only how we ordinarily think—e.g., what we take as evident—but also points us toward new possibilities. Metaphors refocus not only one term, but also the other (§2.2).
Relatedly, it’s insufficient to close this book and say, ‘I understand,’ for you haven’t understood understanding if you take it to mean simply ‘intellectually’ surmounting or passing through something; understanding isn’t being able to recite something. To understand is to feel a resonance, to see how things could be and are this way — not descriptively, but transformatively, for understanding refocuses us. Understanding is being seized, feeling its fingers around you. — We’re not tourists here.
That the gods war amongst each other reveals an openness—a violence (§2.91)—before, as well as continuing long after, attempts to constitute security and identity. That the gods war amongst each other doesn’t simply deny a unity to the onto-theological: it denies a unity to the selfsame, identical human. This is because that the gods war amongst each other isn’t something external that sometimes impinges upon the human realm. Rather, the gods reveal fragments of overlapping and inconsistent worlds — worlds in tension with one another. A human is never an entity that’s independent of the constitution of a world and only subsequently attached to one: humans are being-in-the-world: they’re constituted in their openness to their world. Humans become caught in the sway of the to and fro rocking of worlds. — Ethics responds from our primordial woundedness: our inability to be a singular or contained entity.