From the Immediacy of Otherness to the Mediacy of Interpretation

Abstract

Attempts to philosophize today cannot ignore the diagnosis of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which holds nihilism to be the inevitable destiny of the West. Is there any point in continuing to philosophize if one gives up this pretension of absoluteness and universality and ceases one’s search for the truth? If the task of philosophy is still valid, it is by virtue of a starting point that cannot be reduced to the dialectic of worldviews (weltanschauungen) and interpretations of reality; a starting point that is capable of establishing a significant distance from which the subject receives his first expression and the first word, one whose immediacy seems to emerge hand-in-hand with a restlessness of origin that already bears the first interpretation of reality.