Preamble 2: “Don’t Say ‘There Must Be … ’”

“To the things themselves” was Edmund Husserl’s call in his phenomenology, intent as it is on explicating the life world, the world as lived (Husserl, 1970, 1970a) and this is why there is something of phenomenology lurking under all this—our lived experience is often obscured by a theorizing impetus, a speculative one, and ideological one, or one born of affliction, will, anger, ignorance, fear, or desire. The great task is to cleave to this experience and not be distracted or frightened by its countenance into rendering it into something more docile and safe and secure than it is. John Caputo (1987, p. 2) put this succinctly: “restoring life to its original difficulty” and not “betraying it with metaphysics.”