The recent discussion here of context, limitation, totality, dialectic, confinement, and no doubt some other sixth thing provides me with many different directions to follow. And unlike a certain person I could name if he were not pseudonymous, my habit in such a situation is to pursue all the directions, methodically one at a time as they occur to me, or in a frantic mixture. The motto which now appears at the top of this blog was originally the motto for just this post, but it occurred to me that I would no doubt be repeating it constantly and it may as well cover the whole enterprise. Take it as you wish, however, for perhaps after all one unwavering rule to which I remain confined guides all the directions I take, without my knowing how.
As to confinement itself, I am struck by the manifold of forms this phenomenon takes in philosophy, and I am all afire to begin cobbling together a history of the task of setting limitations which philosophy has been giving to itself at least since the inception of modernity. What good this will do to anyone I do not know but there you have it: it can't be helped. At any rate nothing more will be done this evening.
"a history of the task of setting limitations which philosophy has been giving to itself" that is to say, seynsgeschichte, i.e. the history of the epochal granting of what makes philosophy possible, namely, Being itself
ReplyDelete"And unlike a certain person I could name if he were not pseudonymous, my habit in such a situation is to pursue all the directions, methodically one at a time as they occur to me, or in a frantic mixture."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I quite understand...you want to pursue "all the directions" as opposed to, say, one of them (the latter being a move allegedly made by he whose name we shall pass over in silence)? And were you to pursue them *methodically* would you not IPSO FACTO be pursuing them IN A CERTAIN DIRECTION and indeed, UNDER A CERTAIN DIRECTION? And likewise if you pursued them frantically, and therefore NOT methodically? And since you are fond of other third things, we might as well throw the question out there of some other third thing: Is there some other way of proceeding that lies between the methodical and the frantic? But even so, I humbly submit that such a way will never allow to pursue ALL of the directions ---and it may indeed be far more confined than either the methodical or the frantic way...
As I intimated, I do hope that my frantic disposition submits to a certain direction. But I do not know this direction and so I do not know how I can better confine myself.
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